Judgment is going a big topic at the presidential nominating conventions over the next couple of weeks. It begins today with the Democrats administering CPR to a story they've been instrumental in force feeding to the American public over the last several years. That's the one where our current Commander-in-Chief has incredibly poor judgment. You know the drill. Iraq -- the worst foreign policy disaster in history. That's the theme Democrats will try to hammer home throughout their national convention to argue the urgency for "Change We Can Believe In."
This change we're all supposed to believe in is Barack Obama. His is the judgment we can trust, so they will say. He opposed the war at its outset when support for the war was at its height. But then he opposed the troop surge when there was hardly any support for it anywhere. Unfortunately for Obama, those decisions don't look so good in hindsight. Noemie Emery wonders how that's going to work as it becomes apparent to more and more people just how wrong Obama has been. Will change according to Barack the anointed be change that anybody can believe in it?
As Dickerson notes, that's not all he got wrong--he's been mistaken in nearly everything he said on Iraq since he came to the Senate. He claimed that the Anbar Awakening took place as a result of the Democrats' congressional victories, but it began in September 2006, two months before the voting took place. He opposed not only the troop surge, but the strategic changes that took place along with it, that did so much to enable the victory. He said the American military had nothing to do with the Anbar Awakening or with the retreat of the Sadr militia, something denied by the military and by the Iraqi Sunnis themselves. He was also wrong in his predictions of what would occur. "In January 2007, Obama claimed that the Iraqi government would make no hard choices if the United States stayed," wrote Dickerson, noting however that "they have made hard choices," such as Maliki's decision to attack and defeat Sadr and his Mahdi Army. This of course casts doubt on the senator's current projections. "If Obama was wrong about the tactical gains that would be made by the new strategy, and wrong about how the Iraqi political leaders will react, can his larger theory about how Iraqis will respond to a troop pullout remain intact?"
But it's not just Obama whose judgment has been abysmal. In the most arrogant way possible, the entire Democratic party has showboated the most horrendous judgment imaginable. Oddly enough Hillary Clinton has been the occasional exception, because for a while she did actually defend her Senate vote in favor of war with Iraq. Unfortunately for Hillary she didn't stick to her guns. Political expediencies of her primary battles against Obama forced her to apologize for her vote, to hew to the party line in a desperate bid to be the candidate in November. She lost anyway.
When Bush doubled down with the surge in early 2007, Democrats placed a huge bet on failure and sat back to enjoy and cash in their winnings. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid released a joint letter that said a surge would be useless; Senators Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel introduced a resolution opposing the buildup; votes of no confidence followed in rapid succession. "We are going to pick up seats as a result of this war," Reid exulted. Democrats in the Senate spent much of their time forcing a series of votes designed to get their opponents on record as backing the war and the president. In June 2007, Reid declared the war lost.
By the end of that summer, disturbed by some hint that better news might be coming, Democrats tried a preemptive strike on the testimony to Congress of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. "Dead flat wrong," Biden pronounced their assessment, before it had even been delivered. Rahm Emanuel predicted a report deserving of a "Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction." Hillary Clinton said the reports of improvement in Iraq required a "willing suspension of disbelief." Signs of success gave Democrats the vapors. In the face of an optimistic report from General Jack Keane, one of the principal authors of the surge strategy, Representative Nancy Boyda of Kansas became so unnerved that she fled from the hearing. "There was only so much that you could take until we in fact had to leave the room for a while," she said.
It will be fascinating to see who can take what in the coming weeks. But look what has become of the Democratic party line.
The country portrayed for the last four years by the press and the Democrats as Vietnam-in-the-Desert is doing much better, what with al Qaeda on the run, the Sunnis and Shias coming together, the Shia militias largely defeated, and the war itself looking more or less . . . won.
"The combat phase finally is ending," trilled the Associated Press, which had been warning of doom only weeks earlier. "The United States is now winning the war that two years ago had seemed lost. . . . People are expressing a new confidence in their security forces. . . . Parks are filled every weekend with families playing."
There has been an extraordinary disconnect between what has actually happened in Iraq and the Democrats' rhetoric. That contradiction has been masked for months because of a reluctance in much of the media to admit how utterly wrong they have been. But if you think it will continue to go unnoticed by the rest of America after the Democratic National Convention comes to an end, think again. That's when it's going to be the Republicans turn and the Republican maverick who heads the ticket has had no qualms, ever, when it comes to saying what he thinks about Iraq, and what he thinks about the judgment of our leading Democrats.
John McCain sits across the table from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, fielding questions on everything from taxes to torture to terror. He's asked what surprised him the most about the behavior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with regard to Iraq. His answer -- "their lack of patriotism" -- is of the characteristically impolitic kind that often defines his personality.
McCain is not a soft target for Democrats. There is hardly anybody in the country who doesn't know by now that he can't get his arms up over his shoulders because of the torture he endured in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the service of his country. The Democrats know it. And they know that not only are they unable accuse McCain of any unpatriotic sentiments, their their usual posture of righteous indignation will be no defense when he accuses them. If they call him on it, McCain is more likely than not to look them straight in the eye and say it again.
The horrendous show of poor judgment by the entire Democratic leadership will be on display in prime time, and their only defense against this will be to fall back to their usual tactic -- an all out attack on the character of John McCain. It would help them if a Republican scandal were to crop up. Unfortunately for them, the McCain scandal that their allies at the New York Times had hoped to promote back in February gained no traction with the public. Instead, it actually energized support for the Senator from Arizona. I expect they'll be a bit reluctant to go the McCain scandal route again.
The only thing left is to demonize by charging that John McCain is cruel and mean spirited at heart. Over the years they've gotten a lot of mileage out of the "mean spirited" charge, but it may have gotten a little too much wear. I mean, low taxes are mean spirited in the mind of a Democrat. But there's something different going on here. John McCain has been heartless and cruel enough to say true things about the Democrats, and he's got the facts and the political courage to back up what he says. Their only option is to try to make John McCain look worse than they are. Good luck with that. But long shot that it is, I expect the Democrats to launch a massive effort to paint McCain as a nasty, nasty man at heart.
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