Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan is dissecting the real McCain, and the Obama campaign better start taking note from what he writes.

There is somebody I have been reading with great interest lately, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic Monthly.  He writes with clarity, and understands what is at stake in this election, which to my chagrin, it doesn’t seem like the Obama campaign is listening to him.  He wants Americans to understand the differences between Obama presidency and what a McCain would be - while one engages in diplomatic before employing the thick stick of war, he believes America would be involved in perpetual wars, while plunging the world into another cold war era.

Here’s what he had to say in “America Against the World,”

The op-ed in today’s WSJ by the McCain duo of Lieberman and Graham is far more important for this election, it seems to me, than parsing the dynamics of the Clinton-Obama marriage. What they are laying out in very clear terms is the agenda of a McCain presidency. The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I’m sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.

And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It’s all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It’s the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.

John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush’s second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush’s first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.

In my view, the fear card has only one truly compelling target in this election: McCain.

“If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose,” I agree totally. 

Here’s another one about “Smears and Fears,”

My main worry with John McCain is foreign policy. What do I worry about? That everything that has been awry with this administration would be made worse by his. Seeing the world as a series of enemies to be attacked rather than as a series of relationships to be managed and a series of foes to be undermined has proven of limited use. Even the successful removal of the Taliban has led, six years later, to a long and grueling counter-insurgency with no end in sight and a reconstituted al Qaeda in a nuclear-armed, unstable state. The invasion of Iraq - in the abstract, a noble cause against an evil enemy - has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, the price of $3 trillion ... all for a less despotic Shiite government in league with Iran, making contracts with China. And that’s if it turns out as a success. Along the way, the US has lost a vast amount of its moral standing and its legitimacy as a global power-broker. Insofar as neoconservatives do not understand this, and cannot understand this, they are a clear and present danger to the security of the West. Their unwillingness to understand how the US might be perceived in the world, how a hegemon needs to exhibit more humility and dexterity to maintain its power, makes them - and McCain - extremely dangerous stewards of American foreign policy in an era of global terror. They are diplomatically and strategically autistic.

McCain’s response to the calamities of the past eight years has been to compound them all.

It has been to propose a “surge” in Afghanistan, to aggressively embrace open-ended commitment to Iraq (if the Iraqis can be pressured hard enough), and to launch one new hot war against Iran and another cold one - and hot, by proxies - against Russia. And the way in which the question is debated - around asinine concepts of “toughness” or “sissiness” - leads to facile decisions. It also leads to ads like this one: fear-mongering as an argument. It should be noted that Obama’s statement that Iran is “not a serious threat” is so out of context as to be a lie. He said it was “not a serious threat compared to the Soviet Union.” That is a critical, historical point - a way of actually looking at foreign policy outside a box crafted by morons.

I don’t know how smart McCain is. But this ad takes the smear and the fear to a new level”

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