Clinton veteran Josh Green has the best take of Hillary’s speech. A few paragraphs:
Clinton obviously still wants to be president. Tonight, she swallowed the entitlement that is intrinsic to both Clintons and said the right things. She made the intellectual case for Obama. She seemed finally to accept that, at least for now, her own political future is inextricably bound to his. Most important to the Obama campaign, she explained in somewhat clinical terms why she supports him, and indicated, fairly explicitly and before an audience of diehard supporters, that everyone else must now do so too. She checked that box.
"None of us can sit on the sidelines," Clinton said, but did not implore. "No way. No how. No McCain." Had the message come any later, it wouldn’t have counted. Had it come with real feeling, it would have counted for much more.
…our research has concluded that there typically is not any bounce until the third day of the convention. As such, this polling tells us nothing at all about the convention so far, and it probably won’t tell us a whole lot until at least Thursday or Friday.
It might tell us something about Joe Biden. I tend to agree with the conventional wisdom that there was liable to be a bit of a near-term backlash whenever Obama announced his VP choice, provided that the VP was not Hillary Clinton. The key phrase in there, however, is "near-term". If Hillary is able to rally her supporters to the Obama-Biden ticket…there could still be a latent/lagged VP bounce for Obama that gets rolled up into his convention bounce.
Here’s the quote from Obama out of which McCain created his current fear-mongering and outright deceptive ad:
"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall."
What does McCain disagree with in that? And do yourself a favor. Read the quote and then watch the ad. Now think about what it says about McCain that he would lie this blatantly for power.
"I simply said that I thought that things were being said and done that could very well make the nomination of our party not worth having. I was around when the Willy Horton ads literally annihilated our candidate for president. That [sort of attack] didn’t start out with Republicans; that started out in the Democratic primaries. Right now, we see the McCain campaign doing things that seem to be taken out of the Democratic primary. We see a tightening in this race. And we have nobody and nothing to blame except things that happened in the primary," – James Clyburn.
There’s a debate about whether Hillary should have vouched for Obama’s commander in chief credentials. Here is why, according to an aide, she did not. Had she done that, all the media would focus on is the disparity between her convention praise and her primary criticism. And she would not have sounded genuine. It would have been contrived.
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.
Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong.
Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
It’s a box inside a box inside a box of ethnic resentment and ancient territorial struggle. So we should grant one faction in it membership in NATO?
Here’s an interesting first-person account of Joe Biden’s foreign policy knowledge and skills from the former ambassador to Romania:
On the 20-minute drive into the city, he quizzed me on Romanian attitudes, the status of various government leaders and the inside story on Romania’s foreign policy toward Slobodan Milosevic, who was still in power next door in Yugoslavia. Because Biden has known all the major Romanian leaders since the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the questions were Ph.D. level, not Romania 101. That was remarkable in itself since he is no specialist on Romania; he could do the same, landing in dozens of nations around the world.
In his meetings with President Emil Constantinescu and others, he thanked them sincerely for their support for NATO — and then he drilled right in on Milosevic: How strong did they think he was in Yugoslavia after the war? How did they evaluate the various leaders of the democratic opposition there — whom he asked about name by name, since he knew each of them personally, too. Unlike the Bush administration, which has been accused of tailoring its version of the facts to match its policy, Biden was trying to learn the facts firsthand to figure out what would be the right U.S. policy.
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:
The Dish 
