I see that the McCain campaign finally caught up to my Obama criticism—that Obama is running a celebrity-marketing campaign rather than a political campaign—which I leveled starting back in January and extended into February and extended much further into the year, till I got tired of repeating the same thing over and over again.

In January, I wrote:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, 'cause "change is good," just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

Jeff Jarvis quoted me here. He went on to make a salient point [e.a.]:

I am reminded unfortunately of the scene from The Candidate in which Robert Redford sits in back of his car mouthing the words he’s been delivering in random order. …

I am also reminded of the final scene, in which the victorious Redford asks, “What do we do now?”

I have no doubt that Barack Obama is a decent, smart, and well-meaning politician. But don’t forget that he is a politician. And I fear that turning yourself into a slogan is an essentially cynical political act. Since the start of his campaign, except for a brief period in the middle, he has lacked the courage to be specific in his oratory.

Yesterday, when Jarvis made a similar point—that selling yourself as a celebrity makes you look presumptuous to some (while it makes you look presidential to others)—he was attacked (as, among other things, a racist) by his commenters.

Ho hum.

Let’s unpack the “debate,” shall we?

Rich Lowry quotes the shrewdest take that I’ve seen so far on McCain’s new line of attack—and it indicates that the McCainiacs have had their puffed-up target it their sights for a long time; they were simply waiting for the right moment to strike [e.a.]:

Musings from a shrewd friend on the latest turn in the race (quoting roughly): “The Berlin speech was overreach. This is the moment we were waiting for Obama—to over-step. No candidate has ever acted in this fashion. No one has ever campaigned in front of foreigners. He’s showing hubris and contempt for the rest of us in how he considers America fundamentally broken and he’s the solution. Messianism is usually a quality you don’t want in a president. This was always the soft underbelly of his candidacy. They’ve gotten too caught up in their own story. What always does in a celebrity? Overexposure.

Indeed. But it’s not only a question of Obama being overexposed. That has been obvious for a long time, as Gawker noted:

The thing that undergirds the notion of Obama-as-Celebrity rather than Obama-as-President is his campaign’s track record of promiscuously selling the candidate (consciously and subliminally) to every possible marketing and demographic niche and via every marketing and publicity channel.

The selling of Barack Obama started with Oprah, when Obama told the Talk Show Goddess: “Oprah, you’re my girl, suggesting that if indeed he decided to run for president, he would announce it on her show [rather than on, say, Meet the Press? How come? ---ed.].

During Obama’s primary fight with Hillary Clinton, the campaign to let Americans get to know Obama continued with him being anointed by the Kennedy clan, and went on to feature appearances with him dancing with Ellen

and chatting up the ladies of The View,

And so on and so on.

Recently, it has continued with his family sitting for reporters from Access Hollywood, with one-on-one interviews with Larry King, with photo shoots for People,

with the selling of Michelle as Jackie O, and on and on into the celebrity-marketing universe.

Indeed Bonnie Fuller of tabloid-editing fame just praised Obama early this week for his campaign’s outreach to the celebrity-worshipping audience [e.a.].

It’s official. The Obamas are just like us. With their latest PR move — being photographed as a family for this week’s People magazine cover story titled “The Obamas At Home” — it’s apparent that Team Obama has a clear and clever presidential marketing strategy: present Michelle and Barack as the beloved Brangelina of the political world.

Like every in-demand A-list couple who concedes to allowing a peek behind the curtain, the Obamas insist this will be the “first and last” up-close and personal look at them as a family. What they don’t admit to is that this was a carefully orchestrated, well-thought-out brand presentation. And it isn’t actually the first highly personal look at the photogenic family. No, it’s the culmination of a publicity campaign designed to take advantage of the couple’s charisma and Hollywood-worthy good looks. Team Obama is using popular mass-media vehicles such as People, Us Weekly, “The View,” “Access Hollywood” and “The Colbert Report” to familiarize the American public with the candidate and his wife, and to dispel myths about the couple, in a far more aggressive way than has ever been done before in a presidential election.

Of course in America we’ve been selling presidents as long as we’ve had presidents. Politicians have always had to sell themselves, and in many eras they’ve had a boisterous, rude press and public to contend with.

It just hasn’t happened in recent memory, so it seems new (and newly nasty) to us. That, or we’re not paying attention. Or we really are Amusing Ourselves to Death (though I prefer to think that we’re Simply Amusing Ourselves for Distraction, which is why, um, infotainment rules).

