naked candidate

There are a couple of thoughts that have been lingering with me since yesterday’s post, and one of them has to do with the era of sound-bites in which we have increasingly found ourselves over the last few election cycles.

Actually, even as I typed that last sentence, it occurred to me that the world has long been driven by sound-bites, but we were neither as aware nor as inundated with them as we are now. Little phrases which seemingly provide a quick synopsis of a greater body of ideas have long dictated the course of the oversimplifications of public opinion. In recent history they have ranged from the senior Bush’s ‘Read my lips…,‘ which many attribute as the phrase that delivered the White House to Bush, to Johnnie Cochran’s ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit‘ which effectively summarized the chaos and absurdity of the OJ Simpson trial.

I did not come here though to lament the proliferation of sound-bites. I sat down thinking about Obama’s plan for pulling troops out of Iraq. I began to ponder the various ways that plan is being shaped and reshaped by pundits and politicians all putting a different interpretation to it and then feeding that interpretation to the masses in tiny morsels.

Obama’s 16-month timetable for Iraqi troop withdrawal: Within the past couple of weeks I have seen it dismissed as another instance of Democratic flip-flopping and then vilified as a capricious deadline set forth by a naive politician in hopes of winning votes. It is being used as a platform by both parties and it seems that everyone involved, including Obama himself, has tweaked the details to further their own cause.

According to both Barack’s website and the op-ed piece he recently wrote in The New York Times:

We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected.

This is in line with his earlier statements, that he would work to have our forces withdrawn from Iraq within sixteen months of taking office. However, Republicans have been swift to pounce on these statements as a revision, a flip-flop if you will, from what was once described as a hard-nosed deadline:

“There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience,” spokesman Alex Conant said. “Obama’s Iraq problem undermines the central premise of his candidacy and shows him to be a typical politician.”

I found the GOP flip-flopping accusations silly during our last national election. The idea that a thinking person would be at fault for reconsidering a previous position or statement seemed ludicrous to me. Moreover, I felt that it spoke volumes that Bush was the antithesis of careful reflection and critical thought. But the people bought it. Bush was strong for never wavering, even in the face of a reality entirely removed from the proposed reality he advocated, whereas Kerry was demonized as an elite weakling for pausing to reassess a situation.

Marching along to the mantra that ‘Thinking is bad‘ the current Republican administration has set the standard for minions such as McCain to follow. They relish the idea of dipping into that same can of flip-flopper they used on Kerry and painting Obama as another liberal without a backbone.

The main problem with the current flip-flop accusation is that it is, in a word, wrong. This is being forced on the public despite the fact that all along Obama has stated he would consult with military leaders and ground forces to help shape his plan to end the war. Is there really any reasonable person who thought that Obama was saying, come hell or high water we are out of Iraq within 16 months? Really? Am I giving us all too much credit? After the Bush debacle, could we really put any faith in a leader who would craft a plan with zero contingency planning and no back-up strategy? I have personal goals for myself that include contingencies. Shouldn’t a war necessitate at least as much strategy as my plan for buying a house?

Obama has been clear all along that his plan for an Iraqi withdrawal would remain flexible. He has, though, shifted the focus of his rhetoric from the withdrawal part of the equation to the flexible part as of late. This is a slight softening in his stance, but it is a matter of which part of the plan he is choosing to emphasize. The goal is the same, a withdrawal as speedy as can be safely implemented, but the acknowledgment that flexibility may play a bigger part is what the Repubs are hoping we will see as a change of direction.

A change of direction it is not. A change in nuance it certainly is. Am I waxing too Clintonian here by playing with the semantics? No. All along Obama has planned for a withdrawal of forces within 16 months but acknowledging that tactical adjustments are a necessary part of the equation.

A flip-flop would have been for McCain to advocate a possible 100 years in Iraq, saying that:

“…to set a date for withdrawal — that means chaos, that means genocide, that means undoing all the success we’ve achieved and al Qaeda tells the world they defeated the United States of America…”

And then, later on with time to reflect, McCain deciding that a timetable could work. Here is McCain today in the LA Times:

John McCain, quoted as saying last week that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for withdrawal from Iraq is “a pretty good timetable,” suggested tonight that a crucial part of the rest of his comment had been overlooked — that any timetable must be “based on conditions.”

“I love these days of the sound-bite,” McCain said in an interview tonight on CNN’s Larry King Live. “I said it has to be based on conditions on the ground. Sen. Obama said it’s a hard and firm date.”

John feels that Obama’s goal is “a pretty good timetable,” which is a far cry from when McCain formerly characterized Obama’s strategy as a form of “surrender.” McCain’s flip-flop seems all the more glaring in the way it follows quickly on the heels of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki endorsing Obama’s plan for a 16-month timetable. Now that McCain has reconsidered things and is entertaining Obama’s idea, is he no longer concerned with the chaos and the genocide he predicted? Did a moment of serious reflection cause McCain to adjust his own approach to dealing with Iraq?

This is where it gets entertaining. McCain goes on in an attempt to distinguish his comment from Obama’s goal by saying his is open to a recalculation based on conditions. He further asserts that Obama’s is “a hard and firm date.”

McCain’s claim that Obama is pushing for a hard and firm date is simply factually wrong. Obama has set a goal of 16 months and allowed himself a reasonable caveat that tactical adjustments are “inevitable.” Now the GOP would like to have it both ways, that Obama has a hard-nosed date for withdrawal, thus making his plan different from McCain’s, and that Obama has flip-flopped and is now adding caveats to his plan. The obvious conundrum is that both of these lines of attack cannot be simultaneously true. Either he has a firm date, making him the naive and overly political candidate, or he has flip-flopped from his hard deadline, making him an indecisive wuss.

Which will it be McCain?

The answer is neither. Flexibility has been a part of the plan all along. McCain is just a little annoyed that he is being forced to admit that it looks like Obama’s plan will work.

This fact will not be enough to keep McCain and the GOP attack dogs from slinging out sound bites calling Obama both a flip-flopper and a typical politician. Sound-bites can resonate, even when they are untrue and, apparently for McCain, the straight talk can be bent if it helps him win.

Hmm, maybe that’s my sound-bite for today: The Straight Talk Express is going in circles.