Democrat overconfidence

Michael Goodwin:

This will come as a shock to throngs of delirious Democrats, but the winner of the party's nomination does not automatically become President. There will be - repeat, will be - a general election. And John McCain is already showing he is going to be one tough opponent.

With their party's huge primary turnouts and record-shattering contributions, many Dems act as though the survivor of the showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wins a cakewalk to the White House. There is talk of a landslide and big gains in Congress.

The prevailing sentiment is not that the GOP is weak. It's that the GOP is dead.

McCain, the aging, craggy-faced warrior, begs to differ. As if to remind swing voters he knows a thing or two about elections, he unleashed a series of hard-hitting attacks on Obama last week. If his punches didn't get Obama's attention, the Dem front-runner is deep in denial.

McCain's broadsides have covered Iraq, taxes and trade, each a key issue to many voters. The attacks had an echo of Clinton's charge Obama is not ready, a fact that may help Clinton stave off elimination in Tuesday's primaries. That, too, would benefit McCain. The longer Obama and Clinton keep fighting each other, the less time the winner will have for McCain.

By then, McCain will have started to define his opponent in the most unflattering terms. And when it comes to Iraq, he will have the help of the facts on the ground.

An illustration of how security concerns and a broad national aversion to defeat could give voters second thoughts about Democrats came from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, who's likely to be in the job when the next President takes the oath, warned against a rapid withdrawal of American troops. Both Obama and Clinton have promised just that and have mocked McCain for saying he would keep troops there 100 years if necessary.

Mullen used no names, but Dems could take no comfort in his words. "I do worry about a rapid withdrawal ... [that would] turn around the gains we have achieved and struggled to achieve and turn them around overnight," he told reporters. Asked by ABC News to define a "rapid withdrawal," Mullen said, "a withdrawal that would be so fast that it would leave us in a chaotic situation and the gains we have achieved would be lost."

The comments confirm a point I noted before, that both Clinton and Obama are vulnerable to charges their Iraq withdrawal plans are being made without any advice from the active military. Because they have accused President Bush of listening only to advice he wants to hear, they are setting themselves up for the same criticism. If one of them becomes President, he or she will take office with the top military man, Mullen, warning against keeping the withdrawal promise.

Then what? Ignore him and take the huge risk he is right? Or listen to him and break the withdrawal promise?

...

The Democrats' strategy misreads why al Qaeda is in Iraq to begin with. It ignores the fact that al Qaeda would be sending these forces to Afghanistan where they would be more difficult to fight if al Qaeda had not been distracted by the Iraq invasion. It ignores the incoherence of their own plans for Iraq and fighting al Qaeda.

It also ignores the polls that now give a slight edge to McCain, but are turning more dramatically against the Democrat vision of Iraq as voters see the facts on the ground do not support that visison. The Democrats have remained willfully ignorant of the progress our troops have made in Iraq in the last 12 months as well as the political gains made by the Iraqis. They are still invested in the 2006 mindset and people are going to start realizing if we had listened to them we would have given al Qaeda a victory it has not earned which would have greatly prolonged the war against these religious bigots.