Anyhow: I don’t dispute the need for presidential candidates to sell themselves to us. Most of us are not paying attention to politics; we’re too busily engaged in the drama of our own lives. I do take issue with a candidate who shamelessly sells himself in one breath and shamelessly denies it in the next breath (and who shows a familiarity with the hustler’s art—which he admires).

And, by the way, I think the McCain attacks will work to sow doubt about Obama. The attacks will get some people to question their love affair with Barack and perhaps to look a little deeper into what Obama says under withering questioning by the MSM.

It may lead people to places they don’t necessarily want to go, noting, as John Dickerson did, that Obama is very slippery on the issues [e.a.].

Obama’s take on the surge also tells us how he processes information about Iraq. This has direct bearing on how he shapes his policy for the country today. The same choices are in play—will military tactics or withdrawal get the Iraqis to make political progress? If Obama was wrong about the tactical gains that would be made by the new strategy and wrong about how the Iraqi political leaders would react, can his larger theory about how Iraqis will respond to a troop pullout remain intact? Perhaps, but he has the burden of explanation. Does he elide contradictions, claim they’re irrelevant, and generally spin? In his interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, he suggested that he’d always said the surge would decrease violence in Iraq. That’s not just spin. It’s not true. At the time Bush announced the surge, Obama said: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

The surge that Obama opposed had two parts to it: an increase in troops and a bet on a new military strategy. Obama opposed the additional troops; he also opposed a host of other new tactics Gen. Petraeus tried, arguing they would not lead to political improvement. Even if you agree with the argument that the additional brigades didn’t change much in Iraq on their own, you still have to account for whether the overall Petraeus strategy shift worked to assist the positive developments among Sunnis and Sadr’s Shiite militia. Obama suggests the military had almost no role in the Anbar Awakening and the decision by Sadr’s militia to stand down—that the two sets of events merely happened “at the same time.” Military leaders think they had a role in bringing about these improvements. (This might be a bigger dis of the brass than his conflict with them over a timeline for withdrawal.) What did he learn on his trip that suggests he’s right and the generals are wrong? Did nothing on the trip shade his view?

In case you’ve forgotten—and I wouldn’t blame you if you have, because it seems like it was eons ago—that’s the climate in which Dana Milbank wrote his devastating takedown of Obama in the WaPo.

As he marches toward Inauguration Day (Election Day is but a milestone on that path), Obama’s biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris.

Drawing to a close now, let’s go back to Rich Lowry’s correspondent. He concluded his excellent analysis thus:

The question now is whether Dana Milbank is the bird leaving the wire and every other bird in the press follows him or not. If this narrative sets in, Obama might have to move up his VP announcement to change the story.”

Once upon a time John Lennon got into a lot of trouble for saying how popular the Beatles were. How times change.

Today, according to the WaPo’s Dana Milbank, Barack Obama says, without any apparent irony, that he’s the embodiment of America’s hopes and dreams [e.a.]:

Inside, according to a witness, [Obama] told the House members, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

He couldn’t have said it better if the words were written by Andrew Sullivan.

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy

Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

—via The Times, London, because the American MSM (with the exception of Fox) has failed to mention it

If I see the word “reign” misused one more time today, like this [e.a.]:

Reid attacked and scolded correspondents in attendance, telling them he’s “really disappointed” in how they have been writing his energy plans, which include a bill to reign in speculation in the energy futures markets.

I’m gonna scream!

You rein in speculation.

Queen Elizabeth reigns.

When it rains illiteracy, it pours.

While Barack Obama was in Berlin making sweeping promises to “remake the world,” his detractors were out and about on MTV, of all places:

This is the first time MTV has ever aired a political ad. Colin Hanna, the guy who is behind the anti-Obama ad campaign, explained why he chose this unlikely watering hole as a place to spend his ad money:

Hanna said the MTV buy was an attempt to reach a different audience. …[T]he commercial’s voice-over was meant to have a playful tone. “We want to go after people who are in the political middle and are not fully committed on this race.”

Watch for a lot more of this stuff:

With more Americans online now, and more political sites following the election, Rasiej said these kinds of ads will have the ability to be seen many more times than they were just four years ago.

“What’s interesting about this ad airing on MTV,” he said, “is that they are taking a play right out of Obama’s playbook and trying to reach young people who could potentially be active in the campaign by delivering a message where they already are.”

