Tethered Swimming

A couple of weeks ago I fixed up an old Hewlett-Packard laptop for my dad.  It had been my brother’s laptop but as he’s moved on to a new and better one the three year old HP got passed down (or is it up?).  Once I was done removing all of my brother’s old software (which was now merely clutter) I installed Firefox, added Adblock and Flashblock to keep my dad’s surfing quick and painless, and imported a bunch of my news and politics bookmarks.  Thanks to wireless internet my dad can now sit comfortably in his chair by the fireplace and read endless stories about Iraq, Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and George W. Bush.

Then one morning last week my dad and I were talking and he said he had spent a couple of hours that morning reading on his laptop.  His previous custom had been to read the paper copy of The New York Times that arrives on his doorstep every morning.  He said he preferred the laptop.  I told him that even though there is an unlimited amount of high quality content on-line, I still like to begin my day by reading the A section of the Times.  This is backwards; the seventy year old is supposed to be the one defending the ink and paper version, not the one trashing it.  Maybe he’s just enamored with his new toy and he’ll eventually return to the paper; then again, if a septuagenarian prefers the on-line version maybe the newspapers are in even more trouble than is generally suspected.

Personally though, I like the dead tree version of the Times in the morning.  I even have my own arrogant, self-congratulatory saying to go along with it.  As far as I’m concerned, “There are two ways to start your day, one is having read The New York Times, the other is not.”  Despite my smarmy syntax I am not so foolish as to think that reading the Times makes me a better person, or even better informed than other people.  I like to read the Times in the morning because it’s a well written, well edited little window on the world.

It’s the same reason I like the dead tree version of the Economist.  The Times and the Economist provide news from parts of the world I wouldn’t ordinarily hear about.  They have their editorial biases, but so does everything else and, for my money, they are the two best print sources of English language international news.

There are more stories every day than any one man can take in, and that’s a good thing.  But I don’t need to know about them immediately.  It doesn’t matter if I get the news about Europe, Africa, South America or any other worldly place a day or two after the fact.  It happened didn’t it?  There’s no need to rush something like the news.  Very little of it is immediately pertinent to my life, but immediacy doesn’t make it any less interesting.

Our Mesopotamian adventure reached two milestones this week, four thousand dead Americans and five years duration.  Neither is to be celebrated but both provide useful excuses for a sprinkling of news coverage and the usual back and forth over whether or not the war is working, was worth it, etcetera.  It amounts to little more than padding; last fall the Democratic Congress and Bush the Younger reached a stalemate over the war and more or less conspired to postpone a reckoning until after the election.  All debate about Iraq since has been a sideshow.  The next truly meaningful exchanges about the war will occur this fall and will be between Senators Obama and McCain (plus their various proxies and subordinates).

Regardless of the outcome of the war, or of the election on which it hangs, there have been countless Iraqis who have in good faith aided our efforts in their country.  This includes interpreters who’ve gone out with our military units, stringers and locals who’ve worked with our journalists, and various staff who keep American bases, as well as the Green Zone, up and running.  (George Packer wrote a brutal article about some of these people a year ago in The New Yorker.)   These people and their families took the United States of America up on an offer to help their country and yet all but a lucky few have been left to twist in the wind should they need to escape the flaming remains of Iraq.

It should come as no surprise that we’ve shit all over these people, shitting on brown people is one of the defining characteristics of the US Government going all the way back to its inception, but that doesn’t make it any less shameful.  Refugees International has a page set up at their website where you can see just how screwed up the Iraqi refugee situation is.  Near the bottom is this:

The U.S. fell far short of its promise to permanently resettle 7,000 vulnerable Iraqis in the 2007 fiscal year.

The U.S. promised to resettle 12,000 Iraqis in the 2008 fiscal year, but the program is off to a slow start.

That is beyond pathetic, beyond embarrassing.  We took in 1,608 Iraqis between October 2006 and September 2007?  Words fail.  We ought to be throwing the doors open to these people, for their benefit and ours.

There are three main objections to that policy.  The first is that some of them may be terrorists in hiding trying to get over here to hurt us.  The second is that resettling large numbers of Iraqis in the US is tantamount to admitting that our Iraq policy has failed.  The third is the old NIMBY objection.  None of those three excuses amounts to a hill of beans.

