Public Favors McCain Over Democrats

A new Los Angeles Times poll finds GOP frontrunner John McCain edging ahead of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in potential general election matchups (via Memeorandum):

As he emerges from a sometimes- bitter primary campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain poses a stiff challenge to either of his potential Democratic opponents in the general election, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The findings underscore the difficulties ahead for Democrats as they hope to retake the White House during a time of war, with voters giving McCain far higher marks when it comes to experience, fighting terrorism and dealing with the situation in Iraq.
Both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have made ending America's involvement in the war a centerpiece of their campaigns. And even though a clear majority of those polled said the war was not worth waging, about half of registered voters said McCain -- a Vietnam vet who has supported the Bush administration's military strategy -- was better able to deal with Iraq.

In head-to-head contests, the poll found, McCain leads Clinton by 6 percentage points (46% to 40%) and Obama by 2 points (44% to 42%). Neither lead is commanding given that the survey, conducted Feb. 21-25, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Arizona senator is viewed favorably by 61% of all registered voters, including a plurality of Democrats.

The survey showed that McCain's potential advantages extend even to domestic issues, where he is considered to be most vulnerable. Even though McCain has joked about his lack of expertise on economic issues, voters picked him over Obama, 42% to 34%, as being best able to handle the economy. However, Clinton led McCain on that issue, 43% to 34%.

"I just think he's older, he's more experienced, and he's got the betterment of the country in mind," said Robert Fear, 79, a registered Democrat from Newton, Ill., who said he planned to support McCain in November.

The findings are particularly important in light of recent left-wing attacks on McCain's purported 100 year commitment to the Iraq deployment, as well as continued attacks on the success of the surge (like Andrew Sullivan's).

However, the poll indicates that McCain has yet to rally the GOP's conservative base:

Nearly one in four Republican primary voters said they were "unhappy" that he would win the GOP nomination. And of those voters, about half said they would either vote for another candidate in November or stay home, an ominous sign for Republicans at a time when Democrats are expected to be highly motivated.

Some have indicated that the response to last week's New York Times hit piece against McCain is evidence that conservatives have turned the corner and will back the Arizona Senator after all.

This hypothesis is not supported by the Times poll, at least for the hardened, Malkinite base. McCain's still got some work to do.

See also my earlier entry on November trial heat matchups, "McCain is Competitive Against Likely Democratic Nominee."

McCain and the Iraq Issue

Will Iraq be a winning election issue for John McCain in November? Ramesh Ponnuru poses things this way:

Senator John McCain blurted out that if he can't convince Americans that our military effort in Iraq is succeeding, he'll lose the election. He then softened his assessment, saying that while his candidacy would not stand or fall on the Iraq question, it would be one of the top issues in the campaign.

I think Senator McCain is wrong. He can win the election even if a narrow majority of the country doubts that the surge is succeeding, and he may lose it even if people think that it is succeeding. (Right now, according to Gallup, 43 percent of Americans believe the surge is improving conditions in Iraq while 35 percent say it is making it worse.)

He is going to have to fight back against misrepresentations of his record. Senator Barack Obama, for example, has said that McCain favors a "100-year war in Iraq." In fact, McCain said that if the violence were to end, it might be possible to maintain a long-term American military presence in Iraq: the same type of presence we have maintained in South Korea, without extending the Korean war for decades.

My guess, though, is that the war will not be the top issue in this election. The big challenge for Senator McCain is not to sell the surge. It isn't even to demonstrate that he can fight a recession. It's to prove that he has answers to the economic concerns that middle-income Americans have, recession or no recession. In particular, he is going to have to make the case that his health-care plan is better than that of his Democratic opponent.

Do you agree that domestic issues are going to decide the 2008 election?

I agree up to a point. His job is to make the case that he'll provide competent and innovative economic, health, and social policy management, while at the same time he must convince the public that the war's too important to leave to a national security novice espousing recklessly ill-considered foreign policy proposals.

The success of the surge is a huge asset to McCain and the GOP, as it innoculates the party from Democratic attacks on war-making incompetence and provides a model for what we need to do in Afghanistan.

The Democratic agenda of retreat is an election year downer. I doubt either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can gain much traction on the issue.

But see Andrew Sullivan's post on Iraq, where he poses this challenge for McCain:

If McCain is going to give us straight talk - one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do - and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there's a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

Sullivan's attacking an alleged infinite commitment to the Iraqi people and wants McCain to justify it. But Sullivan provides no context: We have military commitments around the globe. Where can we redeploy and reduce in an effort to consolidate our more recent gains in Iraq?