Well, duh. You didn’t think that Obama would continue to have the new-media advantage forever, did you?

I was sifting through some piles of paper and came across this February 2006 NYT article by Kit Seelye, which was also the subject of one of my first blog posts. Seelye noted both the evolving pace of news-making and the evolving prominence of political newsmakers (in relationship to other public personalities, like, say, sports stars, daytime hosts, and various kinds of opinion-mongers in many different media) [e.a.]:

[I]n 1998, Monica-mania struck.

”I told CNN there was no reason to take this briefing live,” Mr. McCurry recalled. ”But they said, ‘We get 100,000 more households when you’re on the air.’ ”

Ever since, the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.

Mr. McClellan, for one, said he wouldn’t dream of trying to unplug the briefings.

”We have no intention of not broadcasting them,” he said. ”They serve a purpose for both the White House and reporters.”

That was a wise decision on McClellan’s part (back when he was still loyal to GWB), for the reasons he stated. And he was backed up both by a Republican predecessor and a Democratic predecessor [e.a.]:

Mr. Fleischer recalled a virulent period with the media (and Democrats) in May 2002 after a New York Post headline proclaimed that ”Bush Knew” in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks.

”That was a vicious explosion that lasted a week,” he said. ”But the president calculated the press would go too far, and they went so far in their accusations that the country was far more inclined to believe the president than the press.” Several polls at the time showed President Bush maintaining his high approval ratings of 75 percent throughout the episode.

”The public perceives the press not as watchdogs but as attack dogs,” Mr. Fleischer said.

Mr. McCurry saw the same dynamic.

”The public hates the people in that room,” he said. ”My standing up there and getting pelted with rotten tomatoes during Monica probably helped Bill Clinton because people say, ‘What is wrong with the people in this room?’ ”

Check out the required character traits, look inward, cleanse yourself of impurities, and sign on … if you dare:

Brought to you by the Center for American Progress.

Did you know that there is a special kind of “progressive” “thinking”?

Matthew Yglesias, CAP’s highly touted new hire, still writing from his old perch at the Atlantic, may just give a hint of it. Last time I read his blog, he was proposing that public intellectuals simplify their commentary to a level that even a Manhattan-bred and Cambridge (Mass.)-educated ignoramus like him can understand without, you know, actually having to read or study the wisdom of the ages.

This is perhaps a good time to note that I’m not really a fan of historical analogies as a mode of argument. The reason is that accuracy in historical characterization is rarely particularly relevant to the point the analogy-maker was trying to make. But under the circumstances, there’s actually not much need to make the analogy. At the end of the day, I think I understand what Brooks is saying here perfectly well and I don’t know anything about Disraeli. To me, the interesting thing about the use of the analogy is simply that for whatever reason modern-day conservative reformers don’t like to site Eisenhower and Nixon as predecessors even though they would make more familiar references.

No more references to Disraeli! We don’t know anything about him! We’re only Harvard graduates!

Having just watched a particularly unedifying half-hour of Campbell Brown’s CNN show, I can attest that the media free-for-all surrounding campaign ‘08 is well captured by Victor Davis Hanson:

What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.

But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.

Dude, that’s what I’ve been sayin’ all along! But everybody knows it—if you’ve got a pulse and you watch even ten minutes of cable “news,” (which is pretty much the only “news” that exists on TV, since network “news” amounts to about 19 minutes per every 24 hours) you can’t possibly miss it.

It’s just how things are now, and the viewing audience is showing a lot of skepticism, as Rasmussen reported earlier this week. Television is an entertainment medium. All the information we get from it is dressed up in some kind of showbiz clothes. Our job as viewers is to try to figure out what we can trust and what we can’t trust.

Happy viewing!

And the news editors of theWaPo help him do it [e.a.] (whereas the editorial writers are “not impressed“); interesting development inside the Beltway!):

Sen. Barack Obama, on his first and likely only overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has remade the campaign’s foreign policy playing field, neatly sidestepping Republican charges that he has been naive and wrong on Iraq and moving to a broader, post-Iraq focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over. “There is security progress,” he said during yesterday’s news conference in Amman, Jordan. “Now we need a political solution.” While a diminished U.S. force under his presidency would continue to protect U.S. personnel, target terrorists and provide training, he said, it would be up to Baghdad to consolidate the victory by “setting up a government that is working for the people.”

