Obama's war record vs. McCain's

Stanley Fish:

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Meanwhile, as McCain was nimbly moving around, Obama would be standing still, stuck in the one-note posture he has assumed from the beginning of the campaign. In the democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama’s strong suit – the club he used to beat up Hillary Clinton – has been the absolute consistency of his position on the war: he would have voted against it had he been in the senate at the time; he has spoken out against it repeatedly since becoming a senator; and he has promised to end it and bring the troops home within a short time.

But once McCain, and not Clinton, is his opponent, that position becomes a liability, because it can be attacked as being inflexible and without nuance. McCain can ask, Don’t you see that the situation has changed in recent months, and shouldn’t a responsible leader adjust his or her stance according to the facts on the ground? And he can add, I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results. Moreover, by saying something like that he would be reminding the electorate that he knows how to think tactically about military strategies, while his opponent’s only experience in combat has been trying to figure out how to beat Alan Keyes in the Illinois senate race, something anyone with the letter D (for Democrat) after his name would have been able to do easily.

Up till now, Obama has had a free ride on the Iraq War issue because Senator Clinton has been on the defensive since the campaign began. In her desire to avoid copping to a failure of judgment and apologizing for it (as John Edwards did), she came up with an explanation – I voted to authorize the use of force, but I wasn’t voting for it be actually used – that raised new questions about her credibility and made her vulnerable to the charge that her subsequent anti-war position had been adopted more out of political expediency than conviction.

Like McCain, Clinton tells a complex story about her relationship to the war, but unlike McCain. she tells a story whose parts pull against one another, and she has been caught in a cul-de-sac between them.

The parts of McCain’s story, even with one or two twists and turns, fit nicely into a coherent narrative that brings credit to him in every chapter....

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Even Obama's one note, "I would have voted against the war," campaign falls into incoherence when he states what he would do about the war now. Which ever Democrat McCain faces, he will be the one candidate with a coherent policy on the war. It is interesting to see that the NY Times is publishing an op-ed that explains the problems with the candidate the Times will support.