Whether we’re talking about people who’ve worked for our government in Iraq or ordinary civilians who found their lives in danger and had to flee, the idea that some of them might be terrorists in hiding is the stuff of bad fiction.  It’s not an ideal situation, it’s not the striving and yearning to breathe free of immigrant lore, but these are people who’ve had their lives thrown into utter chaos and disorder by our actions.  Extending our hospitality to as many of them as possible is the least we can do.

As for admitting that our policies have failed, well c’mon we do that every day.  Even by the Bush Administration’s own reckoning things are fragile and progress is slow.  What’s one more euphemism?  Call it “temporary”, call them “guests”, use whatever bland meaningless terms you need to use to convince the press and the public that they aren’t coming here permanently and get them on an airplane.

Then there’s good old NIMBY.  Refugees are not something ordinary people generally want around them and their homes, but this is a big country and according to the 2000 census there were already 1.2 million Americans of Arab descent.  Most of those aren’t Iraqis of course, but there is already large population here (which has almost certainly grown since 2000) that can be used to help resettle Iraqis who can no longer live in Iraq.

There would be obvious benefits to the new arrivals, but we would benefit as well.  This is a war which most Americans don’t like thinking about, even now when we’re in the midst of it, and the day it ends we’ll do our best to forget it as quickly as possible.  By coming to America and settling here Iraqis would serve as a living reminder of the war, and the more of them who stay, who become Americans just like the rest of us, the better off we’ll all be.  Home grown Americans would benefit by seeing that Arabs really are just people; the new Americans might understand this country as more than a far off place that sends troops all over the world.

We owe these people a debt of honor, the ones who’ve worked for us and the regular refugees.  A simple enough starting point ought to be the former group.  We asked for their assistance and they gave it, sometimes at personal risk that would shrivel the guts of people who’ve never had to face such choices.  Of all the failures of our policies in that miserable country, this one is unambiguously indefensible.

I have spent a great deal of time watching college basketball over the last couple of days and there are eight more games scheduled for this afternoon. It is a wonderful spectacle and for much of the time multiple games are occurring at once, helping to ensure that something worth watching is on at all times. There are more games than can be fit on a single screen or channel and for the low, low price of seventy dollars my benevolent conduit overlords at DirecTV allow me to watch every single game. Terms and conditions, as they are wont to do, may apply.

Take Thursday night for example. On my channel guide there are four standard definition and four high definition channels in the 700 range, one for each of the four different live CBS feeds coming from around the country. Of course, I also have a local CBS feed as well. Each of the four dedicated basketball channels is set to one; for Thursday night the last stanza of games was Notre Dame/George Mason, Wisconsin/Cal State Fullerton, West Virginia/Arizona, and UCLA/Mississippi Valley State. The local CBS station also lists one of the games, in my case it was the Notre Dame/George Mason game.

The dedicated channels do not break away from coverage no matter how lopsided the score becomes. That’s what they are there for after all, to give you the option to watch any game regardless of other considerations. The local CBS feed, on the other hand, is just a regular network affiliate broadcasting to a market and is under no obligation to stick with a single game. Indeed, they’ll switch from a blowout to a closer matchup and rightfully so.

Here’s where the fine print comes in to play. On Thursday night my dedicated Notre Dame/George Mason channel was blank because that was the game slated for my local CBS affiliate. Blackout rules keep satellite television customers shackled to their local affiliates no matter what. In theory I had access to all four concurrent games, but after just a few minutes of play Notre Dame pulled way ahead and my local CBS affiliate jumped to another game. Even though my channel guide had Notre Dame/George Mason listed for the local affiliate, of the forty total minutes of court time in that game it probably showed fifteen of them, ten at the beginning and five right after halftime. The dedicated channel stayed blacked out even after the local affiliate pulled away from its listed game.

I have no problem with my local CBS affiliate broadcasting television programs. I do have a problem with the idea that their license to broadcast combined with an agreement with the network results in a some kind of legal claim on what my eyeballs are allowed to watch. Of course if I was dead set on still watching the Notre Dame/George Mason game I could’ve watched it for free on CBS’ website. Apparently, reduced picture quality and occasional buffering problems absolve CBS of any non-compete obligation with its local affiliate. In the grand scheme of things this is hardly a serious issue, but it points to just how screwy the rules governing something as simple and fundamental as television are.