Two days spent in Afghanistan and two days in Iraq, Obama said, reinforced his belief that it is time for the United States to move on. Calling the situation in Afghanistan “perilous and urgent,” he said both U.S. military and Afghan government officials agree that “we must act now to reverse a deteriorating situation.”

Obama’s analysis has been buttressed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders who, to the dismay of the White House and Sen. John McCain, his Republican opponent, have publicly agreed with his call for completing a U.S. combat withdrawal from Iraq in 2010.

McCain argues that the United States is succeeding in Iraq — although the war is still not over — because of last year’s “surge” of U.S. troops, which Obama opposed. McCain’s aides and surrogates continued that theme yesterday, accusing Obama of what Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) called “a complete inability to acknowledge that the surge worked.”

Note how McCain is left to sputter: “But I was right and he was wrong!”

Meanwhile, I am left to note to Team McCain: You asked for it. You needled him into making his faux-presidential whirlwind tour of the globe. Now you’re reaping what you sowed.

The WaPo clears away the smoke and fog and nails Obama’s make-believe foreign policy:

Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Byron York says what every blogger thought as soon as he or she read all about John Edwards, his mistress, and his love child on Memeorandum:

Today Is Fitzmas for Mickey Kaus

Ann Althouse isn’t happy that onlookers at the hotel where Edwards was caught visiting his paramour and their baby were reportedly amused that he had to sneak around.

[quoting the Enquirer] “He was clearly surprised that we had caught him at this very late hour inside the hotel.

“Some guests up at this late hour watched the spectacle in amusement from a staircase nearby.”

Amusement.

Certainly there’s nothing amusing about this for Elizabeth Edwards, if that’s what Althouse is thinking. However, some of us don’t sympathize with the wives of presidential candidates, even the ones with breast cancer. Oh, we’re sorry about the breast cancer. But we certainly don’t sympathize with them as wives of obviously unprincipled men: power-mad, arrogant, self-loving, self-aggrandizing sleaze bags, every last one of them. They’re politicians!

So some of Althouse’s commenters, like me, can’t wait to hear the inevitable upcoming exchange between Kaus and Bob Wright.

All hail Mickey Kaus’s nose for undernews.

In a country of conformists, Barack Obama doesn’t fit into anyone’s preconceived notions. He does, however, fit Marc Ambinder’s notions of the dream candidate:

after the Democratic pollster, Peter Hart, whose focus groups of Pennsylvania voters showed that many just didn’t identify with Obama; they didn’t know what to make of him; their life was not his life; they could not hang their experiences on any of his. Now — race may certainly be a major reason for this lack of projective identification, particularly among older whites. But it is also true that Obama’s life is a 21st century American life; one of different countries, an unusual name, two races, a meteoric rise, a life of the mind (and a talented, incredible gift of a mind) and devoted to the ideals of expression. [e.a.]

Ambinder is clear-headed enough to admit that:

Those facts aren’t enough.

They’re not enough to sway voters in Obama’s direction and indeed make them vulnerable to be swayed away from Obama. Where Ambinders gets lost is in asserting that this makes Obama vulnerable only to all the terrible things people might say about him:

But absent a way for her connect to Obama, it stands to reason that she will be more likely to believe just about anything.

In this version of the scenario, Obama is obviously a superior being—anyone can see that, according to Ambinder: after all, his life is “a life of the mind (and a talented, incredible gift of a mind [--my emphasis])”—and 86-year-old Maria VanderMolen is just ripe to be duped, the poor old dear.

In my version of the scenario, it is Marc Ambinder and the Obama-bots who have bought into a notion that the Obama Messiah is, well, the Obama Messiah.

The Messiah himself gives them plenty of reason to believe in him:

Logan: “Do you have any doubts?”

Obama: “Never.”

What I wanna know is why nobody has named me a Messiah, me with my 20th-century life, and four out of six traits that I share with the Obama Messiah:

different countries? check

an unusual name? check (but you’ll have to trust me on that one; if you don’t trust me, look at my nom de guerre: Hepzeeba; is it unusual enough for you?)

a life of the mind? check (”talented” and “incredible”? you’ll have to ask my clients and colleagues)

devoted to the ideals of expression? check (I’m a blogger, ain’t I?)

Take it from someone who’s “different”: it’s not a plus.

Note: I’m in a rush and don’t have time to add the links required to document my assertions; I’ll fill them in later.

