What Sank McCain. Could anything have prevented this defeat?

In January, a few days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, I went to a Barack Obama rally in Columbia with a Republican friend who had never before seen Obama in action. This friend’s reaction: "Oh, s**t." The super-enthusiastic crowd was about 3,000 strong — no big deal compared to the audiences Obama would later draw in the general election, but several times what John McCain was attracting in South Carolina at the time. My friend said the scene reminded him of the old clip from Jaws, in which the small-town sheriff, seeing how big the shark really is, says, "We’re gonna need a bigger boat." The question, of course, was whether Republicans actually had a bigger boat.

Now we can say for sure that they didn’t.

In his concession speech, John McCain referred to his effort as "the most challenged campaign in modern times." He was right. What sank McCain’s presidential bid was a set of the worst conditions to face any candidate in decades, in combination with an opponent who was not only a better campaigner but also the favorite of the nation’s media establishment. And there was some luck involved, too.

Could any candidate have been elected to succeed a president of his own party whose job approval rating was 25 percent? Probably not. Could any candidate have been elected to continue his party’s stay in the White House when roughly 90 percent of Americans believed the country was on the wrong track? Probably not. Could any candidate from the governing party have been elected after the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 4,000 points before one could even turn around? Probably not.

McCain faced all those obstacles — and not just those, but a political climate in which his advantage over his opponent was perversely diminished by McCain’s own courage and good judgment. In the primaries, McCain bet his entire candidacy on the surge in Iraq. He was right, and Democrats were wrong. By any measure, he should have benefited, and Democrats should have suffered, when the surge worked. Instead, as Americans achieved greater success in Iraq — and as U.S. deaths fell to 13 last month, equaling the lowest total in a very long time — the war in Iraq simply fell off many voters’ radar screens. McCain’s resoluteness and good sense went largely unrewarded.

And yet in spite of it all, McCain still managed to outperform conditions. The vote totals, as of 2 a.m. Eastern Time, show McCain with about 47 percent of the national popular vote. Perhaps that figure will go down a bit, but there’s no doubt that McCain far outshone George H.W. Bush’s 1992 re-election effort — a campaign undertaken in poor conditions for a Republican, but not nearly as bad as what McCain encountered this time — in which Bush won just 38 percent of the vote. Likewise, McCain outperformed Bob Dole, who won a little less than 41 percent in 1996. And McCain’s percentage of the popular vote might be not too far from George W. Bush’s in 2000, when Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.

In other words, McCain faced tougher challenges than his predecessors, yet somehow managed to win more votes. Just not enough.

You hear a lot of talk to the effect that, despite all the obstacles facing his campaign, McCain was actually even, and a little ahead, of Obama until the financial crisis blew everything up. There’s some truth to that; on September 8, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, McCain led Obama 48.3 percent to 45.4 percent. As late as September 17, the two candidates were tied at 45.7 percent each.

But that relatively brief moment at the top of the polls didn’t mean that all McCain’s other problems had gone away, or been conquered. Instead, it meant that any new problem, whether it be one as cataclysmic as the financial breakdown or one far less serious, would be placed on top of all of other McCain’s other handicaps, making the wall facing McCain a little higher.

A few weeks before the election, a top McCain aide gave me the campaign’s inside view of the situation. "You could think of this as trying to summit a mountain," he said. "Both campaigns have to summit the mountain. In most elections, one campaign has some kind of advantage over the other — maybe they get a ten-minute or a half-hour head start — but both sides have to climb the same face of the mountain. In this election, we’re not climbing the same face of the mountain. They’re climbing the side of the mountain with boardwalks and latte stands and playgrounds for the kids, and we’re climbing the side of the mountain with axes and ice picks and one slip and you’re dead."

It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fair, but that’s the way things go. And in the end, McCain slipped.

Palin speaks out

To Know Her Is To Respect Her. The great Palin divide.

Five things that keep Democrats up at night

WASHINGTON–An extra hour on the clock? Just another hour for Democrats to toss and turn.

On this, their most nervous of weekends – with thoughts of Fat Ladies not yet singing, Yogi Berra proclaiming: "It ain't over till it's over" and Dewey beating Truman – they received another fright yesterday from Barack Obama's aunt living illegally in Boston.

Here are five things that come at Obama supporters in the night:

• Auntie Zeituni: The Obama campaign said yesterday it would return $260 in campaign donations from Zeituni Onyango, his Kenyan-born aunt who is living illegally in this country.