Germany? South Korea?

What percentage of GDP is this "trillion dollars" Sullivan throws out? Is that an accurate figure? Will the costs of an Iraq foreward basing commitment be commensurate with the costs of earlier postwar security guarantees the U.S. has offered after its great conflicts?

These are the questions that McCain is best prepared to answer. Sure, Americans want to focus on domestic issues. They also want to reduce commitments overseas to allow a redirection of attention back home.

Yet, they don't want to lose in Iraq, and they're still concerned about radical Islamist terrorism. The U.S. is not making an unlimited, 1000 year guarantee to the Iraqi people. Putting our ongoing deployment in fiscal and historical context is the challenge for McCain in November.

Barack Obama and the Power of Words

I've noted a number of times now that Barack Obama's lofty rhetoric cannot hide his advocacy of policies that would take the country in a radically different direction, on both domestic and foreign issues.

But many on both sides of the political spectrum underestimate the power of words, according to Stephen Hayes:

These are words that move and uplift, that give hope to the hopeless. These words inspired millions of voters nationwide to join the grand experiment called democracy, casting votes for their candidate, their country, their destiny:

"More than anything else, I want my candidacy to unify our country, to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose. I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values . . . For those who have abandoned hope, we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!"

Whose words are these? Ronald Reagan's in 1980.

As Hayes notes, Democrats dismissed Reagan's lofty statements that year, but he went on to win a landslide election, winning 44 states and 489 electoral votes.

Are Republicans making the same mistake with Obama?

For months now, Hillary Clinton has suggested that Mr. Obama is all rhetoric, no substance. This claim, or some version of it, has been at the center of her campaign since November. One day after losing to him in Wisconsin and Hawaii -- her ninth and tenth consecutive defeats -- she rather incredibly went back to it again. "It's time we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions," she said -- a formulation that could be mistaken for a sound bite.

As she complained about his lack of substance, tens of thousands of people lined up in city after city, sometimes in subfreezing temperatures, for a chance to get a shot of some Mr. Obama hopemongering. Plainly, her critique is not working.

And yet, Republicans are picking it up. In just the past week, conservative commentators have accused Mr. Obama of speaking in "Sesame Street platitudes," of giving speeches that are "almost content free," of "saying nothing." He has been likened to Chance the Gardner, the clueless mope in Jerzy Koscinski's "Being There," whose banal utterances are taken as brilliant by a gullible political class. Others complain that his campaign is "messianic," too self-aggrandizing and too self-referential.

John McCain has joined the fray. In a speech after he won primaries in Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, Mr. McCain said: "To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude." After Wisconsin, he sharpened the attack, warning that he would expose Mr. Obama's "eloquent but empty call for change."

The assumption behind much of this criticism is that because Mr. Obama gives a good speech he cannot do substance. This is wrong. Mr. Obama has done well in most of the Democratic debates because he has consistently shown himself able to think on his feet. Even on health care, a complicated national issue that should be Mrs. Clinton's strength, Mr. Obama has regularly fought her to a draw by displaying a grasp of the details that rivals hers, and talking about it in ways Americans can understand.

Read the rest.

Hayes speaks so glowingly of Obama's substantive firepower you'd think he too was totally in the tank!

I kid, of course, and frankly Obama's coming off as one of the greatest campaigners in the history of American presidential elections.

Still, the key question to remember is where will all these lofty calls to inclusion, equity, and equality lead? To an additional $400 billion in federal spending amid a time of steep budget deficits? That doesn't sound Reaganesque.

On foreign policy, when Obama declared the recent success in Iraq as "tactical" improvements in one of America's greatest strategic blunders, where do those words lead? To the abandonnment of America's hard work at overcoming initial failures to achieve what's now looking like one of modern warfare's greatest strategic corrections? Will Americans surrender the blood and treasure of our emerging victory in Iraq to the angry cries of the nihilist wing of the Democratic Party?

Public opinion's not demanding an unconditional retreat. Iraq can and should be a continuing outpost of American forward military leadership. In partnership with a sovereign Iraq, American power will mark the foundation of a political and strategic commitment to Iraq's democratic future, and to the region's long-term stabilty and progress.

So don't underestimate Obama's words, like these:

Iraq was a diversion from the fight against the terrorists who struck us on 9/11, and incompetent prosecution of the war by America's civilian leaders compounded the strategic blunder of choosing to wage it in the first place. We have now lost over 3,300 American lives, and thousands more suffer wounds both seen and unseen.

Hayes notes that if elected Obama will govern the same way he's campaigned.

That's exactly what worries me.