Crisis in Georgia: McCain and Obama React

Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo at 8:19 AM on August 11, 2008.

I've been casting about all week-end trying to figure out how to write something about the political implications of the two presidential campaigns' responses to the Russia-Georgia situation. (I'm not in a position to comment on the policy implications -- the situation is still too murky to make sense out of what's really happened.) The more prosaic domestic implications are easier to get a handle on.

Then I was alerted to this piece over at Political Wire by my email acquaintance (and Barack supporter) Dan Conley. I'll just steal the whole thing:

Crisis in Georgia

The following guest post is from Dan Conley, a former speechwriter for Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

While most of America is distracted with the Olympics and the Edwards scandal, the world is inching closer to a massive, destructive war between Russia and Georgia, one that could possibly draw in Ukraine as well. So far, the domestic political implications of this conflict have been minimal, but the actions of both campaigns raise troubling questions about how either Senator would perform as Commander in Chief.

For Barack Obama, the problem is foreign policy incoherence. Obama has become a willing pawn of foreign policy experts -- to the point that he's embraced Georgia's entry into NATO without understanding the full implications of that strategy. As we now see, embracing Georgia in NATO means a willingness to defend that country in a war against Russia. Yet Obama's response has been all over the map, matching consensus global opinion. At first, he blamed both Georgia and Russia, then called for Russia to withdraw, now he's demanding an immediate cease fire. Events are in the saddle and Obama is going along for the ride -- this matches President Bush's approach to the crisis, and that's not a good thing.

For John McCain, the problem isn't coherence, it's bellicosity. McCain has been the strongest global voice behind Georgia since the shooting began. The problem is, when does the McCain tough rhetoric end and World War III begin? The McCain team will argue that the only way to deter Russia, Iran and other global aggressors from taking actions like this is to stand up to them forcefully, with credibility. The problem is the second half of that equation -- with U.S. troops in Iraq and even Georgia unsure how to get their 2,000 Iraqi troops back home in time to make a difference, how exactly would the U.S. help Georgia in this conflict, short of starting an all-out war with the second biggest nuclear power? At this moment, the U.S. has no credible way to threaten Russia. So unless McCain is willing to get the U.S. in the middle of every armed conflict on earth -- giving new definition to his promise of "more wars" -- a McCain Presidency would mean that we're at least going to enter a new age of foreign policy brinkmanship that will demand a military sufficient to fight these battles. That means either getting out of Iraq or reinstating a draft, because the military today is incapable of matching McCain's rhetoric.

One final point: yesterday, one Georgia official claimed that Russian jets targeted the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which carries roughly one percent of the world's oil to Turkey, bypassing Russian ports. The strike, if it actually happened, was unsuccessful. There has been no independent confirmation of the attack and considering how easy it's been for Iraqi insurgents to knock out pipelines over the last five years, one would assume that if Russia really wanted this pipeline out of service, it would be blown to bits by now. Yet despite the dubious nature of these reports, the Drudge Report threw up a headline this morning entitled The Pipeline War and now every American news source has followed their lead. All based on one man's unconfirmed report. Such is the ridiculous state of American news coverage in 2008 and another reason why the oil futures markets have become completely insane this year.

The right has gone completely nuts over this pipeline thing. If you want to get a good overview of their view of the pipeline story read the posts above this one from Powerline, which captures the spin on Obama's take:

On Friday the Obama campaign issued a pathetic statement "strongly condemn[ing] the outbreak of violence in Georgia." Strongly! Obama found no reason to distinguish between Russia and Georgia in strongly condemning the outbreak of violence. Or perhaps he found it too difficult to do so.

Obama has apparently continued to deliberate on the subject. Given some more time to think about it, one can infer from this Reuters story, Obama has made a big decision. Obama has decided that it's better to sound like John McCain.

Yes, they're shoot-from-the-hip, hawks who are apparently convinced that the US is prepared to fight the whole world at the same time, but the Obama campaign seems to have been sufficiently unnerved that they felt they couldn't allow their original, sensible comment to stand. Perhaps it was unavoidable as events unfolded, but it's discouraging nonetheless. Setting aside the real foreign policy implications, from a political standpoint, the right is always going to use any excuse to paint a Democrat as someone whose first instinct is capitulation. It's what they do. This kind of response actually reinforces their theme.

Which brings me to Michael Tomasky piece in yesterday's Washington Post:

... instead of talking about post-partisanship, Obama has in some respects been demonstrating it. His apparently close relationship with retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who traveled with him to Iraq and shows many signs of intending to endorse him, is the clearest manifestation of this. The recent ad bragging about Obama's nuclear nonproliferation work with Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), an ad that Lugar clearly green-lighted, is another.