Shelby Steele gets at the essence of Obama’s profound appeal: he’s running on culture (i.e., as a celebrity, as I have noted many times over the last six months) rather than on his politics (which are all over the map, as has been well documented all over the interwebs, if not in the MSM (as noted by Pew) in the last two months:

[W]hite Americans have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit — presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.) It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.

This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by “change.” He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.

The McCain campaign is obviously aware of Obama’s cultural appeal, and it is seeding a “False Messiah” counter-culture campaign against him:

The important thematic part of the ad is not the gas prices, but the explicit, if still subtle, use of the False Messiah argument, which McCain’s senior staff has been talking privately about for months.

At first it sounds like the rush of a river, then the chants become clear. They are Obama’s minions, chanting his name in a kind of creepy, almost Orwellian repetition. Watch this theme develop over the coming months. As it stands, the McCain campaign already likes citing Oprah Winfrey’s claim that Obama is “The One,” like Keanu Reeves in a trench coat. The McCain campaign is trying to turn Obama’s enormous enthusiasm and crowds against him, to find a kryptonite for his superpowers. This is an arrogance argument, like the one made last week by Charles Krauthammer, but it is also a cultural argument. Subcultures are inherently insular. They have rules, customs and assumptions of their own. They tend to embrace lofty, abstract rhetoric. They also exclude. And in a political campaign, you do not want to exclude. In this spot, McCain is not just campaigning against Obama the man, but Obama the movement and Obama the subculture. He is trying to convince regular voters that Obama supporters are not regular. They are true believers, even worshipers. And it could be an effective attack, for at least two reasons.

1. America has a tradition of seeking out regular people as presidents, not demigods.

2. The conventional wisdom in politics today is you win by tearing down your opponent’s strengths. [e.a.]

Shelby Steele notes a further chink in Obama’s armor:

But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama’s political invisibility — a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions — may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste. [e.a.]

I can tell you that this appeal to the culture is working on the under-30 set (the part of that set which I see, at any rate). They don’t care about Obama’s policy ideas. They like the guy.

And they’re not the only ones. Why, on American Morning just today Kiran Chetry reported on the media’s pro-Obama’s bias, then her interview subject Rudy Giuiliani confirmed that pro-Obama media bias, and then moments later Chetry—with no apparentrony—reported the BREAKING NEWS: “any minute now! Barack Obama’s plane  will arrive in Amman, Jordan!!!”

John McCain had the great good fortune to fall into the hands of a NYT worm. The worm got his: David Shipley managed to give more publicity to McCain’s op-ed by refusing to publish it than it ever would have gotten in the paper itself.

Here it is (via CNN):

Here is the op-ed piece written by Sen. John McCain that the New York Times declined to run. The piece was released to CNN by the McCain campaign:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City?actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war?only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Clive Crook says that John McCain is toast [e.a.]:

A recent Gallup reading says that Mr Obama’s slender lead has narrowed; last week Rasmussen’s tracking poll called the race a tie. State-by-state polling, filtered through the electoral college arithmetic, gives Mr McCain a real shot at victory. All this despite the fact that the incumbent Republican president is deeply unpopular and the economy continues to tank.

How does one make sense of this? The simple answer may get me ejected from the guild of political commentators, who have a lot of space to fill between now and November – but I report it nonetheless. It is that these early head-to-head polls and the vast enterprise of political analysis, nit-picking and minute speculation they support, are, to a first order of approximation, worthless. In short, you resolve the paradox by ignoring them.

Instead of these worthless polls, look at the barometer that has predicted 14 out of the last 15 presidential elections:

Alan Abramowitz, a politics scholar at Emory University, has shown that summer head-to-head polls convey almost no information about the forthcoming election. (Subsequent head-to-head polls are not much better.) Instead, he has a simple “electoral barometer” that weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the “time for a change” factor). This laughably simple metric has correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections.

The upshot?

A wide winning margin, which is what the barometer predicts for Mr Obama, renders moot all the detailed electoral map analysis of swing states, solid states, toss-up states, states leaning one way or the other.

Soon we’ll all be praying to the Obama Messiah, I guess—and this despite the fact that most people know that the MSM is force-feeding him to us and trying throw the race his way, as Rasmussen reports.

The belief that reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the fall campaign has grown by five percentage points over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.

The loser, of course, is the media … not to mention the people who tune in to it—if they’re expecting to be informed, that is.

But readers of Infotainment Rules know better than that! They know that people just like to watch.

