The media establishment is desperate to revive McCain’s candidacy but he is stone-cold broke and a walking a dead man. If he thinks this strategy is going to work, he’s nuts.
It is now his goal to use the coming debate in Washington over the report by Army Gen. David Petraeus and defense funding to reestablish himself in the eyes of Republicans as the candidate who has been most consistently right about Iraq for four years and therefore is the right man to become the next commander-in-chief.
McCain will make two arguments. First, that, alone among the Republican candidates, he was highly critical of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy when it wasn’t popular to do so–back in late 2003 and early 2004. He will point to what he said about the need for more troops on the ground in Iraq at the time, and to his condemnations of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“I’ve taken unpopular stance [sic] because I knew what was right,” he said Wednesday. “Back in 2003, amid criticism from my fellow Republicans, I spoke strongly against the then Rumsfeld strategy, which I knew was doomed to failure and [would] cause so much needless sacrifice.”
I remember John McCain saying that we needed more troops. I don’t recall him ever saying that our mission in Iraq was ‘doomed to fail’. If he really felt that way he should have done something to stop this war years ago. In the age of YouTube there is no way McCain can rewrite history so that it looks like he has been right about this war.
