Required Reading

1) From the Los Angeles Times, "For McCain, the Surge is a Losing Strategy" by Jonah Goldberg
A couple of week ago, I mentioned my depression over the way the McCain campaign was functioning. My sad mental state had driven me to beat myself over the head with a baseball bat. After a jot of relatively smooth sailing, the McCain campaign has forced me to turn to my trusty Louisville Slugger once more.

The McCain campaign has been caught completely flat-footed by the Maliki pronouncement that he would like to see American troops leave a secure Iraq as rapidly as possible. Of course, the McCain camp and other surge proponents should want the identical thing. Our major beef with the Obama withdrawal plan is that Iraq's well-being and a consolidation of our victory don't seem to be any sort of Obama priorities. They never have been in the past.

More unforgivably, the McCain campaign also has been caught flat-footed by the ongoing success of the surge. Right now, we have a bizarre dynamic in which John McCain seems to be refusing victory. Instead, as that victory's primary architect, he should be embracing it. But with the progress of the surge having surpassed the prognostications of even its most optimistic proponents, McCain's adherence to an endless slog seems oddly ill-fitting with the fresh facts on the ground.

Senator McCain and I aren't exactly email pals, so I'm not quite privy to his innermost thoughts. Still, I think I understand what's going on in McCain land. McCain was the hero of the surge. Without his efforts in the Senate, it wouldn't have happened. What's more, he was an early not to mention lonely Republican critic of the Bush administration's conduct of the war. McCain can make an honest claim to being the Winston Churchill of the Iraq War. And Winston Churchill lost in 1945 to a historical non-entity named Clement Atlee.

For McCain and his minions, it's probably unnerving to see Iraq fade as an issue. He was right on the surge. Obama was wrong. Yet the public will look forwards, not backwards. Still, all things considered, it's not so bad. If someone told me six months ago that Iraq as an issue would be a wash come November, I would have taken it.

Here's Jonah Goldberg's cogent take on things:

Within months of the invasion, McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Later, when the Iraqi civil war erupted, Al Qaeda in Iraq metastasized and the Iranians mounted a clandestine surge all their own, McCain doubled-down; he argued that we couldn't afford to lose and proposed a revised counterinsurgency strategy for victory. That was the same very month that Obama introduced the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007."

That's all great stuff for McCain's biographers. But the tragic Catch-22 for the Arizona senator is that the more the surge succeeds, the more politically advantageous it is for Obama.

Voters don't care about the surge; they care about the war. Americans want it to be over -- and in a way they can be proud of.

Richard Nixon didn't win in 1968 by second-guessing LBJ about the mess in Vietnam; he ran on getting us out with honor. McCain is great talking about honor, but the getting-us-out part is where he gets tongue-tied.

If Iraq recedes as an issue and the positions of the two candidates effectively blur, what does McCain do? The temptation will be to run a campaign based on biography, honor and being right about the surge. This is a temptation McCain will have to resist. You don't get elected president as some kind of lifetime achievement award. The presidency is not a metaphorical gold watch that the electorate bestows upon its most worthy citizen. This is the part of presidential politicking that John Kerry never got.

McCain will have to talk about the future. He'll have to talk about his plans for the economy, his plans for $4 gas, and why the kind of resolve he showed in Iraq will be necessary to deal with the developing messes we have in Iran and perhaps Pakistan. Much of this stuff lies outside McCain's comfort zone. He was so uneasy with economic matters, he outsourced them to political klutz extraordinaire Phil Gramm. And discussing grand strategy has never been a McCain forte.

But as the Goldberg column points out, every election is about the future. This one will be no different.

2) From The Fix, "McCain to Meet With Jindal" by Chris Cillizza

I'm glad I didn't put my Louisville Slugger away - I need it again.