Obama said he had no idea the woman he refers affectionately to as "Auntie Zeituni" in his memoir had been ordered out of the country four years ago by an immigration judge but said he believed all U.S. laws should be followed.

She lives in public housing in Boston and attended Obama's swearing-in as a U.S. senator in 2004 and, according to Obama, last talked to him about two years ago.

The campaign said such revelations about the half-sister of Obama's late father should be viewed suspiciously when they're leaked less than 72 hours before voting day. Not quite a November surprise but certainly an unwelcome November distraction.

• Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida: All are still in the Obama column, but all are tightening in the final days.

"It's time for a reality check," Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Ed Rendell said Friday. "We've got our work cut out for us."

His state looks solidly behind Obama, but what's with this NBC/Mason Dixon poll suddenly showing his lead at only four points, within the margin of error?

RealClearPolitics, which collects and averages major polls, shows McCain has whittled six points off Obama's once 14-point lead in Pennsylvania in three weeks.

That's 68 electoral votes in those three states. If everything goes south this weekend. ... Want to sleep better? John McCain's home state in Arizona is now in the toss-up category, according to RealClearPolitics.

• Investor's Business Daily poll: It has become the Republican equivalent of comfort food, the most accurate poll in 2004 has consistently put the national race closer than most other polls do.

Yesterday, it had Obama up only 4.5 points nationally, but with 8.7 per cent still saying they were unsure. And while Democrats are worrying, what about this nugget in yesterday's Hotline Diageo tracking poll putting McCain and Obama tied among independent voters? A week ago, Obama led by five points.

Maybe running mate Joe Biden will make you feel better.

"I felt awful good about this time in the (John) Kerry campaign and I felt good in the(Al) Gore campaign and so, so, this, that old joke, you know, it ain't over till it's over," Biden said.

Never mind.

• Where is the youth vote? There is evidence that in the midst of record early voting, the one missing component is the youth vote, those who have turned out in the tens of thousands to cheer Obama at rallies.

In Florida, where 3.4 million people have already voted, an Orlando Sentinel study found only 15 per cent of them were under age 35.

Then there is the legendary Republican Get Out the Vote effort. But this year, some of the GOTV money has been poured into final weekend advertising and it is hard to believe a legendary Obama ground game would not deliver.

Right, kids?

• The Bradley Effect: This phenomenon – named after black candidate Tom Bradley, who unexpectedly lost to the 1982 California gubernatorial election to the white Republican challenger, George Deukmejian, may be myth or at least outdated.

There is no reputable polling data available in 2008 that indicates voters are telling pollsters they will vote for Obama while actually planning to vote for McCain.

More often than not, Obama outperformed his polling numbers in the primaries.

But it would be naïve to discount race in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, states where Hillary Clinton easily beat Obama in the primaries, and it is more likely that many people who tell pollsters they are undecided have really decided to vote for McCain.

That means there could be 6 per cent of Americans listed as "undecided" who are actually McCain backers hiding their intentions.

But an expected record black vote for Obama will overwhelm any latent racist effect.

Won't it?

Liberals and the Surge

In early January 2007, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was going moderately badly to very badly. Indeed, the war had been unpopular for much of the previous years, at times deeply so. But by this past September, a nationwide Pew survey found “a striking rise in public optimism about the situation in Iraq.” According to the poll, 58 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is going well or very well, and the same percentage now also say that the U.S. will definitely or probably succeed in Iraq.

This news is encouraging—and not terribly surprising. After all, most Americans have assessed the situation in Iraq based on a reasonable interpretation of events on the ground. And since the January 2007 announcement of the “surge”—President Bush’s decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, armed with a fundamentally new counterinsurgency strategy—the situation on the ground has, by every conceivable measure, improved. In some cases, the progress has been stunning.

And yet, no matter what most American believe or what reality tells us is so, leading liberal observers and politicians, long in the vanguard of opposition to the war, have denounced the surge at every point. Even as some, in the face of overwhelming evidence, have been forced to concede a modicum of American progress, they have done so reluctantly and have downplayed the role played by administration policy in achieving that progress. Others have denied that significant progress has been made at all.

Why they have responded in this way is a question worth exploring. But first it may be useful to establish the record.

