Hullabaloo

Friday, August 15, 2008

 
They Just Noticed

by digby

Some of us have been gobsmacked by this since the beginning of the Georgia crisis but it took a whole week for The Washington Post to finally write something about the fact that McCain has been strutting around --- and mucking things up --- with his presumptuous "I am the president" act.

McCain's Focus on Georgia Raises Question of Propriety
After Chiding Obama, He Dwells on Crisis as a President Might

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: "If I may be so bold, there was another president . . ."

He caught himself and started again: "At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America's advocacy for democracy and freedom."

With his Democratic opponent on vacation in Hawaii, the senator from Arizona has been doing all he can in recent days to look like President McCain, particularly when it comes to the ongoing international crisis in Georgia.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he talks to McCain, a personal friend, several times a day. McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia's government. McCain also announced this week that two of his closest allies, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would travel to Georgia's capital of Tbilisi on his behalf, after a similar journey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The extent of McCain's involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.

[...]

But McCain and his aides say his tough rhetoric on the Georgia crisis, along with his personal familiarity with the region, underscores the foreign policy expertise he would bring to the White House.

The problem is that it sends mixed messages to the players. But then, that's probably the point:

His focus on the dispute has also allowed McCain to distance himself somewhat from President Bush, who has been sharply criticized by many conservatives for moving too slowly to respond to Russia's military incursion into Georgia and South Ossetia, the breakaway province at the heart of the dispute. McCain's first statement on the conflict last Friday came before the White House itself had responded.

In often-lengthy remarks about Georgia this week on the campaign trail, McCain repeatedly talked of how many times he had been to the region, let it be known that he had talked daily with Saakashvili since the crisis began and made it clear that there had been times he thought Bush's response could have been stronger.

He provided a primer for why Americans should care about the "tiny little democracy" and tried to tie the foreign crisis with a domestic one: oil. Georgia is "part of a strategic energy corridor affecting individual lives far beyond" the region, he said.

"His statements have been very presidential," said John R. Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador under Bush who has since become one of the sharpest critics of the administration's recent foreign policy. "These are the kinds of things that the president should have been saying from the beginning."

How nice for him. He gets to "act" presidential, appeal to his conservative base, distance himself from the hated Bush and make a pitch for perpetual war for perpetual peace. And knowing the Mayberry Machivallis' belief that there is no such thing as policy, only politics, they probably conspired with him to let him do it. After all, the Big Money Boyz goals have a big stake in keeping things all riled up in oil country.

But lest you think that the Washington Post is being too hard on the old boy, never fear. He's got it all under control:

At the same time, McCain also appears sensitive to going too far. In remarks both Wednesday and yesterday, for example, McCain explicitly ruled out direct military action against Russia, a step advocated by some hard-line conservatives.

"We want to avoid any armed conflict, and we will not have armed conflict," McCain said at a fundraiser yesterday in Edwards, Colo. "That's not the solution to this problem. But we have to stand up for freedom and democracy as we did in the darkest days."

Big of him to "rule out" military conflict, don't you think. Seeing as he's only one of a hundred Senators it's quite a feat, but he seems to be in charge of Americn foreign policy right now, so I guess we should be happy that he's not calling for nuclear strikes.

I'm not sure I understand this, however:

The Obama campaign has been generally cautious in its remarks about the Georgia conflict, and the campaign yesterday declined to comment on the appropriateness of McCain's role. But earlier this week, Obama adviser Susan Rice said McCain "may have complicated the situation" with his early tough rhetoric on the dispute.

I don't know why they shouldn't comment on it unless they feel that the earlier taunting about presumptuousness and celebrity have rendered them impotent to attack McCain when he's behaving as if he's already president --- or that the public will somehow reward them for their "proper behavior." That's a bad bet.

The pictures this week have been pretty bad. McCain has looked like he's already president and the Democrats have simply been nonexistent. We can hope that nobody was paying attention --- but then they didn't need to be. All they had to do was see the images on TV in passing to get the idea that McCain was being sought out by reporters for his views on the crisis and Obama wasn't. For those who were paying attention it was even worse.

I certainly hope the Obama campaign wasn't counting on the press to see the rank hypocrisy of McCain's actions in time to stop the damage. One of the cardinal rules of dealing with the mainstream media is that they wait for the rival to put out a press release or chat them up on something like this before writing about it. They publicly admit that if the other side doesn't make an issue of something, they won't do it themselves. If the Obama campaign didn't complain that McCain was acting like he'd been anointed Emperor (as the article seems to suggest) then that was a mistake. The press hasn't mentioned it until now --- when it's so obvious even they couldn't ignore it --- and it's too late to undo the damage. McCain has definitely shown himself to be a "strong leader" (however bad his leadership) in a crisis, even to the extent that he's managing it without being president. Let's hope that Phelpsmania is the more enduring memory of this week.


Update: On the other hand, I may (happily) be wrong about this:

When he left for vacation in his birth state a week ago, ahead of the convention season, the Illinois senator had a three-point edge over McCain in the Gallup Daily tracking poll.

By Thursday, as Obama packed his bags to fly back to the US mainland, his Gallup lead was still three points -- 46 percent to 43.

The moving average failed to budge despite a rhetorical onslaught by McCain on the crisis in Georgia, as the Republican's campaign scented an opportunity to hammer Obama on his perceived weak spot of foreign policy.

"I would attribute this to the amount of coverage of the Olympics, and the fact that foreign affairs generally isn't of much interest to Americans except under very unusual circumstances like the war in Iraq," pollster John Zogby said.

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digby 8/15/2008 10:10:00 AM |