McCain's Grit and Obama's World Tour

In this Post:

• media bias
• George H.W. Bush
• John McCain
• Barack Obama

One thing about Republican presidential nominee John McCain: He’s no slave to public opinion polls. With about 60 percent of Americans thinking the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, and the Democratic presidential nominee being a fellow who opposed it from the beginning, you’d think the former Navy man might be trimming his sails. Think again.

Here’s McCain, as recently, as today, on a visit to see George H.W. Bush in Maine: Any withdrawal of troops from Iraq “must be based on conditions on the ground.”

McCain also categorized Barack Obama as “someone who has no military experience whatsoever.” This was precisely the kind of critique that Bush Forty-One, a Navy flier shot down in the Pacific during the Second World War, refused to level against Bill Clinton. Perhaps McCain thinks that Forty-One was too genteel back in 1992. Or maybe McCain is a tougher candidate. Anyway, the man his North Vietnamese jailers called “Mack Kane,” continued: “When you win wars, troops come home. He [Obama] has been completely wrong on the issue. ... I have been steadfast in my position.”

McCain's steadfastness is not in doubt. In terms of historical accuracy, however, I might point out that U.S. troops did not “win” the war in Vietnam before being summoned home. They just came home. And they did so because American public opinion didn’t sustain keeping them there. Iraq seems an obvious parallel.

Meanwhile, Obama finished visiting Afghanistan and went to Iraq. His tour was getting good reviews, perhaps because the news media covered his journey extensively (while all but ignoring McCain’s most recent trip.) There are two ways to look at this. The first is that McCain has mainly himself to blame: He repeatedly taunted Obama for not going to Iraq in two years. Well, Mack Kane, Obama has been there now, and can speak with more authority.

The second way of looking at the situation is that the U.S. media’s tilt toward the Democrats is so pronounced in the 2008 election that we risk falling over (on our faces?). The three major U.S. networks sent their anchors with Obama on his foreign trip. As esteemed media critic Howard Kurtz points out, that fact alone ensures a lot of news coverage for Obama. Conservatives’ fears about liberal bias were hardly allayed today when Matt Drudge reported that the New York Times, after running an op-ed piece by Obama last week, has spiked a similar piece penned by John McCain—or that the editor who made the decision worked in the Clinton administration.

Barack Obama is indeed a compelling figure, but sometimes one gets the feeling that the majority of the members of the elite media have already made up their own minds about this election, and aren’t necessarily waiting for the formalities—like the actual voting. That’s not our job. Our job is to wait.

NEXT POST: Politics is Nice, but I'd Rather be Fly-Fishing

PREVIOUS POST: Would They Have Denounced Huck Finn, Too?

• June (5)
• May (4)
• April (8)
• March (10)
• February (9)
• January (13)
• December (4)
• November (10)
• October (20)
• September (20)
• August (19)
• July (10)
• June (19)
• May (7)