_____________

The formal inauguration of the surge in January 2007—in announcing it, the President said it would “change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror”—was met by liberal commentators with a skepticism bordering on derision.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post mocked Bush’s “fantasy-based escalation . . . which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” At Time, Joe Klein ridiculed “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found “something genuinely bizarre” about those Americans who actually supported the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong. . . . It’s that they are completely detached from reality.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart predicted that, by 2008, American soldiers would “still be dying, and the catastrophe will still be deepening.” In sending more troops to Baghdad, Beinart wrote, “Bush is showing his commitment to win—except that the United States has already lost.”

Liberal politicians were just as certain that the surge was a doomed and irresponsible policy. On the night of the announcement, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Later in the month, Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” Senator Hillary Clinton similarly insisted that “I cannot support [the] proposed escalation of the war in Iraq,” while Senator John Kerry said that sending in additional troops was not an “answer” but “a tragic mistake.”

Throughout the spring, even though the full complement of additional troops had yet to arrive in Iraq, the drumbeat of opposition continued, and so did intimations of American defeat. To Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, “the [American] lives lost in Iraq were wasted.” Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush had embraced a plan that “has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference.” On Capitol Hill, Senator Christopher Dodd asserted that “there is no military solution in Iraq. To insist upon a surge is wrong.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared that “this surge is not accomplishing anything” and in April announced flatly that the Iraq war was “lost.”

_____________

Two months later, liberal critics of the war remained of the same mind, and were now demanding that we quit the field altogether. According to a July 8 New York Times editorial, the time had come “for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” (This, despite the paper’s acknowledgment in the same editorial that an American pullout was likely to yield “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” not to mention regional chaos and more terrorism.) James Fallows of the Atlantic, a sharp critic of the surge from the outset, wrote that the expectations “being heaped” on it were “simply laughable.”

In August, Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a mea culpa titled “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment.” Ignatieff wrote:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a President. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the [2003] invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

In fact, however, far from having turned into an “unfolding catastrophe,” the dream was already getting closer to realization. By the summer of 2007, although Iraq was still in many ways a broken nation, evidence was mounting that the surge was working. In almost no time, sectarian violence had been sharply decreased in Baghdad, and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala were being reclaimed. Coalition forces were making huge headway in human intelligence, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the run.

In September, a full report on the situation was delivered by David Petraeus, the military architect of the surge and the new commanding general in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Both men had traveled to Washington to provide two days of congressional testimony.

Petraeus and Crocker reported that civilian Iraqi deaths in all categories had declined by more than 45 percent since the height of sectarian violence the previous December. During the same period, the number of overall ethno-sectarian deaths had decreased by more than half in the country as a whole, and by about 70 percent in Baghdad. In Anbar province, thanks in large part to the turn against AQI by local Anbaris, car bombings and suicide attacks had declined in each of the previous five months. Likewise, the number of areas in which AQI enjoyed sanctuary had been considerably reduced. Even the political front showed advances, with heartening early signs of a bottom-up reconciliation of hitherto warring Iraqi factions.

While both Petraeus and Crocker were careful not to overstate the degree of progress in Iraq, and reminded everyone who would listen that the country remained a fragile place, they left no doubt of their belief that, in the words of Crocker, “a secure, stable, democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors is attainable.”

But none of this mattered to the administration’s liberal critics, who to their earlier prognosis of failure were now adding charges of government cooking of the evidence. Even before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, warned Americans that “by carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” After the hearing, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” To Representative Rahm Emanuel, the general’s written report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”

Paul Krugman, an influential columnist for the New York Times, could not have agreed more. The administration, he flatly asserted, was intentionally misleading the public by “creating the perception that the ‘surge’ is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.” Others were even more reckless. A Democratic Senator complained to the website Politico that no one was willing to call Petraeus “a liar on national TV,” hoping instead that “outside groups will do this for us.” As if in response, MoveOn.org, the left-wing political-action committee, promptly took out a full-page ad in the New York Times proposing, in giant type, a new name for General Petraeus: “General Betray Us.”

_____________

In November 2007, two months after Petraeus and Crocker testified, Barack Obama was still arguing that the surge was having the opposite effect from the one they had described: “not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.” Representative David Obey, asked if the surge strategy was working, offered the novel view that if violence was in fact decreasing, it might be because the insurgents were “running out of people to kill.”

