I guess the fundraisers are over.
Via the King of Hacks:
Following up on today's NYTime's Op-Ed, Barack Obama will be giving what his campaign calls a "major speech" on Iraq tomorrow. This appears to be part of a big post-post-primary/pre-convention push back against the DC punditry's aggressive and flatly misleading campaign to paint him as a flip-flopper (and Democrats as advocates of some mythical position called "precipitous withdrawal").
For those who got skittish during the past few weeks of fundraising and infrastructure development, this pushback seems to mark the return of the more aggressive campaign we knew during the early primaries. With today's op-ed and tomorrow's speech, Obama will sharply define the contrasts that McCain's allies have been desperately trying to blur (yesterday on Meet the Press, Mike Murphy even went so far as to make the ludicrous claim that Obama "endorsed" McCain's policies).
This will be soon followed up by Obama's high profile overseas trip where he'll be visiting the West Bank, Israel, and Iraq, among other less controversial locations. He will be accompanied by Chuck Hagel and dark horse VP prospect, Jack Reed. It also has been reported by journalists close to Hagel that the Republican Senator is on the verge of an endorsement.
In Iraq, things may get interesting. The government's call for a timetable for withdrawal may signal their desire to push off the yoke of the neoconservatives' foreign policy fantasies. In his op-ed, Obama focused heavily on al-Maliki's announcement, deploying some incredibly clever rhetoric that exposes Bush and McCain's efforts to both assert that the surge was a success and insist that Iraq is still a house of cards:
They call any timetable for the removal of American troops "surrender," even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.
While I would personally like to hear about how Obama intends to deal with the empowerment of Sunni militias that followed the disastrous first phase of "the surge," it's clear that he's going to turn the Republicans' ridiculously optimistic rhetoric about "the surge" against McCain. Either the new strategy worked and we can go home... or it didn't and McCain was wrong. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between, but as we saw over the last two weeks, "somewhere in between" is not a safe place to argue from in presidential politics.
As a whole, this effort appears to have all the pieces in place to secure dominance of the media cycle for the next two weeks. Any further significance is unclear, though Obama's late July effort to establish his foreign policy credentials may signal that he's leaning towards an economy-focused VP (assuming the effort is successful), an announcement that is likely to follow his return from Iraq.