August 14th 2008
Unfortunate Rhetoric From McCain
J
ohn McCain is enjoying his foreign policy superiority over a confused and halting Barack Obama this week, but he’s in serious danger of overplaying his Georgia card and should back off until he gets his mouth right.
The biggest risk of too aggressive a stand against Russia is that a war-weary American electorate will fear McCain will drag them into another conflict, while the doves of peace that dreamily circle around the haloed head of Obama signal peace, brothers and sisters. Yet McCain’s speeches yesterday, replicated in today’s WSJ op/ed, look too much like a scattering of the doves. Are we in fact all Georgians, as McCain says? Or do we wish this little nowhere rough-edged democracy would just leave us alone? Quite a lot the latter; a bit of a stretch on the former.
McCain needs to be careful here, vetting his comments so they appear deeply knowledgeable on foreign policy, tough enough to stand up to trouble, but wise enough to read the truth in every situation he faces. The lead of his op/ed totally blew that image out:
For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call.
This most unfortunate sentence got an immediate drubbing down from the Left. Yglesias is as good as any for this illustration:
We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.
Rule: Don’t hand-feed laughers to the left. Words are important, and here the important words “against democratic nations” are missing. Iraq was the disposition of a tyrant who was killing his people after years of international diplomatic efforts to bring about peaceful change; Georgia was a crushing military attack against a (weak and flawed) democracy carried out as a surprise without so much as a head fake to the diplomats. But McCain ineptly let the left focus on this canard instead of getting to the meat of the issue: How do the candidates respond to international crises?
Later in the op/ed he did articulate the thought correctly:
The world has learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked. (emphasis added)
McCain may be a maverick, but he still needs a message deck that tames the maverick enough so he doesn’t throw away his strength now or cause international incidents later, should he win in November. The conservative blogs are full of praise for McCain on all things Georgian. I started there, but I’m afraid McCain is playing his Georgia card more worrisomely with each passing day.
Posted in 2008, Foreign policy, Georgia, McCain, Obama, Russia | No Comments yet » | |
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