As in:
Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're fucked."
That's in response, in particular, to the news that Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki endorsed Obama's timeline for getting US troops out of Iraq.
This doesn't help their cause either:
What's that, you ask? Those are US representatives engaging in "the false comfort of appeasement" negotiations listening sessions with Iranians.
And the Obama campaign is pouncing. The whole memo is smack-downy goodness, but here's the main theme:
MEMO: Obama Leading on Foreign Policy, McCain Following
To: Interested Parties
From: The Obama Campaign
RE: Obama Leading on Foreign Policy, McCain Following
There are two problems with John McCain’s political attacks on Barack Obama’s foreign policy. First, on the biggest foreign policy questions of the last eight years, Barack Obama has made the right judgment and John McCain has sided with George Bush in making the wrong one. Second, the failure of the McCain-Bush foreign policy has forced John McCain to change his position, and to embrace the very same Obama approaches that he once attacked.
Just this week, Senator McCain has been forced by events to switch to Barack Obama’s position on two fundamental issues: more troops in Afghanistan, and more diplomacy with Iran. On both issues, Obama took stands that weren’t politically popular at the time – opposing the war in Iraq as a diversion from the critical mission in Afghanistan, and standing up for direct diplomacy with Iran – while John McCain lined up with George Bush. Time has proven Obama’s judgment right and McCain wrong.
The next shift appears to be Iraq. For months, Senator McCain has called any plan to redeploy our troops from Iraq "surrender" – even though we’d be leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government. Now, the Bush Administration is embracing the negotiation of troop withdrawals with the Iraqi government – a position that Senator Obama called for last September, and reiterated on Monday in the New York Times. And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Barack Obama’s timeline, telling Der Speigel that, "Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months."
[ed note FWIW (and it's not much) I tried to push this narrative, about Afghanistan at least, a couple of days ago here]
It's a long way until November, but this may turn out to be one of the weeks we look back on as a turning point when things started looking really solid for Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidential election.
Time to push this over the top! I'm not quitting until November...will you?
Update [2008-7-19 16:4:37 by MLDB]: Via the comments...another quote from al-Maliki that has got to hurt:
"So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat," Maliki told SPIEGEL. "But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias."
This comes from the der Spiegel article.
That is a huge blow to the whole Bush/McCain argument. Good news, indeed.