I suspect that Hagel will speak at the Democratic convention and appear in ads for Obama down the road. And I wonder about former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and Lincoln Chafee (the former Rhode Island GOP senator, now an independent), and Susan Eisenhower (Ike's granddaughter) and even Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar who is hardly a household name but whose endorsement of Obama was a huge deal in certain circles. If these folks are willing to speak for Obama, offering testimonials to his ability to lead us toward a new kind of politics, that could well do more to advance the national unity theme than any amount of rhetoric from the candidate.

Even so, I would like to see Obama return to the post-partisan, one-America idea himself. It's an electoral winner and a governing essential, should he be elected.

It's an electoral winner because Democrats can't really triumph in divide-and-conquer elections. No, it's not that they're too noble for them. It's just that they're not as good at it as the Rove Republicans are, and progressive core positions don't translate as well into fear-mongering rhetoric. The Democrats fear-monger pretty effectively about Social Security -- as well they should -- but beyond that, it's hard to scare people into fearing that the other guy is going to cut your taxes too much or be too tough on our enemies.

[...]

And the one-America theme will be crucial if he actually wins. As president, Obama will need to unite liberals and moderates of both parties and isolate the conservative blocs in the House and especially the Senate to get anything done.

I guess I just don't think it's fear mongering or divide-and-conquer to tell the truth, which is that the Republicans have screwed things up royally and that the Democrats have a better idea. (And yes, I know that the Democrats have been complicit, blah, blah, blah -- that's what I think should change.) And my view is that governing is actually going to impossible unless Obama is willing to leverage his power in a far more partisan fashion than he indicates he is willing to, even if he sings in dulcet tones about compromise and bipartisanship. They'll eat him for lunch if he actually tries it. There is no "isolating" conservatives. They are the Republican party (and a fair number of Democrats too.) And they are not even close to the point of "changing."

I don't know why we, the allegedly reality Based Community, shouldn't just tell it like it is, as Thomas Franks does in his new book (but as a politician would say it ... )

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. ...

... The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

That's not going to happen through compromise because they don't want it repaired and will do everything in their power to stop it. The nature of the opposition makes compromise and consensus impossible, even if it were desirable, which I submit that it is not since the amount of repair that must be done is so enormous that there literally isn't time to play these games.

It's nice that Hagel and Lugar and Doug Kmiec are backing Obama, but I doubt it means a thing to anyone who isn't a political junkie unless they come out swinging against McCain at the convention and cause a serious media buzz, which I'd be shocked to see happen. (And anyway, in most people's minds, it will be "balanced" by the fact that our party's nominee for VP just seven years ago will be speaking at theirs.)

By the time these guys are done, the only acceptable bipartisanship will be the Republican kind -- the kind that results in more wars and tax cuts and deregulation. The "compromise" is that we might not have quite as many as we have under a Republican.

In foreign policy the president has more power to go his own way. But the military, the hawks and the media, (which is even more susceptible to accusations of lack of patriotism and the fetish for men in uniform than the Democrats), will be substantial barriers, particularly to a young, reputed liberal with no association with military culture. They are going to make his life very difficult and post-partisanship isn't even relevant. Foreign policy is already post-partisan -- and we've seen the results.

I do believe the world will very relieved to see a president Obama take over for Bush and that is an excellent and important thing. But he's got his work cut out for him. His biggest foreign policy challenge will very likely turn out to be his own government.

Update: here goes the Village:

McCain prescient on Russia?

When violence broke out in the Caucasus on Friday morning, John McCain quickly issued a statement that was far more strident toward the Russians than that of President Bush, Barack Obama and much of the West.

But, as Russian warplanes pounded Georgian targets far beyond South Ossetia this weekend, Bush, Obama and others have moved closer to McCain's initial position ...

Pushing the prescience line, aides are circulating a pair of YouTube clips from 1999 and 2000 that feature some tough talk from McCain about the new Kremlin regime.

Right. As if a right winger waving his fist at Russia is "prescience." Unless he did it in 1899 (which is possible) there have been millions who got there before him.

Update II: Also, Think Progress and Matt Duss point out that Randy Schueneman, McCain's foreign policy advisor, was a long time registered lobbyist for Georgia. For more on Scheueneman, check this out from Lindsay Beyerstein. More from Salon.

I don't know who is at fault for what's happening in Georgia, but I do know that this group of neoconmen, (including our good friend Ahmad "Zelig" Chalabi) around John McCain are not trustworthy and just because he came out of the box screaming about Russia, it doesn't automatically follow that he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, if his people are saying it, I would automatically be very cautious about believing anything they say. Like all neocons, they have always been wrong about everything.

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Digby is the proprietor of Hullabaloo.