Without turning this into some kind of populist screed about television and media, I’d like to point out that these ridiculous blackout rules are just the tip of the iceberg. There was the feud Comcast got into with the fledgling Big Ten Network last year where football fans were deprived of the right to watch their teams because two large organizations couldn’t come to an agreement. It isn’t limited to sports either, on cable or satellite no one has the ability to choose which specific channels to receive. Oh no, you must choose which package of channels, ensuring you and your kids have access to channels you don’t watch and may not even want available. Next February the way television is broadcast is going to change and no one really knows how many ordinary people will be affected. The less said about infrastructure exclusivity, net neutrality and the embarrassing state of broadband internet access the better.

In the end it’s about finding the easiest and most efficient way to transmit digital data from one location to another. This includes being able to watch a live basketball game from 2,000 miles away just as much as it includes the simple acts of writing an e-mail or placing a telephone call. The current systems for doing so are rickety and riddled with legal and logical contradictions. At the moment it isn’t much of a problem, here in 2008 were are still in all but the most primitive stages of the digital world. But digital communication, on any scale, over any distance, is one of the most fundamental aspects of our lives. The technology that provides the bedrock of this world is constantly improving, our thinking about it needs to keep up or we’re going to find ourselves in a world where digital communication is fundamentally unfair or, worse yet, doesn’t work properly.

Barack Obama seems to be getting high marks for his speech yesterday but it’s too soon to tell what the final spin and lasting fallout will be. It may put this farcical stuff about his preacher behind him for awhile, it may not. It may be a brilliant campaign pivot that neutralizes the reverend’s comments by putting them in the broader contexts of race and our silly political discourse, it may not. It doesn’t really matter either way though because a month from now this whole incident is barely going to be remembered.

The more - ahem - controversy the Senator from Illinois endures this early in the year the better off he is likely to be later. We can use Rev. Wright’s comments as a topical example of why. The money quote of this little tempest is the phrase “God damn America” in place of the more traditional, but equally meaningless, “God bless America”. Those three little words put the huffers and puffers of the flag-pin set into a tizzy and caused enough media hyperventilating that the candidate himself had to go on television and give a big speech.

There are a lot of people here in America who wear their religion and their patriotism right on their sleeves (hopefully lots of people can see them there!). To see those two concepts employed in the reverse of their accustomed expectations must have been very distressing. But I’ve got two pieces of bad news for anyone who thinks this is long-term damaging to Obama’s campaign. First, Obama didn’t say it, someone else did. Even if that someone is close to Obama it still isn’t him. Second, this whole thing is primarily about shock value and shock wears off rapidly in contemporary America.

“God damn America” is only going to work once as serious political theater. It’ll be in pamphlets and talking points from now through November - no doubt about that, but the big media storm is only going to happen once, here in March, eight long months (two-hundred and forty-one news cycles!) from the election. It’s not news a second time unless the good reverend has some even more cutting rhetorical bombs in his repertoire. It’s tough to imagine one as concise and biting as “God damn America” though. My personal suggestion would be “God should make white people get abortions” but it doesn’t seem too likely that he’d say that.

In any case Rev. Wright has now been - ahem - exposed to the national media. He’s no longer working directly for the campaign and any time his comments come up again Obama or one of his surrogates can point to yesterday’s speech and call the matter closed. That isn’t going to satisfy everyone, but long before November it is that position, rather than outrage over the remarks, which will occupy the media high ground. The same goes for the picture of Obama in the turban, the lunatic “madrassa” story from last year, and all this other crap; they’re good for a couple of news cycles and little more.

If this had come out right before Halloween it would be different. An October Surprise, which may still be in store for us, is a hallowed American political tradition. But a “March Surprise”, if there even is such a thing, probably describes a college basketball game.

On Thursday Tom Engelhardt posted one of his customarily circumspect and informative essays about our situation in Iraq, “The Eight Inside-the-Beltway Fundamentals of the Iraq War“.  It is worth reading in full, though two specific sections immediately jump out.  The first was his list of three different scenarios (one for each of the three remaining presidential contestants) for what our involvement in Iraq will look like a year from now.  The second was his titular list of eight depressing truisms of D.C. thinking that, in defiance of logic and public opinion, dominate our government’s foreign policy.