Nibras Kazimi examines the implications of our failing to claim victory in Iraq:

Senator Obama has some explaining to do: what does he mean by saying that he would end the war in Iraq? Whereas some aspects of the war seem to indicate that America is at war with itself as the Iraq debate rages in a charged partisan atmosphere, yet it is often the case that wars usually involve more than one side. So who is America at war with in Iraq? And is the enemy willing to end the war, and under what conditions?

Then there is another existential conundrum that Mr. Obama needs to contend with: how does one go about ending a war that, for all intents and purposes, is already over.

I hear my readers screaming: Whaddaya mean the war is over? Let Kazimi explain [e.a.]:

[The jihadists] thought they were building an empire in Iraq, the caliphate that Mr. bin Laden was always harping on about but never got the nerve to attempt. It was to be the realization of their dream, the same vision for which they launched the September 11, 2001, attacks and the mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq.

And now that they have been defeated in Iraq — anyone saying otherwise is either clueless or being purposely mendacious — America has in fact achieved something far greater than a military victory: America’s soldiers have smashed the nascent state of the caliphate; the dream is no more. This is a fate far worse than death for the jihadists, who enthusiastically embrace dying for their cause of resurrecting an Islamic empire as a noble act of martyrdom. Should Mr. bin Laden be killed or captured, then he would remain an undiminished hero in their eyes; while Americans may think that this would count as victory, the jihadists may simply shrug it off. However, seeing their state collapse in Iraq is their own nadir of demoralization and ideological defeat.

Kazimi also explains the ramifications of failing to declare defeat of the enemy [e.a.]:

The enemy has been defeated before it and its aims have been defined; now that’s quite an auspicious outcome. But it is also a dangerous one, since important lessons need to be learned before the enemy regroups and reengages on newer fronts.

The new fronts will be in Europe, Kazimi says. How does he know? Well, he reads the enemy’s writings. What a concept!

Read the whole thing.

And remember that the brilliant and persistent professor-blogger Engram has reached the same conclusion (via different means)—that the enemy [al Qaeda] has been defeated in Iraq.

Not that we’ll have an easy time convincing the American people of this basic fact—that we have achieved victory over Al Qaeda in Iraq (because, as the NYT notes today, America has turned inward, a fact reflected in the change in foreign news coverage in just the last three years [e.a.]:

Almost two-thirds of American newspapers publish less foreign news than they did just three years ago, nearly as many print less national news, and despite new demands on newsrooms like blogs and video, most of them have smaller news staffs, according to a new study. …

Sixty-four percent of the newspapers reported cutting the space given to foreign news over three years, making that the area that has suffered at the most papers as the business contracts. Only 10 percent of the editors said they considered foreign news “very essential” to their papers.

Really? Because we Americans are so special that we don’t need to know what’s happening elsewhere … Right?

Well maybe we’ll get “lucky” and the next really bad thing will happen far away, in Europe.

What? You’ve never heard of Europe?

Well, it’s the place that the Obama Messiah visited back in July 2008.

Remember?

Samir Kuntar on arrival in Lebanon, complete with Hizbullah uniform and “Heil Hitler” salute (AFP).

via Daniel Pipes

Obama is struggling to maintain a lead over McCain in the polls. Could this be one of the reasons?

Tax Rates For New Yorkers Would Top 50% Under Obama

‘Significant Difference’ Is Seen For High-Income Areas Like the City

Glenn Reynolds notes:

A BASIC RULE OF POLITICS has always been that you tax other people’s constituents to provide goodies for your people. So Barack Obama deserves credit for breaking from this with a tax plan that will hit well-off blue-staters — his core constituency — the hardest

I’m really curious to see whether well-off Americans will vote against their self-interest in campaign ‘08. Calling Tom Frank!

If you, like a lot of book lovers (including moi), find yourself these days with your nose in front of your monitor more often than between the covers of a book, read some book blogs—like Wyatt Mason’s Sentences, at Harper’s. They’ll get your juices going.

The other day, introducing a recently rediscovered author, Mason wrote:

Meaningful art—however long it might take—always reaches its audience. Writers or painters who work in obscurity and struggle to get an agent or gallery to give them a shot will, if their work warrants attention, eventually get it. That the attention may be too little or come too late, that the artist in the interim will have a fittingly miserable time being overlooked and unsupported–these sad facts are common enough, as anyone who has read, say, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, understands.

