Obama won't be able to beat McCain unless the MSM and a majority of American voters are ready to accept, at the very least, two brutal truths:
This is the takeaway from Thursday's debate. Here's why.
Obama's case for getting the nomination over Hillary -- that being right on Day 1 is at least as important as being ready on Day 1 -- rests on his ability to debate with McCain from the bedrock position that the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake.
Obama is able to state his case so clearly and forcefully, and Hillary's rebuttals are necessarily so muddled and nuanced, because Hillary refuses to admit her vote for the AUMF was a mistake.
Why would Hillary willingly cede so much rhetorical ground to Obama? The conventional wisdom is that Hillary thinks that admitting a mistake would show a weakness that a woman candidate for president cannot afford to project. But I think there is an even deeper reason: Hillary doesn't think the American people are ready to hear that every soldier's death and every dollar spent in Iraq was the consequence of a mistake.
Thursday's debate showed that Obama will need to seize this issue to defeat Hillary. He needs to commit himself to the superiority of the position he took that the war was a mistake from the beginning. But sooner or later, McCain or the press is going to take note that this position logically implies that thousands of Americans have died for a mistake. And Obama, if he is as principled as he has shown himself thus far to be, cannot run from that implication.
Obama will also be faced in the general election campaign with the accusation that his plan to withdraw will be "accepting defeat" and "cutting and running." The only principled response Obama can make is that the war was a mistake from the beginning. He should point out that McCain, having supported the war from the beginning, is so heavily invested in the decision to go to war that he will not declare success and leave until that decision is vindicated. McCain's definition of success in Iraq is a day when we have achieved improvements in our own national security and in the lives of the Iraqi people that are equal to the thousands of lives we have lost and the trillion dollars we have spent. That is why he is willing to contemplate the necessity of a 100-year occupation.
Obama should argue that we can no longer achieve that kind of success in Iraq. He should point out that most of our losses were unnecessary, and the objective now is to avoid further unnecessary losses while achieving as much as we can for our national security and for the Iraqi people from the compromised and irretrievable position Bush has put us in. And he will have to persuade the American people that while the results won't be pretty, completing that objective is the only kind of success that remains available to us.
I have stated these two brutal truths in minimal form. Of course, there are even more brutal truths about Iraq that Americans will ultimately need to face: the lies and deceptions that engendered the aforementioned mistake, Iraq's one million civilian casualties, the likelihood of future terrorism on American soil as a direct blowback from the suffering we have inflicted on the Iraqi people, the weakening of our strategic position in both hard and soft power, and on and on. But the two minimal truths I have identified are the ones that are absolutely fundamental to Obama's case against McCain.
I think it fair to say that as of February 2008, the MSM is not yet ready to speak even these two minimal truths directly and openly. To the contrary, the MSM censors itself and marginalizes those who would speak these truths.
So my question is: Will American voters be ready to hear these truths this summer and fall? And will Obama be able to present these truths without being drowned out and smeared by the MSM?
Vote below. But count me worried.
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