Engelhardt’s eight fundamentals describe the relentlessly militaristic thinking of the foreign policy establishment.  They are ideas that existed in Washington D.C. long before Bush the Younger took office but which have grown so prevalent since his inauguration as to exclude all others.  Having laid them out he concludes that no matter who wins the election in November this same ingrained thinking will continue.  Thus our Iraq adventure, now at its fifth anniversary, will have a sixth and a seventh and so on.  What’s worse, the mindset that got us into that war will continue, leading us inevitably into fresh catastrophes.  If either Hillary Clinton or John McCain becomes our next President, I would agree with him; but I have greater, forgive me, hope for the Senator from Illinois.

Let us examine what Iraq policy might look like a year from now under a President McCain or a second President Clinton.  John McCain is so gung-ho for the Iraq war that he is basing his presidential bid around it; if he is elected you can be sure that it will go on for at least a further four years.  There, that didn’t take long; Hillary Clinton’s position is a bit more nebulous though.

She has promised (albeit in wishy-washy terms) to end the war, but she has never repudiated the mindset, Engelhardt’s eight fundamentals, that got us into it in the first place.  A second Clinton Administration would have a very different Iraq policy from a McCain Administration, no doubts there, but were she to defeat McCain the general philosophy of American foreign policy would be little changed.

Then there is Barack Obama.  The Senator from Illinois not only opposed the war from the outset (at a time when doing so was the equivalent of openly declaring yourself a communist during the 1950s), he has also made his anti-war stance a central part of his campaign.  If Obama (the most anti-war of anti-war politicians) were to defeat McCain (the most pro-war of pro-war politicians) his electoral mandate would have one marquee theme: end the war in Iraq.

What’s more, the instant the television networks declared him victorious it would be abundantly clear to the entire world that direct American involvement in Iraq was coming to an end.  The moment that happens there will be a sea change in what’s considered possible and impossible in Iraq.  All of the interested parties, inside and outside of Iraq, would immediately have to scrap all of their expectations and begin anew.

One way or another we’re going to have a lot of troops between the rivers next year on the sixth anniversary, but if Obama is elected the seventh anniversary may pass very differently.  Obama’s website has disclaimers about “combat troops”, 16-month schedules and leaving some troops to protect diplomats and strike at al-Qaeda bases, but those are mostly campaign fig leaves against charges of being a namby-pamby.  Once it’s clear, to the troops and the brass, that we’re on our way out the decision will likely be made to do it faster rather than slower.  Last man to die for a mistake and all that.

Obama’s messages of hope and change are easily dismissed when it comes to domestic politics and policy.  But the office of the President, as its current tenant has sadly proved, has an almost unlimited power when it comes to matters of war and peace and international relations and in a nutshell that is why Obama matters.  President McCain means war without end.  President Clinton (the Vaginal) would at least try to wrap up the one in Iraq but would still likely view our military as the primary tool of foreign policy.  President Obama’s foreign policy would be a complete 180 from our present one and with an electoral victory won by opposing the war he would have the strength to smash those decrepit fundamentals that so vex Mr. Engelhardt.

The brothers Coen won a Best Picture Oscar a couple of weeks ago for No Country for Old Men.  It’s an entertaining enough picture, though if it were up to me I’d have given the nod to There Will Be Blood.  I’m not here to make a claim about which one of them is better though, I enjoyed them both; I just think that you really can’t tell which movie was the best one for any given year until some time has passed.  Ten years from now, which catch phrase will still echo in popular culture, the one about the milkshake or the one about the coin flip?  Maybe neither one will be remembered by anyone but film geeks, who knows?  There is another movie that clearly has stood that test of time though and while I missed the actual anniversary by a week owing to the March 4 primaries and the end of The Wire, it deserves to be marked.  I’m speaking, of course, of The Big Lebowski.

Ten years on Lebowski abides.  Most movies don’t age well, the context for them fades, the effects lose their luster, the plot and characters don’t speak to modern audiences, etcetera.  This is especially true of comedies.  Well crafted jokes are finely tuned instruments that speak to a very specific time and place and as the world changes from year to year they lose their precision.  Through ten years though, Lebowski remains dead-on.  It helps that it was set in the past, even by 1998 standards the Dude’s 1990 bag-phone looks ridiculous, but whatever the ultimate reasons for its longevity it’s a remarkable accomplishment.

