The economic news is so bad that it's no wonder Sen. Barack Obama is leading the presidential race. But he is giving political gifts to Sen. John McCain on Iraq policy.
Every voter understands the simple principle that you don't make up your mind about something until you have checked the facts -- but this week Obama declared he will stick to his predetermined troop-withdrawal schedule no matter what he might learn on his forthcoming trip to Iraq.
The only reasonable explanation for his rigidity is that he's hemmed in by the overwhelming demand of the Democratic base -- and left-wing bloggers above all -- that he not backtrack on the central promise of his campaign: to end the war.
A new Quinnipiac poll shows that a majority of likely voters -- 51 percent to 43 percent -- opposes immediate withdrawal from Iraq or setting a fixed deadline. But 64 percent of Democrats favor one or the other.
No one knows exactly what happened between Obama's first news conference on July 3, when he said he might "refine" his withdrawal schedule after visiting Iraq, and his hastily called second news conference, but the likelihood is that he feared getting blasted from the
left, like he did after shifting on terrorist surveillance.
Obama seems as locked in ideologically on Iraq as McCain is on economics. President Bush's tax-cut-and-borrow strategy has ballooned the federal debt from $5 trillion to $8 trillion without helping workers' incomes -- yet McCain is determined to extend all the tax cuts he once opposed. Why? Because the Republican base demands it.
And McCain is suffering for it. According to the Washington Post/ABC poll, Obama is favored over McCain on economic issues -- which rate No. 1 in voter concerns -- 54 percent to 35 percent. McCain hasn't escaped Obama's charge that he represents "Bush's third term," and Obama still hasn't begun to employ Ronald Reagan's killer question from 1980, "Are you better off now than you were ... ?"
On Iraq, however, the Post poll gives a slight edge to McCain, 47 percent to 45 percent, and this was before Obama's mistakes this week.
Besides holding to his 16-month withdrawal deadline without talking to Gen. David Petraeus or Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Obama missed another huge opportunity to demonstrate mastery of foreign policy and genuineness in politics.
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