The rediscovered author is Lamed Shapiro. Here’s what Mason writes about him:

This week on Sentences, I’ve featured the work of gifted writer Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948), of whom I’d not heard until last week. And yet the collection published by Yale University Press in 2007, Shapiro’s The Cross and Other Stories, is superior in every conceivable measure to any gathering of short stories I read in the past year.

Now, doesn’t that make you feel like reading those stories? If so, you’re in luck, because Mason reprinted one of them.

Read it.

Spencer Ackerman attended the hearings of “war criminal” Doug Feith today and left deeply unsatisfied:

About an hour ago, I followed Doug Feith on his way out of the Rayburn Building as he tried to flag a cab down on Independence Avenue to escape the women of Code Pink. “Torturer!” they yelled. “War Criminal!” Feith had a small retinue of Capitol Police officers to protect him from the five or so ladies — one Hill cop instructed a Pinker that she couldn’t unfurl an anti-Feith banner in a Rayburn “vestibule” even though she was clearly outside — and they shrugged off suggestions that they should arrest Feith for crimes against the Constitution. Feith, for his part, bit his lip and tried to ignore the yelling. But the cab took forever to come. “War criminal!” “Torturer!” No response. …

Jesus, I thought. Isn’t that enough, ladies? The cab came. Feith got in and sped away. Code Pink dispersed. But I kept thinking about it. Good Lord. To be called a war criminal everywhere you go, for ever and –

Then I came to my senses. Yes, the yelling was obnoxious. But Feith shares responsibility for the most disastrous U.S. war in 35 years; for abandoning the fate of a different U.S. war far more central to U.S. national security; and for creating and implementing an architecture of torture. Over 4700 Americans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. al-Qaeda is materially stronger, as an organization and as a broader movement, as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. And the worst he’ll ever have to endure is five women in pink screaming at him the obvious truth about what he is? It doesn’t even out.

That, plus his book got no play in the media.

What were you thinking Feith should endure, Spencer? (Man up, man. You’re much, much smarter than this.)

The NYT’s Bill Carter, supported by all the writers of late-night comedy, claims that there are no jokes about Barack Obama because … well, I’m not so sure what he claims—that there’s nothing funny about him.

Ann Althouse disagrees:

The best targets are the strong. Any decent political satirist should have an instinct to go after the most powerful individuals. I don’t believe Sweeney and Stewart for one minute. The real explanation for the lack of jokes is some combination of the desire for Obama to win and the fear of seeming racist.

The candidate himself has issued a list of permitted jokes. Andy Borowitz reports:

Saying he is “sympathetic to late night comedians’ struggle to find jokes to make about me,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) today issued a list of official campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes.

The five jokes, which Sen. Obama said he is making available to all comedians free of charge, are as follows:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, “I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.” Barack Obama replies, “She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American Dream.”

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?” Barack Obama replies, “His jockey just lost his health insurance, which should be the right of all Americans.”

Q: What’s black and white and red all over?
Barack Obama: The New Yorker magazine, which should be embarrassed after publishing such a tasteless and offensive cover, which I reject and denounce.

A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. Barack Obama says, “This joke isn’t going to work because there’s no Muslim in this boat.”

Did you hear anyone complaining about this?

Or this?

Satire has an illustrious history.

This one came from the left:

“I Shall Exterminate Everything around me That Restricts Me from Being the Master,” George Grosz, 1921

This is one came from the insane brain of Sacha Baron Cohen:

The Brits really loved Margaret Thatcher:

Arianna Huffington thinks Barack Obama needs more sleep, and that perhaps if he got it, he’d stop straying from his core message. (And she also claims that this is not a critique from the left; she’s lying (you knew that, right?), because on June 30 she wrote a post titled “Moving to the Middle Is for Losers” and we know she’s no longer a Republican insider and right-wing harridan but rather a Democratic operative and left-wing propagandist):

He needs to remain true to himself — and, above all, to make it clear that he will not lead by sticking his finger in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing.

Too late, Arianna dear! Barry hasn’t only changed his stripes on Iraq and the surge—he has rewritten history!

Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a “problem” that had barely reduced violence.

“The surge is not working,” Obama’s old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks - not U.S. military muscle - for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

Barry’s “plan for Iraq” gets thorough responses here and here.

Hitchens demolishes the let’s-leave-Iraq-and-fight-”them”-in-Afghanistan argument here.

Bonus reading: Joe Klein is sticking to his “Iraq was a disaster“ story.

