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War Issue

Surges. Mercury News: 

WASHINGTON - The Iraq war, conventional wisdom goes, has been eclipsed as the No. 1 issue of the presidential campaign. The housing crisis, credit crunch and overall economic woes top the list of voters’ concerns, recent polls show.

But as the war nears two grim milestones - five years since the invasion and nearly 4,000 Americans killed - the question of what to do in Iraq is never far below the surface. In California, where polls show 42 percent of Republicans and 91 percent of Democrats oppose U.S. policy in Iraq, strong anti-war sentiment gives the issue staying power.

When both parties held debates this week in California, the candidates’ differing positions on the war were aired much more prominently than they have been in primaries and caucuses elsewhere.

OK, apparently it’s the grim milestones, says Merc-News, which shows the media tunnel vision re polls we’ve come to expect.  Expect more campaign and media blather about that as we pass said milestones.  I suspect it’s simpler than that. The candidates know that issue hasn’t gone away, will still be there no matter what happens to the economy, and as they approach an entirely different grim milestone … Super Tuesday … they’ve seen an advantage to beating each other with it.  Remember, you read it here first. Merc-News continues:

 ”From town halls to phone calls I get, it’s the big thing I keep hearing about: What can we do about this war?” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat. She was part of the unsuccessful effort last year by congressional Democrats to force President Bush to change his war policy.

Tucker Eskew, a consultant who worked in the Bush White House, described the war as a latent issue, replaced for now by the economy, that will emerge again in the general election because of major differences between the two parties and their front-runners.

Eskew is either behind the curve or this interview is a couple of days old. Merc-News concludes with a relatively good roundup of when and where war will rear its ugly head.

The war will be a fluid issue between now and November. Decisions made by the Bush administration this year will affect the presidential race. Gen. David Petraeus is due to report to Congress in April, and officials in the administration have signaled that troop reductions may slow or stop this summer.

While U.S. casualties have dropped in the past four months, the numbers started creeping back up in January, and the toll of killed and seriously wounded and the redeployment of many units concern many voters.

So far, 823 soldiers who lived in or were based in California have died in the war.

The administration also seeks a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could commit U.S. forces to defend Iraq’s security beyond 2008, and that could develop as an issue. Democrats say that would tie the hands of the next president, and Obama has agreed to back a legislative effort by Clinton to require that any such agreement needs the approval of Congress.

On top of everything else, the war is an economic issue. Candidates point out that the cost of the war, at $8 billion to $10 billion a month, is taking resources away from domestic needs.

Put another way, it’s the war, stupid. Meanwhile, LA Times attributes the Dem war talk to the McCain surge, though LAT’s reporting farther down the same article acknowledges its deeper rooted than that, and treats readers to an entertaining moment of awkward campaign advisor truthspeech:

WASHINGTON — The growing likelihood that Sen. John McCain will win the Republican presidential nomination has sparked renewed debate between the Democratic front-runners over the Iraq war — and over who possesses the strongest credentials to challenge a war hero for the duties of commander in chief.

The issue provoked one of the sharpest moments in Thursday’s Democratic debate in Los Angeles, as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York argued that the party’s eventual nominee would need sufficient “gravitas” to persuade American voters that he or she can be a strong leader while arguing for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

The jousting continued Friday when a top military advisor to Clinton’s rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, ridiculed Clinton’s implication that she would offer voters the better credentials.

The advisor, retired Gen. Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak, said in a telephone interview that Obama has “real gravitas, not artificially created, focus-grouped, poll-directed, rehearsed gravitas.”

He also said Obama “doesn’t go on television and have crying fits; he isn’t discovering his voice at the age of 60″ — references to Clinton’s much-publicized show of emotion during the New Hampshire primary campaign and her speech after winning the contest in which she declared that she had “found my voice.”

McPeak later retracted his remarks, and the Obama camp disassociated itself from them.

…

The battle over who best could press the Democratic case on foreign policy is one of the key ways that Obama and Clinton are trying to distinguish themselves as they campaign for convention delegates in Tuesday’s voting in California and more than 20 other states.

Both Clinton and Obama have criticized McCain for his past comments that the United States likely would have to maintain a military presence in Iraq for many years. At Thursday’s debate, both offered assurances that they would start troop withdrawals within the first months of their presidencies.

McCain, a vocal supporter of President Bush’s so-called surge strategy in Iraq, has charged that the Democrats have been pushing a “false argument” in focusing so much attention on removing troops from Iraq.

Noting that the United States has maintained a lengthy military presence in South Korea, he said during a GOP presidential candidate debate Wednesday near Simi Valley that “we are going to be [in Iraq] for some period of time, but it’s American casualties, not American presence” that should be the main concern.

Polls throughout the campaign have shown that Democratic-leaning voters see Clinton as better prepared than Obama to be commander in chief. The survey respondents, even if they disagree with her war vote, also rate her as best equipped to end the war.

But exit polls of voters in states that already have held primaries or caucuses have found that Obama, who was an Illinois state senator in 2002 when he delivered a speech opposing the war, has made up some of that ground. In New Hampshire, Democratic primary voters were split over who they believed was the “strongest leader.”

On Iraq, surveys continue to show strong public opposition to the war — setting up what many Democrats believe is a winning campaign issue.

But, again based on the polls, McCain, a decorated naval aviator who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, appears to pose a challenge for the Democrats: The senator from Arizona scores high marks with voters for candor and his decision to back the troop surge, even when it was unpopular.

Well, that would be because that while polls consistently have indicated that while Americans may not like fighting wars, they like losing them less. Same thing with pols, when push comes to shove.

Topics: Iraq, pols

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:20 am on Saturday, February 2, 2008

4 Responses to “War Issue”

1. Fatty Bolger Says:
   February 2nd, 2008 at 11:27 am

   Many in the media do realize that Americans don’t like to lose wars, which is why they often use wording like this:

   “She was part of the unsuccessful effort last year by congressional Democrats to force President Bush to change his war policy.”

   “Change his war policy?” Is that what they were trying to do? I suppose that’s true, if by “change his war policy” you really meant “withdraw all of our forces and end the war altogether.”

2. Don Surber » Blog Archive » Grim milestones Says:
   February 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm

   [...] Yes, the number of enemy casualties is mounting in Iraq. Oh, that is not what the MSM means. My bad. Jules Crittenden has more. [...]

3. Eric Says:
   February 2nd, 2008 at 3:03 pm

   Wow, Tony McPeak is/was an advisor to Obama? He was a clueless knucklehead when he was Chief of Staff, Air Force; looks like not much has changed.

4. saltydog Says:
   February 3rd, 2008 at 2:25 am

   Understanding that I am ignoring American casualties for the purposes of this comment only, I must ask myself why the media is so eager to mention that Clinton is eager to get us out of Iraq. How about shutting down our activities in the Balkans first — you know, that place where we had absolutely nothing but Bill’s altruism to send us into the area? Do you remember humanitarian Bill’s promise to us that our troops would be home by Christmas? How much has it cost this country over the years to act in an area of the world where we had no national interest to protect; where all we accomplished was to open the area up to Muslim extremism; where we went before we knew the full extent of what was going on there; where we then allowed the UN to add its usual incompetence into the mix, causing more slaughter; where we allowed Russia to successfully challenge what little we accomplished?

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