Posted by Jed Lewison on Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 1:33 AM Pacific

Nonsense

On Wednesday morning, Marc Ambinder offered what seems to have quickly become the collective wisdom of the media on John McCain's statement that it's "not too important" when troops come home from Iraq. The essence of his post: Obama surrogates should have been nicer to their opponent and probably should have left him alone altogether. Not surprisingly, the McCain campaign heartily agreed.

Obviously, I'm not on the same page as Ambinder -- or McCain, for that matter. Here's why, taking his post point-by-point.

Democrats and allies are jumping on John McCain for telling NBC's Matt Lauer that it's "not important" when troops return from Iraq. Period. There's no because. There's almost never a because when one side seizes on the comments of another.

Ambinder's hand wringing strikes me as a bit excessive. Imagine if Matt Lauer had asked Barack Obama for an estimate on when he thought he could bring gas prices back down to $3, and suppose that Obama said that no, he couldn't, and that it wasn't all that important to lower gas prices anyway, that what was really important was improving car fuel efficiency.

Obviously, McCain would have criticized Obama's indifference to ordinary American's ability to pay gas prices, right? Probably he would have done so every single day for the rest of the campaign. And who could blame him? Would he have any obligation whatsoever to praise Obama's support for fuel efficiency? No. And would the press get all up in arms about McCain's attack? Hell no. They'd eat it up.

The context makes it clear that McCain is reiterating his position that the presence of troops isn't the issue; instead, it's the casualties they receive.

That's mostly true, but so what? McCain might not be establishing new policy, but he is asserting a heretofore unmentioned implication of that policy: that to him, it's "not too important" when American forces return home from Iraq.

Given that casualties are not currently at an acceptable level, and that 2013 is the closest McCain has come to estimating when they will be tolerable, it's absolutely fair to criticize him for saying that it's "not too important" when American forces return home.

(It's worth noting that since December 1, an average of 1.1 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq each day -- the exact same average so far for the month of June.)

The differences between McCain and Obama are clear enough; Obama wants a bare-bones U.S. presence in Iraq, and McCain is willing to tolerate a much larger one; Obama believes that the presence of U.S. troops exacerbates the tension and gives Iraqis a crutch to delay political reconcilliation. McCain does not. One would think that those differences are a sufficient basis upon which to launch a political attack.

Those differences do provide a sufficient basis upon which to launch a political attack.

But John McCain generously gave Barack Obama a whole lot more to work with. Who can blame Obama for seizing the opportunity? What McCain said might have been politically dumb, but it certainly would have been even dumber for Obama to give him a free pass.

Instead, though, in a conference call with reporters, in remarks by Democrats like Joe Biden, in a blistering statement by Rep. Rahm Emanuel, McCain is being portrayed as, inter alia, not caring one whit about casualties and deaths and chaos and certainly not about the families of troops who dealt with deployment after deployment. That's my reading, anyway.

More drama. Nobody is saying that John McCain personally hates the troups. What people are saying is that he thinks it's "not too important" when troops return home.

Take, for example, Rahm Emanuel's statement which Ambinder calls blistering: "When asked this morning about American troops coming home from Iraq, John McCain said ‘that’s not too important.’ Senator McCain, to the men and women who are serving their second, third, or even fourth deployment in Iraq, and to their families, it is incredibly important."

That might be tough, but it's hardly blistering -- and it's also entirely correct.

The bottom-line here is that the media's coverage has been overly protective of John McCain, as if he's someone that needs a defensive shield against his more nimble opponent. That's not a good thing. By any objective standard, journalists should have been on McCain's statement like bitter on cling. But they weren't.

Now the question is whether Obama will keep the issue alive by raising it on the trail sometime on Thursday. I think he should, because it illustrates a fundamental difference between his Iraq policy and that of John McCain, and it does so in a way that is entirely unflattering towards McCain. It's fair politics, and it's good politics, and we shouldn't let the McCain campaign bully us into doing things their way.