McCAIN AND THE SURGE….Jon Chait finally says something that I suspect everyone knows but that nobody has bothered to point out: when John McCain tells us endlessly about his bravery in supporting the surge, he’s just making stuff up. There was nothing brave about it at all:
Back in 2006, McCain was still anathema to most of the party base and elite. He needed to find issues of agreement with the administration. The surge was perfectly suited for that end. Sure, it carried some risk of hurting McCain in a general election, but McCain’s issue was finding a way to get nominated. After that, he could always finesse the surge if it wasn’t working, or rely on his war hero/maverick image.
I’m not saying McCain took up the surge for political reasons. Surely he believed in it. But this wa a case where his beliefs dovetailed perfectly with his political interests. His persuasion of the political press corps is a triumph of spin.
I’ve never before bothered mentioning this myself, mainly because I guess I figured it didn’t really matter much. But although the members of the Baker Commission counseled limited withdrawal from Iraq, the fact is that the surge was almost instantly popular among the Republican base and was supported by virtually every Republican politician. During the GOP primary, the major candidates practically held a competition to figure out who was really the biggest surge supporter. The political risk of supporting the surge was nil, and that would have been the case whether or not Bush had ordered it. It’s just another bedtime story designed to stoke McCain’s self-image of moral bravery and supposed service to a cause greater than his own political career.
