McCain Is Fucked

Let's get this straight: McCain's entire campaign is premised on his foreign policy experience. It's all about Iraq, all about al Qaeda, period.

And today, the Prime Minister of Iraq fucked him, and fucked him good. How can McCain continue his talk of "victory vs. surrender", when the Prime Minister of Iraq is on board with Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan? Is McCain going to accuse Maliki of being a "Defeatocrat"?

The McCain campaign has issued their official response, and it's lame:

"The difference between John McCain and Barack Obama is that Barack Obama advocates an unconditional withdrawal that ignores the facts on the ground and the advice of our top military commanders. John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today. Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor, which is of no apparent concern to Barack Obama. The fundamental truth remains that Senator McCain was right about the surge and Senator Obama was wrong. We would not be in the position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama's views had prevailed."

The campaign dances around the main issue, ignoring what Maliki plainly said and then repeating their tired refrain about how awesome McCain's surge has been.

American voters don't give a damn how awesome the surge has been. They want to know when the troops will "surge" out of Iraq and back home to their families. They want to know when the "surge" of money to Halliburton finally gets cut off, and when the "surge" of bellicose Mideast policy ends so that oil speculators stop driving gas prices through the roof.

Anyway, here is the roundup of opinion on the Maliki statement and the potential aftermath:

Josh Marshall:

I've spent a couple hours now trying to process the probable impact of Prime Minister al Maliki's explicit endorsement of Barack Obama's 16 month timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. My first instinct is always to try not to overstate the impact of momentary developments. But I don't think it's enough to say this is a huge development. It's huger than that. In a stroke, I think, al Maliki has cut McCain off at the knees in a way I'm not sure his campaign strategy can recover from.

Marc Ambinder:

This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing. Obviously, our national interests aren't equivalent to Iraq's, but... Malik isn't listening to the generals on the ground...but the "hasn't been to Iraq" line doesn't work here....

(Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're fucked."

Matt Yglesias:

Last week, both the Bush administration and John McCain found themselves shifting in the direction of positions Barack Obama had long espoused in terms of talks with Iran and in terms of the need for more troops in Afghanistan. More recently, Bush seemed to be edging toward embracing a timetable for withdrawal and now Maliki has explicitly embraced the Obama position on the need for a timetable.

This leaves us with two questions -- one is whether McCain will make this the third issue on which he's following Obama's lead, and the other is whether the press will note that his constant flip-flopping undermines the two core themes of his campaign, "straight talk" and alleged national security expertise.

The Daily Dish:

A few weeks ago, Ross argued (somewhat persuasively) that McCain should run on the surge. In the last few days, the McCain campaign and his supporters began pursuing that strategy. An independent pro-McCain group, Let Freedom Ring, announced today it is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars running an ad attacking Obama over Iraq. And the McCain campaign put out a new TV ad along similar lines yesterday. But with Maliki backing Obama's Iraq strategy and Bush accepting time horizons, those ads feel tone-deaf.

The Obama Campaign:

There are two problems with John McCain's political attacks on Barack Obama's foreign policy. First, on the biggest foreign policy questions of the last eight years, Barack Obama has made the right judgment and John McCain has sided with George Bush in making the wrong one. Second, the failure of the McCain-Bush foreign policy has forced John McCain to change his position, and to embrace the very same Obama approaches that he once attacked.

Just this week, Senator McCain has been forced by events to switch to Barack Obama's position on two fundamental issues: more troops in Afghanistan, and more diplomacy with Iran. On both issues, Obama took stands that weren't politically popular at the time – opposing the war in Iraq as a diversion from the critical mission in Afghanistan, and standing up for direct diplomacy with Iran – while John McCain lined up with George Bush. Time has proven Obama’s judgment right and McCain wrong.

The next shift appears to be Iraq. For months, Senator McCain has called any plan to redeploy our troops from Iraq "surrender" – even though we'd be leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government. Now, the Bush Administration is embracing the negotiation of troop withdrawals with the Iraqi government – a position that Senator Obama called for last September, and reiterated on Monday in the New York Times. And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Barack Obama’s timeline, telling Der Speigel that, “Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months.”

Ezra Klein:

To really understand the importance of Maliki's comments, you need to consider their opposite. Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, "at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves." It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about "Obama's Iraq Problem." Obama would probably lose the race.

I differ somewhat on his conclusion, that Obama would "lose the race" if Maliki said something different. Americans would be more than happy to dismiss the calls by a foreign leader to keep our troops their against our will. We'd just say, sorry buddy, you need to take control of your own country now.

But the opposite situation, where an allied foreign leader says that our troops are no longer needed -- that is an entirely different situation. What are we going to do, force occupation down their throat? Is that what McCain is going to argue? Americans want to go home, the Iraqis want us to go home, and McCain's gonna stand in the way? Big fucking chance.

John Aravosis:

On the eve of Obama's visit to Iraq, the Iraqi leader, a US puppet, is signaling that he now not only endorses Barack Obama's plan for withdrawing from Iraq, but overall, Maliki hints that he prefers Obama over McCain.

Normally, foreign endorsements of our presidential candidates are neither welcome nor helpful. In this case, it's rather huge. Why? Because the foreign leader is the leader of Iraq. He's the guy who even John McCain says we should follow his lead on whether to stay or go. But there's more. Maliki knows that Obama is coming to Iraq in a few days, yet Maliki still basically inserted himself into the US presidential race on Obama's side. Maliki wanted to help Obama, and he wanted to hurt Bush and McCain. It's simply extraordinary that a foreign leader would do something like this. While it's difficult to know how the American people will react to this news, it's hard to imagine that people are going to want to say in Iraq if the Iraqis want us to leave. And that the American people are going to support the candidate who wants us to stay in Iraq long after our welcome is over. On so many levels, this is huge.

Overall, more terrible news for McCain. Let's see how well his pals in the media coverup for him. And let's see how effectively and quickly the Bush administration forces Maliki to retract his words.