July 25, 2008

Obama Can't Handle the Truth

USA Today: Why can't Obama admit the obvious? The surge worked. Indeed it did. Yet Obama says he still wouldn't have done it. He'd rather we'd quit Iraq more than a year ago, when quitting meant losing. But Obama can't admit the surge worked, because to admit the surge worked is to admit that John McCain was right, and Barack Obama was wrong, and not only that Barack Obama was wrong, but that he was wrong on the biggest foreign policy issue of the last two years. How wrong? Losing-a-war wrong.

You may not like everything President Bush has done. You may think the Iraq war was a bad idea from the get-go. But you have to admit two things: 1. Whatever Bush has done for the last seven years has kept America from being hit a second time by al Qaeda, and, 2) He was right that the war in Iraq was winnable when most everyone was telling him the war was lost, and the surge that McCain championed and Bush adopted was exactly the right strategy.

Frankly, it's impossible to argue that, now that we know the surge worked, that doing the opposite of the surge - Obama's suggested surrender - would have resulted in the increasingly peaceful and stable and -yes - democratic Iraq that we are seeing emerge today.

Obama was wrong; McCain was right. Ironically, it is the very fact that McCain was right and the surge worked which makes Obama's proposal to most withdraw U.S. troops within 16 months even remotely possible. Unless, of course, you thought withdrawing them in defeat was a good idea. Which Obama did.

And now, with even the mainstream media now admitting the surge worked, and admitting the we're on the verge of a stunning victory in Iraq, no thanks to defeatist surrender-artists like Barack Obama - the American people are now telling pollsters that Iraq isn't a big issue in the upcoming election. That makes total sense. Most Americans hate to lose wars even if they didn't support the war in the first place, so when the war was going badly, it was a top issue - for the anti-war crowd because they wanted it ended immediately and for the pro-war crowd because they wanted it won rather than lost.

Now that Iraq is about to be added to America's win column, Americans are focused on other issues. The anti-war crowd is left to carp and complain that the war was a bad idea, but the urgency of forcing an immediate withdrawal has subsided. And war supporters are just happy the surge worked. And the economy and fuel prices have taken center stage.

At first blush, you might think that helps Obama. But does it? The economy that, for all its problems ($4 gas, the credit crisis, falling housing prices, layoffs) is still growing - as McCain adviser and former Fortune 20 CEO Carly Fiorina noted recently, while big business is laying people off, small business continues to generate jobs. Given that small business employs the vast majority of Americans, that's good news.

Obama's prescriptions for the economy include higher taxes on income, on inheritances and on fuel (via higher taxes on fuel producers), and a refusal to allow increased drilling for oil off America's coastline. With the Iraq war now in the win column for the U.S. and a win, politically, for McCain, the more Americans focus on the rehashed same old liberal tax-and-spend policies wrapped in Obama's soaring hope-and-change rhetoric, the less they are likely to like it.