A while ago, I said I was going to start taking pictures of downtown Manhattan, which is undergoing a massive transformation under my nose. I took my camera with me today, but what I felt like photographing wasn’t new.

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of hopes pinned on plan A—and I do mean all over the place.

John McCain:

Senator John McCain said that the buildup of American forces in Iraq represented the only viable option to avoid failure in Iraq and that he had yet to identify an effective fallback if the current strategy failed.

”I have no Plan B,” Mr. McCain said in an interview. ”If I saw that doomsday scenario evolving, then I would try to come up with one. But I cannot give you a good alternative because if I had a good alternative, maybe we could consider it now.”

George W. Bush:

The president would not discuss what he would do if [Petraeus told him in September that the surge wasn't working].

“The Plan B is to make Plan A work,” [Bush told Charlie Rose].  “You know, the problem is you start talking about Plan B, that’s where everybody defaults.”

And here Martin Kramer, in a fascinating piece on the “Geopolitics of the Jews” asks some pointed questions about what Israel plans to do when (not if but when) the tide of history changes, as it inevitably must, because that is what history does:

Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it. The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. …

Yet as we all should know, history stops for no man, and for no people. … What is, will not be. Balances of power will change. Identities will be recast. Eventually, too, the map of the Middle East will be redrawn.

When we worry, we tend to focus on apocalyptic scenarios. But I invite you to think for a moment about five long-term trends that could erode the status quo, but that fall short of a mushroom cloud. I will proceed from the far to the near, and I will focus on the Israeli side of the equation.

Read the whole thing. And bookmark and check out Kramer’s excellent and frequently updated site.

This reliance on plan A is a guy thing, I’m afraid. Women always have a Plan B. 

(with a tip of the hat to Frank Luntz)

So: Kevin Drum is very annoyed, because no Democrat has stood up to make an effective rebuttal to an effective statement and speech by Giuliani:

Yesterday Rudy Giuliani said the country would be safer if it elects a Republican in 2008 — especially if that Republican is him:

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense….I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

He added: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”

So I was curious: how would the Dem candidates respond?… Unbelievable. Neither [Obama nor Clinton] took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office.

Later, Drum updated to a response to Giuiliani posted at Electioncentral at TPMCafe, from the DNC’s Karen Finney:

How can the man who failed to prepare NYC for a second attack after the first one, quit the 9/11 commission because he was too busy raking in money from sketchy business deals, can’t assess if the surge is working or if Iran and North Korea have nuclear weapons claim that he will keep America safe?” 

To which a commenter promptly responded with the only thing you can possibly say [e.a.]:

Karen Finney needs desperately to seek assistance in Strunk & White or the Chicago manual of Style. That sentence is a hot mess.

It sure is! But that’s not all that’s wrong with the anti-Giuliani and pro-Dem forces. This (Drum’s advice) is what’s wrong with them [e.a.]:

While it’s true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it’s not that complicated. …

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be “hard hitting” is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake.

Um, no. You don’t “explain” why your opponent is “wrong,” especially not in great detail. If you’re explaining, you’re merely repeating his talking points and allowing your opponent to frame the debate—and in this case, it means you’re framing it in a way that ensure you can’t win.

If you have a case—and Drum claims the Dems do, but I have yet to hear it—what you do is start an entirely new line of attack that frames the debate in your favor.

Father Bernays said: the most effective way to fight PR (that is, good PR for your opponent) is with more PR (that is, better PR for you). The Dems don’t have to answer Rudy—they have to top him.

(Good luck to the Dems! Rudy knows all the words that work. He knows how many to say, what order to put them in, and when and how to end a sentence and a thought. He knows how to talk circles around his opponents, too.)