True, such palterings were becoming a little harder to sustain. The Washington Post, for one, was ready to conclude in a mid-November editorial that “the ‘surge’ of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success.” And not only in military terms: “Markets in Baghdad are reopening, and the curfew is being eased; the huge refugee flow out of the country has begun to reverse itself.” By the end of 2007, there was no question that Iraq, which a year earlier had been on the brink of implosion, was now on the mend. Attacks against citizens in Baghdad had dropped by almost 80 percent since November 2006, murders in Baghdad province had decreased by 90 percent, and roadside bombings had declined by approximately 70 percent. In the Dura market in southern Baghdad, where fewer than a handful of shops had been open in January 2007 there were now 500 in operation. As Joseph Fil, commanding general of the multinational division in Baghdad, reported, “many Iraqis now can shop without fearing for their lives.”

Nevertheless, in a January 2008 debate, the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination—Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards—still refused to reassess their stance on the surge. Instead, they silently dropped the subject in favor of re-emphasizing their commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq and their unchanged opposition to the presence of any permanent bases there.

Others were not quite so ready to abandon their conviction that the surge itself had failed, even if that meant moving the goalposts on the definition of success. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, questioned on her unbending insistence that American troops must begin an immediate and massive withdrawal from Iraq, was asked by the CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer: “Are you not worried that all the gains that have been achieved over the past year might be lost?” Pelosi replied: “There haven’t been gains, Wolf. The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure.” In the Washington Post, the writer Michael Kinsley rang an inventive change on the same motif: the surge was a failure, he reasoned, because even though violence was down, and even though political progress was being made, the number of American troops was still roughly where it was when the surge was announced—as if the achievements produced by those troops were somehow disconnected from their presence.

In early April of this year, Petraeus and Crocker made a return appearance on Capitol Hill. By then, some liberal politicians were reluctantly conceding security gains, but insisted they were evanescent and therefore unimportant—“very nice to have,” in the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, “but essentially . . . meaningless.” To the columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., the problem now was that “the administration and its supporters talk incessantly about winning but offer no strategy for victory.” In doing so, he continued, they “resemble their own parody of liberal do-gooders insisting on continuing flawed and foolish programs no matter how obvious it becomes that their efforts are doing more harm than good.”

_____________

More harm than good? In his April testimony, while stipulating that “the situation in certain areas is still unsatisfactory and innumerable challenges remain,” Petraeus presented an avalanche of statistics illustrating the degree to which “security in Iraq is better than it was when Ambassador Crocker and I reported to you last September, and . . . significantly better than it was 15 months ago when Iraq was on the brink of civil war and the decision was made to deploy additional U.S. forces to Iraq.” To which Crocker added:

Last September, I said that the cumulative trajectory of political, economic, and diplomatic developments in Iraq was upward, although the slope of that line was not steep. Developments over the last seven months have strengthened my sense of a positive trend.

Which did not stop Barack Obama from taking to the op-ed page of the New York Times two months later to insist that “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.” A week later, ABC’s Terry Moran asked Obama if, knowing what he knew now, would he support it? Obama’s answer was “No.” That is, he was still against the surge despite his own belated acknowledgment that it had, in fact, “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” In the effort to reconcile this blatant contradiction—akin to a diagnostician’s continuing to oppose the treatment that made the patient well—he twisted himself into an intellectual pretzel, asserting that the decrease in violence was the result not of any new American strategy but of “political factors inside Iraq that came right at the same time.” A similar counterfactual claim would later be made by Bob Woodward in his new book The War Within and by Peter Galbraith in the New York Review. In Galbraith’s summary judgment, “less violence . . . is not the same thing as success,” and in any case the surge “has not been the main reason for the decline in violence.”

And so it goes. By the time General Petraeus handed over the flag of his command to General Raymond Odierno in September, the situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed. Not only had overall violence in Iraq declined to almost “normal” levels,* and not only were Iraqi security forces growing in numbers and effectiveness as threats from al-Qaeda and Shiite militias decreased, but Iraq’s political leaders had also reached comprehensive domestic accommodations, passing key laws in the areas of provincial elections, the distribution of resources, amnesty, pensions, investment, and de-Baathification. Also in September, Iraq’s parliament passed a crucial election law that, according to a story in the New York Times, “represents a significant achievement for a country that has more often resorted to violence than political negotiation in resolving its differences.”