It didn’t get much respect when it came out, ranking a mere #96 at the domestic box office for 1998 and failing to garner a single Oscar or Golden Globe nomination.  Take a look at the top grossing movies of 1998, there are four comedies in the top ten.  Three of them were off the shelf star vehicles, The Waterboy (#5), Doctor Doolittle (#6) and Patch Adams (#10), and the fourth was a directorial star vehicle, the Farrelly brother’s There’s Something About Mary (#3).  That year’s best picture winner, Shakespeare in Love, was also a comedy, albeit of the higher brow variety, and came in at #18 overall.  Do any of those movies still garner the love of fans like Lebowski does?  Do any of those movies sit on as many DVD shelves as Lebowski?  Will as many people understand a quote or a reference to one of them?  I think not.

After ten years The Big Lebowski has stood up impeccably, the jokes still work and the effects haven’t dulled.  Attend a screening of it sometime, even outside of Los Angeles they’re still held with some frequency, half the audience probably wasn’t old enough to enjoy it when it first came out.  Will teenagers ten years from now, reaching that age where they begin to really enjoy adult movies, embrace Lebowski with the same fervor?  I don’t know, but if there was ever a comedy that can continue to draw new fans even long after the fact it’s this one.

I don’t have any real point beyond stating the obvious: ten years on Lebowski remains as funny as it was when I first saw it in the theater.  It just seems wrong to let the tenth anniversary of such a film pass without comment.  And while I’d ordinarily think to close with a quote, or a reference or a rehash of a famous scene, in this instance there really are just too many to choose from and that’s about the best compliment I can give to a movie.

As I post this the credits are rolling on the last new episode of The Wire. It was a staggering program, unlike anything else on television. From the opening scene of another pointless murder to the finale of McNulty driving off stage right the show made entertaining television out of depressing subjects that are normally ignored in the mainstream discourse. There isn’t much point in heaping more praise on the program, it is unequaled. The Wire is so far above other dramas (cop shows, courtroom shows, whatever) that it makes them unwatchable by comparison.

HBO did excellent work on The Wire, it is exactly the kind of programming that could not be done on commercial sponsored television. It helps that they can have nudity and use the word “fuck”, but the greater advantage is not having to insert meaningless cliffhangers every eight minutes or so. That being said though, I got the distinct impression during the fifth and final season that the show was truncated.

The fifth season had only ten episodes, the previous four all had twelve or thirteen. It’s always easy to spend someone else’s money, but I can’t believe that two or three more episodes would’ve had a dire impact on the budget. That rushed feeling was why I, and a lot of other people apparently, found the serial killer angle frustrating. Much like Hamsterdam in the third season though once I went back and watched them again, consecutively and in bunches, it works a lot better.

David Simon and Ed Burns may have some axes to grind, but they’ve also probably got cause and nothing in the fifth season, or any of the others, seems out of line. Piece of shit sergeants become piece of shit lieutenants and slightly crooked mayors become slightly crooked governors. No good deed goes unpunished and in the end the world is still corrupt and the game still goes on.

There are too many great scenes, too many cutting lines, too many hilarious realities to rehash, so I’m just going to leave it with some youtubage. It’s going to be a long time, if ever, before we see another show with this comprehensive awesomeness.

Season 1 - CSI: Fuck:

Season 2 - Omar on the Stand:

Season 3 - Paper Bag:

Season 4 - Michael Works:

Season 5 - Sen. Davis on the Stand:

Tethered Swimming was never intended to strictly be a platform for me to rant about domestic American politics. It more or less became exclusively that over the last few months due to the unusual length of the Red and Blue nominating contests. With John McCain and Barack Obama (more or less) assured of their respective nominations though the streak of consecutive political posts can come to an end. The topic range here is going to broaden starting tonight around 10:30 (Eastern). That’s roughly when the credits will roll on the final episode of The Wire. Thanks to the miracle of the internet I’ve already seen it and at that time I’ll put up today’s actual post.

Note: All delegate math done “back of the envelope” style.

It may take a few news cycles for the sheen of victory to fade, but Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination all but died in Texas last night.  She is certainly within her rights to stay in the race and pray for a miracle, but the six weeks between next Tuesday’s Mississippi primary and the Pennsylvania primary will see tremendous pressure for her to throw in the towel.  Barack Obama doesn’t have much to crow about this morning and Clinton is by no means finished but, to my reading of things, her odds of winning the nomination got longer last night.

