GuardianUK
Michael Tomasky Thursday June 19, 2008
The last two days have brought the beginning of the debate that will be the most important of the presidential election. The fundamental question is whether Barack Obama can hold his own against John McCain on national security questions.
McCain and the Republicans will try to make the race about security and terrorism (other conservatives will make the race about race, which McCain will hopefully decry when the time comes with more than a nod and a wink). They'll trot out – as they just did for two days running – the same rhetoric that worked for George Bush against John Kerry in 2004. Will it be as effective this time around?
The current set-to started in the wake of the US supreme court's Boumediene decision last week, which extended habeas corpus rights to non-citizen prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay. As I wrote previously, Obama praised the decision and McCain called it "one of the worst" in American history.
On Monday, Obama gave an interview to ABC News in which he brought up the successful prosecutions of all but one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. He said: "We were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."
For the neocon circle around McCain, this was all they needed to hear. That girly-man Obama wants to arrest terrorists instead of kill them – read them their Miranda rights, make sure they have lawyers and gym privileges and pillows in their cells. So for two days running, McCain aides and supporters on the daily press conference call stressed that the comment proved that Obama had a "September 10 mindset", a famous phrase from the 2004 campaign, was advocating "a policy of delusion" and basically that if he became president we'd be lucky if we weren't all blown to smithereens by 2012.
This is the point at which the Kerry campaign would have done one of three things: one, said nothing and hoped the matter went away; two, said something lame along the lines of "Americans are tired of seeing their leaders play politics with our national security" and then tried to change the subject back to domestic issues; three, said something trying to prove that Kerry could be just as tough as Bush, which statement would inevitably seem laughable to conservatives, unpersuasive to moderates and cringe-inducing to liberals.
Besides all that, Kerry was all over the place on Iraq in 2004. The fact that he voted for the war meant he couldn't really call it a disaster or even an error with much credibility. And that in turn got him all twisted up like a pretzel on the war.
It's early days yet, but so far Obama seems to have learned from Kerry's mistakes. Obama returned serve quickly. "Let's think about this," he said Tuesday. "These are the same guys who helped engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11."
The charge had the benefit of being true. The McCain adviser who accused Obama of "delusion" is a certain Randy Scheunemann, a leading neocon Iraq war booster who was on the board of the Project for the New American Century, the chief right-wing intellectual glee club for the war. Being called delusional by Scheunemann is like being called a hypocrite by Eliot Spitzer.
Another who threw down against Obama in the McCain conference calls was former CIA director James Woolsey, who wrote after 9/11 that (I kid you not) Osama bin Laden "may well be responsible" for the attacks but really thought we needed to take very seriously the possibility that the attacks were "sponsored, supported and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein." He's certifiable.
So Obama is not going to do what Democrats have done on military issues going back to the 1980s and on terrorism for seven years now. He's not going to say: "Hey, look at me, I can be a tough guy too." He's going to say: "The notion that these people are the tough guys is an illusion. They've screwed up everything they've touched, and there's a better way to do all this, and here it is." And by the way, Scheunemann and Woolsey are lying about him and the law-enforcement trope. Obama said in August 2007 that if he were presented with reliable intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts, he'd take him out. There is no contradiction in saying that the US or any country needs to use both law-enforcement and military options in fighting terrorism, and in fact it's obviously the only common-sense way to approach the matter. The Bush administration relies on law-enforcement techniques against terrorism every day of the year, as any administration would.
One of the main reasons I supported Obama in the primaries and always thought he'd be the Democrats' strongest candidate, whatever his drawbacks, is exactly this. He is willing to present a genuinely alternative view of foreign policy and America's role in the world and to stand up for that view and push back with it. He's not afraid of the big bad guys on the other side. The fact that he opposed the Iraq war from the start – which was a gamble, even for a state senator; if the war had gone well he not only wouldn't be the nominee, he probably wouldn't even have run in the first place – means that he has credibility as a critic that Kerry lacked.
Will it succeed? I don't know. The major political media in the US, which spent years watching such attacks work for Bush, operates for the most part on the assumption that they'll work for McCain, too. Certainly the coverage of the fracas on CNN on Tuesday, for example, was full of breathless assertions that McCain had Obama on the defensive and so on. The press won't drop this reflex easily.
But beyond the precincts of the media, out there in the land of regular voters, I suspect that Obama's strategy here will work, or at least will work well enough so that he doesn't get hammered on the issue. Solid majorities support his view that the Iraq war wasn't worth fighting and that we should withdraw as quickly as prudently possible. Large majorities support his "irresponsible" view that talking to world leaders we don't like is a good idea. His support for last week's supreme court decision, however, represents the minority view (for data on these last two, go here, and see question 13 for the supreme court decision and question 26 for meeting with hostile foreign leaders).
Obama doesn't need to win the national security fight. So many other issues tilt so strongly in his direction – the economy, healthcare, change versus experience and so on – that he merely needs to stand his ground on national security and not let it become the single defining issue of the race. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to push back. Certainly "ceding the issue", as Democrats have done since 9/11, has worked something other than wonders.
And importantly, putting forward an alternative view will come in handy not only before November but after it, if he's elected. It's the understatement of the millennium that America needs to change both its practice and its image in the world. A president who will radically depart from the radicalism of the past seven years is a pretty radical idea indeed.
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