Petraeus once described Iraq as “hard but not hopeless.” Today, he says Iraq is “hard but hopeful.” That statement would seem beyond dispute.

Not, however, to the war’s liberal critics.

_____________

Those critics, in the piercing phrase of Senator Joseph Lieberman, “hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.” So hermetically sealed off from reality are they that even Charles Peters, the founder of the liberal Washington Monthly, was driven to write as long ago as last December:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared. . . . [T]he fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications?

Why, indeed? And, if reluctant in December 2007, why are most still reluctant today?

A generous interpretation is that by the end of 2006, many liberals had made a definitive good-faith judgment that the Iraq war was irretrievably lost. This then became the filter through which they viewed all later developments. Once convinced of the impossibility of substantial progress, never mind a decent outcome or an actual victory, they could not help receiving good news as anomalous and/or inherently unsustainable.

But the generous interpretation may be too generous, and also condescending. Reasonable and responsible adults are expected to assess the solidity of their convictions against the available evidence and in light of changing circumstances. Even at the time of the surge’s announcement, when things were going quite badly, should responsible adults not have been able to entertain the possibility that, given the enormity of what was at stake in the war, a fundamentally new approach merited at least a degree of support, however hesitant or conditional?

Instead, many pronounced the new approach a failure even before it was tried. Still worse was that they continued to pronounce it a failure even as the evidence began to amass that it was succeeding. Even those few who (like Richard Cohen and Joe Klein) eventually admitted they were wrong about the surge itself continued to insist they were right about the war. Others stuck more and more zealously to their original position the more it became falsified by reality. They, and not the President, were the ones who were truly “doubling down” on their bet—as if a decent outcome in Iraq threatened their entire worldview.

Nor was their blindness limited to the good news occurring in the lives of Iraqis. They seemed no less blind to the huge drop in American combat deaths. Those deaths, after all, had been said to be among the core concerns of the anti-surge critics, who along with their allies in the media had been focusing relentless attention on the numbers of American casualties in Iraq. Yet little was now made of the fact that—to take just one example—there were but five U.S. combat deaths in Iraq in July 2008. (The previous monthly low had been eight in May 2003, after the invasion.)

Nor, finally, has much if anything been made of the fact that coalition forces have drawn down significantly. All five of the U.S. combat brigades committed to the surge, as well as two Marine battalions and the Marine Expeditionary Unit, have withdrawn. One could not ask for a clearer sign that the surge has been achieving one of the key declared objectives of the anti-war critics themselves—namely, a reduction of American combat troops in Iraq. It is a sign that remains, for the critics, all but unnoticed.

_____________

Enter, ignominiously, politics. For some liberals, hatred of the President was clearly so all-encompassing that they had developed a deep investment in the failure of what they habitually dismissed not as America’s war but as “Bush’s war.” To an extent, this passion was driven by merely partisan considerations: Iraq had become a superbly effective instrument with which to bludgeon Republicans. It had helped the Democrats take control of both the House and the Senate in 2006; might not a thorough “Republican” defeat in Iraq lastingly reshape the political landscape in their favor?

This is, admittedly, an unpleasant line of speculation, and those foolhardy enough to venture upon it have been loudly condemned for questioning the patriotism of their political adversaries. But patriotism is not the issue—judgment is. When politicians acting in good faith misjudge a situation, nothing prevents them from acknowledging their error and explaining themselves. For the most part, we await such acknowledgments in vain.

In partial extenuation, it might be contended that politicians have an elementary obligation to be responsive to the opinions of their constituents; since Iraq had become a certifiably unpopular cause, stepping out of line on the issue was likely to be regarded as an offense punishable at the polls. But what, then, are we to say of the opinion shapers, the editorial writers of our great newspapers, the essayists and columnists and book authors who, unconstrained by petty interest, present themselves as stalwartly independent spirits willing to follow the truth wherever it may lead? What was at work in them when the evidence of American progress—which started as a trickle, and then became a river, and eventually became a flood—could no longer be denied? For not only did they continue to deny it, but they actively promoted an alternative policy of withdrawal and retreat that would have made an American defeat, and a jihadist and Iranian victory, inevitable. Is it not fair to say that what was at work in them was an ideological antipathy not just to an American President, but to America’s cause?