The - ahem - firewall needed to hold in two places, but held only in one.  In Ohio she won by eleven points and will gain around fifteen delegates on her nemesis.  In Texas though her mere three point win in the primary and (probable) loss in the caucus will likely all but wipe out her delegate gains from Ohio.  The final delegate numbers weren’t available at the time of this writing, but it looks like Clinton would need to repeat her victory last night dozens of times to show any significant gain.  Whatever delegate pickup she finally takes away from yesterday is likely to be short lived as well.  The caucus in Wyoming on Saturday and the primary in Mississippi on Tuesday both look like probable Obama victories and will likely restore and even enhance Obama’s pre-March 4 delegate lead.

Then it’s six weeks of nothing until Pennsylvania.  That’s a lot of news cycles for a campaign that is, on paper at least, woefully behind.  In that time both campaigns are going to address themselves to the super delegates.  Clinton’s argument is going to be that Obama cannot win big states, that he stumbled when she attacked him, and that if she has the momentum of a lot of wins going into the convention the party elders should throw it to her no matter what (hopefully small) lead he has in pledged delegates.  Obama’s case to the super delegates is simpler and stronger for being so: she can’t catch me, but I can’t force her out and John McCain is on the loose.

Anyone can, depending on their preferred outcome, reach different conclusions from last night’s results.  Obama backers can take comfort in the fact that the delegate math didn’t change and the two largest remaining states are now off the table.  Clinton backers can point to her first victories since Super Tuesday and say that it builds the foundation for more.

To me at least, last night’s results look very similar to those of Super Tuesday.  Clinton won in some ways, but so did Obama and the next couple of contests favor him over her.  Her delegate math looks exceedingly grim and her only chance to stand triumphant in Denver is to overcome that deficit by convincing the party elders that she’s the only one capable of beating McCain.  Maybe she can do that without tarnishing herself, maybe she can’t.  Clinton had a good night last night, but on sober analysis it probably wasn’t good enough.

Wednesday’s news cycle was dominated by debate wrap-ups (consensus: Clinton campaign almost dead) and memorials to William F. Buckley Jr. (consensus: actually dead).  All but lost amid that hubbub was a very sharp exchange between Barack Obama and John McCain over Iraq.  Put succinctly, McCain called Obama a naïve pussy and then Obama told McCain to go fuck himself.  They didn’t use language quite that spicy so it didn’t get a lot of attention, but barring a Clinton (or Buckley!) resurrection, their little spat will be far more important to the outcome of the 2008 election than the debate or the memory of Buckley.

First, a quick review of what was said.  From Ben Smith’s Democratic ‘08 blog at Politico:

“I have some news,” McCain told voters at a rally here Wednesday morning. “Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is called al-Qaeda in Iraq. My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base…they would be taking a country. I will not allow that to happen my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaeda.”

Obama then struck back almost immediately, again from Politico:

“John McCain may like to say he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but so far all he’s done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq,” he said….

“McCain thought that he could make a clever point by saying, ‘Well let me give you some news, Barack, Al Qaeda is in Iraq,’ like I wasn’t reading the papers, like [I] didn’t know what was going on.” Obama said, leaning into his developing McCain impression….

“I have some news for John McCain,” Obama continued, “That’s there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain” began the Iraq war, he said.

In short, McCain repeated one of the (many) familiar Republican canards about the war, namely that we’re fighting real terrorists in Iraq and any let up would be a surrender to the perpetrators of the 11 September 2001 attacks.  Obama, instead of pussyfooting around the issue, simply declared it false in the same sarcastic tone that has been a Republican trademark these last few years.  It is statements like that - not some cult hysteria - that have made liberals swoon for the Senator from Illinois.

In Obama the Democrats have something that they’ve sorely lacked: a prominent and uncompromising anti-war voice.  Howard Dean had the right position in 2004, but he wasn’t a very good campaigner.  Cindy Sheehan was a bereaved mother who shamed a president, but then it went to her head and she started getting photographed with egomaniacal Venezuelan jag-offs.  Obama is a proven campaigner and isn’t about to throw his arms around Hugo Chavez (I hope).  Make all the Obama as Messiah jokes you want, but for those of us who opposed the Iraq adventure from the start he really is the one we’ve been waiting for: a national Democrat - a (likely) presidential nominee no less - who was against the war before it started, wants to end it and isn’t shy about saying so.