Please note: I’m not saying Iraq hasn’t been a disaster. Indeed it has been—and continues to be—a disaster and a half. But thanks to the shift to the surge, thanks to Petraeus-style counterinsurgency, and, yes, thanks to George W. Bush’s stubbornness in seeing it through (despite getting the bum’s rush from his father’s closest pals), I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (far, far, far away).

I can also see that Iraq will be a losing issue for Barack Obama, whose judgment was so prescient that it had to be erased from his website. Via Gateway Pundit:

Here is Obama’s website before the scrubbing this weekend:

This previous page said: “The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq’s political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq’s civil war.”

And, here is Obama’s current webpage on Iraq and the surge:

And, now… Voila!– *poof* –No more civil war!

Which is why he’s doing the fancy soft-shoe routine now. I also don’t think it’ll help much. Americans like him, but they really don’t like him as commander-in-chief.

One reason McCain can push back on Iraq is his advantage as commander-in-chief — a striking one, albeit perhaps not surprising given his military background. Seventy-two percent of Americans — even most Democrats — say he’d be a good commander-in-chief of the military.

By contrast, fewer than half, 48 percent, say Obama would be a good commander-in-chief, a significant weakness on this measure. (McCain’s rating is much improved from his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, when 56 percent said he’d be a good commander-in-chief — no more than said so, at the time, about George W. Bush.) [e.a.]

I’m sure you’ve also been wondering about where Obama’s number-one fan stands on all this flip-flopping, waffling, rewriting of history, and purging of his website. Sullivan has got no comment about any of that. Of course, he’s no longer declaring defeat in Iraq, as he did when he endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican nomination. But he’s still banking on the wisdom of the Obama Messiah (who’s right even when he’s wrong):

[J]udging now what we should be doing next February is foolish. Our choice will be rooted in a core judgment of whether Obama’s instincts will be better than McCain’s - in blending the diplomacy, military tactics and strategic vision to win the war on terror.

This is the headline of the summer:

Remnick Defends Obama Cover, Idea That Readers Aren’t Retards

And this is the line of the summer, from Pareene at Gawker, about the “tasteless and offensive” cartoon (or possible “anti-Obama propaganda”) that is making a fool of nearly*** everyone on cable “news” tonight:

This obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the FUTURE:

————

*** Everyone except Jesse Ventura, bless him, who just told Larry King (I’m paraphrasing) that we live in the era of free speech, and everyone remembers Larry Flynt took his case to the Supreme Court and won for his magazine’s satires of Jerry Falwell, and the First Amendment is there to protect offensive speech because inoffensive speech doesn’t need protecting.

Go, Jesse, go!

Norm Geras, displaying the unfailing common sense to which his readers have become accustomed, suggests the obvious for those who worry that the internet is ruining their book habit:

Me, I don’t get it. It’s true that sometimes, if you have to switch rapidly from one type of activity to another, there can be a problem. For example, if you’ve been in charge of boisterous young children for some hours, and have to sit down immediately to something requiring intense mental concentration, you may find that you’d be better placed coming to it after a break. Switching from much online hopping and skipping about to serious reading is no different. The problem isn’t with the internet. And the solution is straightforward. Here’s one version of it: however much of your spare time you spend online, spend at least 50 percent of that reading (books and such). You’ll find you can do it just as well as ever. This is if you want to. And if you don’t, then you don’t. But that’s you, in that case, and not the internet. [e.a.]

Geras was responding to the hand-wringing of this guy.

The number of links I’d have to provide for previous hues and cries about the death of books and reading would fill all the space that WordPress offers, so I won’t even try. I have written about the supposed death of reading before, though: here.

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of political satire.

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of Bernie Mac’s comedy routine.

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of his daughters offering up personal details about their family life.

Unfortunately, John McCain doesn’t approve of political satire, either; and he never talks about his family. Plus, he thinks Viagra vs. birth control is a very serious debate.

Lighten up!

Folks: We are in for an excruciatingly moralistic four (or eight!) years.

I wish our culture warriors would get cracking! (Though, truth to tell, from the controversy surrounding the latest animated blockbuster from Hollywood, it seems like they’re not moribund after all.)

This is causing an uproar:

I report. You decide whether it is, as the Obama campaign noted, “tasteless and offensive” or whether those Obama folks aren’t awfully thin-skinned.

Hey! Even Andrew Sullivan agrees with me:

I thought it was quite funny myself. This was obviously intended ironically, and it’s not exactly Parade magazine.