Fortunately, as I noted at the outset, Americans at large are not so ready to deny the evidence of their senses, and appear open to reasoned argument on the basis of that evidence. For a political leader in high office, this is a great blessing. Some eyes will refuse to open and some ears will refuse to hear and some voices will always be raised high in derision. To act rightly in such circumstances is difficult and often enormously costly; but it is the very essence of leadership. If a leader’s decision is wise, there are grounds for hoping that in time this wisdom will be vindicated and, perhaps, recognized—even in the case of a war once massively unpopular but now winnable.

---

Respond to this Article

(page 1 of 1 - view all)

---

Write a Letter to the Editor

Subject:

Liberals and the Surge

Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Your Name: Your Email Address: Message: Your Mailing Address
(required if your letter is to be printed):

Write a Letter to the Editor

Thank You

Your email has been sent.

Footnotes

* According to the quarterly report submitted to Congress by the Department of Defense in September, “security incidents” in Iraq are at levels not seen since early 2004. Across Iraq, civilian deaths have declined by 77 percent since the same period in 2007, and ethno-sectarian-related deaths by 96 percent. Eleven of Iraq’s eighteen provinces are now under local Iraqi control.

---

About the Author

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.

SNL: McCain, Palin on QVC

SNL Weekend Update w/ Sen. McCain

John McCain — The Agony of a Gadfly

ABC News.com: Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

The McCain Mutiny

Casualty of the Surge

But after early challenges, the positive results have become undeniable, as violence in Iraq has plummeted, normality has returned to markets, and neighbors and political accommodations have moved forward. McCain, it turns out, was tragically and gloriously right -- as right as Winston Churchill during his wilderness years. And McCain's come-from-behind nomination victory would have been inconceivable without this prophetic achievement.

This raises the question: If McCain benefited politically from being correct about the surge, why has Barack Obama not been punished for opposing it?

It was, after all, the single most important decision Obama has made as a public official. His judgment? "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." This initial reluctance is perhaps understandable; many shared it. But Obama persisted in his skepticism after the results became evident. Even in July of this year, he argued, "the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true."

...the main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table. In early December 2006, 44 percent of Americans said that Iraq was the most important problem faced by the president and Congress. This week, 7 percent said Iraq was the most important issue in their choice for president. A relatively peaceful Iraq is not an issue -- even for a candidate who might have thrust it into genocide.

So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency.

And McCain is left with a poignant comfort. He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war.

McCain for President

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up? The Maverick roasts the Messiah.

John McCain often comes across as stodgy and stiff. Well, Thursday night, at the nonpartisan Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, the senator brought down the house with his hilarious remarks on the election so far. With pitch-perfect delivery and impeccable timing, who knew that a white-tie affair would actually loosen him up?

John McCain

On his penchant to overhaul his campaign staff, Mr. McCain self-mockingly announced that, once again, he's replaced his entire team of senior advisors, this time by one man: Joe the Plumber. Joe's concerned about getting hit by an Obama tax increase, Mr. McCain continued, because he recently signed "a very lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to handle the work on all seven of their houses " -- a shot at the McCains and their controversial housing assets.

On his relationship with Barack Obama, who was seated nearby, Mr. McCain revealed that while he likes to call his "friend and colleague . . . 'That One,'" Mr. Obama "even has a pet name for me: George Bush."

And in recognizing his underdog status, he lamented that "my friend " Chris Matthews of MSNBC was not a McCain supporter. "We've talked about it, and I've told him: 'Maverick I can do, but Messiah is above my paygrade.'"

Still, Mr. McCain said there was much cause for hope: "Even in this room full of proud Manhattan Democrats, I can't shake that feeling that some people here are pulling for me. I'm delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary!"

Like many other McCain speeches, this one was given from behind a podium and read from notes. Yet the crowd clearly loved him, as you could tell by the extended applause. If only every stop along the campaign trail was an Al Smith memorial dinner.

The Cabinet of Dr. Obama: Dissecting the health care proposals of Obama and McCain.

Palin and Populism

She killed. She had him at "Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?" She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy.

The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.

As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic "talk over the heads of the media straight to the people," and it is a long time since I've seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial.

Joe Biden seems to have walked in thinking that she was an idiot and that he only had to patiently wait for this fact to reveal itself. This was a miscalculation. He showed great forbearance. Too much forbearance. She said of his intentions on Iraq, "Your plan is a white flag of surrender." This deserved an indignant response, or at least a small bop on the head, from Mr. Biden, who has been for five years righter on Iraq than the Republican administration. He was instead mild.