McCain is equally happy to discuss his position on Iraq repeatedly and at length.  He’s comfortable doing so because he, unlike the current Administration, actually has an intellectually coherent position.  McCain, to his credit, understands that the only politically acceptable level of American casualties is zero.  That’s why his message, which he has not been very effective in articulating so far, is that it’s okay for us to stay for 100 years (or more!) so long as our boys and girls aren’t dying.  He’s selling the idea that with him in charge we can stay in Iraq, kick the crap out of the bad Iraqis, reduce our casualties to zero by farming out the fighting to good Iraqis, and not have to endure the shame of withdrawal.  It’s the have your cake and eat it too argument and the outcome he’s promising is a fairy tale.

As he proved on Wednesday though, Obama isn’t going let that fairy tale go unchallenged.  He’s going to stand up and call bullshit by pointing out, correctly, that the war was a mistake, our troops are dying for no gain, our money is being spent for no purpose, and there’s no end in sight if John McCain is elected president.  The two are about as far apart on Iraq as is possible and in a much more visceral way than on the economy or any other issue.  If this week’s little fracas is a preview of what we’re in for during the general election, it’s advantage Obama.

The war is deeply unpopular and has remained so even as coverage from the front has been scant or (undeservedly) positive.  Take a quick gander at www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm.  Not only do a majority of Americans oppose the war (64%), think the war is going badly (54%) and disapprove of Bush the Younger’s handling of it (65%), but 58% think we should have stayed out and never gotten involved.  That last number, by the way, has only increased from last fall, despite all the idiotic “The surge is working!” stories.  Those are just numbers I grabbed from a couple of the polls listed, scroll around that page and you’ll find more.  The war’s unpopularity has endured and grown no matter the propaganda.

McCain is irrevocably wed to a frightfully unpopular war and is promising to continue it.  Obama has a sterling anti-war record and is promising to end it.  For a moment, set aside everything else (fundraising, oratory, experience, organizational strength, height, shoe size, eye color, everything) and ask yourself one question: which of these two men is most likely to win in November?

Obviously all that stuff we just set aside does matter, but even with the aid of the mighty Republican electoral machine I cannot convince myself that a 71-year old senator, who is at best his opponent’s equal as a campaigner, can overcome the singularly enormous disadvantage of the Iraq war.  I could be wrong, and a lot can happen between now and November, but I feel pretty confident with my money on the younger man with the vastly more popular position on the issue likely to stand out more than any other.

A Note on Tuesday’s Primaries:

I don’t know what will happen on Tuesday.  As of this writing pollster.com has Obama ahead in Texas and Clinton ahead in Ohio.  (Nobody cares too much about Vermont and Rhode Island during the run up though they’ll probably get some media attention after the fact.)  If Clinton wins both, even by slim and delegate insignificant margins, she’ll continue and rightly so.  If Obama wins both, by any margin, she’ll suspend her campaign.

If Ohio and Texas go in different directions, a distinct possibility, I hope Clinton has the good sense to pack it in - quickly.  A split would doom her for any number of reasons, the most immediate of which would be the worsening of her pledged delegate situation while the trickle of automatic delegates changing position would turn into a torrent.  But it’s all too easy to imagine her on a stage saying something like, “The people of Ohio have spoken and this campaign will go on!”  Take a quick look at the schedule, on Saturday Wyoming has a caucus and then next Tuesday Mississippi has a primary.  I’d assume Hillary will lose both.  After that the calendar is blank all the way to Pennsylvania on April 22.

Up until now calls for her to quit have been foolish hyperbole.  The idea that she’s doomed and is only damaging Obama is silly.  Ohio and Texas are large enough that winning both could fundamentally alter the tone of the campaign and provide her with enough support to win the nomination.  But two weeks of “11-0!” storylines are nothing compared to what six weeks of “16-1″ or “15-2″ storylines will be like.  Over that time the sour grapes theme will only become more prevalent and she risks doing real damage to her considerable standing in the Senate as well as to Obama’s efforts to unify the party behind him and prepare for the general election.  If Texas and Ohio split, suspending the campaign quickly is the smart, classy and correct thing to do.