Admirable Opportunist

by digby

This must be nipped in the bud, right now.

Joe Klein robotically parrots the conventional wisdom that McCain has been admirably consistent in his views and furthermore he says:

I admire McCain’s honorable willingness to take this unpopular position into the 2008 election.

Nonsense. He is fighting with everything he has to get back to where he was before Bush joined his team.

Everyone knows that in order for a Republican to win in 2008 he has to run away from Bush the incompetent and against the cut-n-run Democrats. As the presumptive front-runner, McCain looked ahead and saw that the best way to do this was to run on Bush’s right by saying he never committed the proper number of troops. (“We could have won, if only he’d followed my advice…”)

This wasn’t a stupid move. The conventional wisdom for years has been that there just weren’t enough troops available to make a difference. We heard that any escalation would “break the Army.” McCain logically thought that he could get away with advocating a position that was impossible to achieve and look like a tough guy warmonger compared to all the cowardly little pussycats in the Bush administration and the Democratic Party. (I could see the bumper stickers — “Make America proud again.”)

But he made a big mistake last October when he offered up a specific number of 20,000, — and then Bush decided to take his advice. Since then he has been all over the place trying to put himself back on Bush’s right — but it’s very difficult since he openly advocated for 20,000 more troops just last fall and now he’s getting exactly what he wanted.

None of this has anything to do with being “admirably consistent” on the war and everything to do with political strategy. Many people of all political stripes have said that Bush made a huge tactical error in refusing to commit enough troops to keep down an insurgency in the early days. (It’s possible that he really thought he could bully the rest of the world into sending in more troops as necessary, but obviously that didn’t quite work out.) McCain has made a fetish of it, however, since 2003 — knowing full well that there were not enough troops available to make a difference.

It has, in other words, been almost entirely cynical and oppportunistic. Meanwhile, he supported Bush’s presidential bid in 2004 like he was his BFF.

No, McCain gets no credit for being consistent. His “consistent” cry for more troops was an empty proposition until he made a fatal mistake and asked for a specific number that was just few enough that Bush could actually fulfill his wish. (If I didn’t know better, I’d think the whole thing was a perfect Rove to Weaver coup de grace.)

Since then, as Greg Sargent illustrates here, he’s backtracked and zig-zagged like a snowboarder on acid trying to find that sweet spot where he can once again run as the “manwhowouldhavewonIraq” if the hippies and the Codpiece had only done what he said.

There is nothing at all admirable about any of it, either as a political strategy or a sign of leadership. Iraq, as we all know, was a failure from the moment this nation embarked on an illegal, preventive war of aggression. Everything follows from that. Mccain’s nonsense about magically conjuring hundreds of thousands of soldiers from thin air to win the war either prospectively or retrospectively is just a cheap political ploy.

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