The heart of her message was a complete populist pitch. "Joe Six-Pack" and "soccer moms" should unite to fight the tormentors who forced mortgages on us. She spoke of "Main Streeters like me." A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation.

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We've got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom. Watch her crowds this weekend. She's about to get jumpers, the old political name for people who are so excited to see you they start to jump.

Nice Try: Palin is still standing.

When Joe Met Sarah

Playing games

The U.S. dollar is soaring (at least in relation to the British pound), the price of oil is plummeting, stock markets are calming in the eye of the storm, the big bad banks are going down like dominoes. At first sight, what's not to like about the failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to rubberstamp the Bush-Paulson-Pelosi-Reid financial rescue package?

Better, from a strictly Democrat point of view, Nancy Pelosi and company are squeezing every drop of partisan advantage from the process itself, by which lame-duck Republicans are trying to fix a largely Democrat-created problem that Republicans like John McCain could see coming for at least the last three years, and actually tried to do something about, over Democrat objections.

(Most readers won't know this because they are not being told by the mainstream media: but yes, McCain began pleading with the Senate Banking Committee to act on huge irregularities discovered in the accounts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, back in May 2006, two years after a Bush administration initiative to improve their regulation died in Congress. McCain's efforts were ridiculed, then stifled by ranking Democrats, including the committee chairman, Chris Dodd, the leading recipient of financial contributions from lobbyists for the very banks McCain said were "gaming the system." Senator Barack Obama is incidentally the second-biggest recipient of political contributions from these sources.)

Nancy Pelosi to the U.S. Senate, Monday, on the figure of $700 billion: "It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush administration's failed economic policies: policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system."

This remark was as close to the opposite of the truth as it is humanly possible to get. Even by the standards of politicians, it was shameful. That it was used by a politician who went on to pat herself and Democrat colleagues on the back for their selfless bipartisan efforts to rewrite the Bush-Paulson rescue proposal into a shopping list of Democrat attachments -- including e.g. Harry Reid's attempt to squeeze in an extension to the moratorium on oil shale drilling -- speaks to a profound unseriousness.

Ms. Pelosi's speech itself could not have been better designed to discourage Republicans in the U.S. House -- whom she knew were receiving messages from their constituents 10-to-one against the rescue package -- from voting for it. One must reasonably assume she wanted the measure defeated, by those Republicans, for political advantage.

The combination of great political cleverness with moral vacuity -- cynicism, in a word -- is a plague throughout the western world. The phenomenon is hardly confined to the left-of-centre parties, and yet neither is it evenly distributed. For cynicism of that nature requires domination of the news media. Supine media, in the tank for the Democrats, make it possible in this case.

But the problem transcends left and right. We cannot solve problems, in a "bipartisan" or any other way, when the cause of the problems is concealed from us, and false explanations are substituted, whether from malice or from ignorance. We can only compound problems in this way.

The various credit crises we face are real, notwithstanding the facetiousness with which I began this column. Anyone who doubts this should look into shipping news. All over the world, ships carrying vital commodities are failing to load and sail because banks are currently too shy to extend modest, conventional credit instruments. The cumulative effect of that, and much else like that, will soon bring home the reality of failing banks even to those who keep their money in pillows.

The only thing I liked about Hank Paulson's original proposal (of three pages) was its crispness and clarity. Take $700 billion of bad debt out of the system, let the government with its greater resources carry the risk on it, and maybe, just maybe, the banking system will right itself.

It was a clean proposal to pump water out of a foundering hull, and every complication added to it (including even the ban on short-selling) reduces its effectiveness.

Moreover, if the banking system recovered, and with it the economy that depends upon it, the government would have a fairly good chance, over time, to get its money back, as debtors recovered the ability to make payments.

The question should never have been how to encumber the pumping operation. Rather, it should have been, will $700 billion be enough? For that is the fallout from the subprime crisis alone, and we have credit card, auto purchase, and several other credit crises stacked up behind it.

And if it is not enough, what would be better? To let nature take its course, like a hurricane, and then rebuild from the ground up? Or try to rebuild in the face of the hurricane?

Ivy League America assumes the latter, Main Street America the former.

David Warren

Obama: John McCain is Right

A Presidential McCain: McCain's bold move could reframe the election--and win it.