CAN OBAMA GO TO IRAQ AND NOT BE TRAPPED INTO AGREEING WITH BUSH, PETRAEUS, AND MCCAIN?

McCain is eager to have Obama go to Iraq. And why? Obama will then have to consult with Petraeus and it is predictable what Petraeus will say, though perhaps not so entirely predictable as it was before the Iraqi Prime Minister defied the Bush line and called for a timetable forwithdrawing U.S. troops. Obama might make sure that he has military men of standing with him who will not let Petraeus get away with just repeating the "stay-the-course" testimony that he has twice given Congress in the last year. They could help him take and keep the initiative from the beginning by asking Petraeus how he would carry out the time-tabled withdrawal that Malliki is calling for within the 16 months that Obama has been specified. Obama should not accept any profession from Petraeus that he does not have a plan for withdrawal or know of any such plan. Obama should insist that Petraeus cannot estimate the costs of withdrawal unless he has such a plan to refer to. Petraeus must understand that Obama is moving into a position to change his marching orders and if necessary change the man who will do the marching.

HAS AMERICAN POLITICS TAKEN A HOLIDAY FROM ILLOGICAL DISCOURSE?

The blog continues to be open for business and I am on the watch for lapses in the logic of public discourse in the campaign for U. S. President. However, the last several weeks have not offered much of importance in such lapses. No doubt I could find some by moving farther afield than I have been doing, and watching the Fox network or Rush Limbaugh. I would rather not do that. For one thing, they do not have the audiences that I want to reach – audiences ready to correct lapses. In what I do watch, there have been continued distractions from talking about the great issues before the country: Jesse Jackson’s unbuttoned opinion of Obama; Phil Gramm’s condemnation as "whiners" of people who have not prospered as much as he. There is perhaps the beginning of the sort of lapse topic that I am looking for in Obama’s ill-directed charge that critics from the left "have not been listening to what I’ve been saying." In the vote for renewing FISA, it was what Obama did in voting for it that was the target; and even if he defended his vote (a defense that has not come my way), supporters could listen and still condemn. But I do not have information complete enough to survey the protests and Obama’s responses. I’ll keep watching for lapses in discourse. Meanwhile, I’d welcome suggestions from readers.

IS IT IMPIOUS TO QUESTION MCCAIN'S QUALIFICATIONS?

Wesley Clark, who given his extraordinarily gallant service in Vietnam has himself a claim comparable to McCain’s to being a war hero, dared question whether McCain’s military service qualified him to be President. The reactions have been silly all around. It may be that Obama had to accept the feature of the situation created by the media that evidently makes it impious to question the bearing of McCain’s military qualifications on his candidacy for President. Nevertheless, it was perfectly irrelevant for Obama to thunder that military service, McCain’s included, deserved unquestioning respect. Clark was not questioning the respect; he was questioning the relevance. Honorable as it was, McCain’s military service does not qualify him for every office: not for being Secretary of Agriculture, not for being head of the National Park Service, not for being President. McCain adopted a pose of sanctimonious long-suffering in the face of Clark’s remarks, a reaction as irrelevant as Obama’s. McCain’s long service on the Senate Armed Services Committee is much more relevant than his military service to making the strategic decisions that a President has to make. Unfortunately, his record with regard to these decisions is not convincing: He was a cheerleader at the outset for the war in Iraq; and he has, I believe, never appreciated the folly of getting involved in Iraq before the war in Afghanistan was settled, with the Taliban destroyed and bin Laden captured.

HOW DISCREDITABLE WAS IT FOR OBAMA TO BREAK PROMISES ON PUBLIC FINANCING?

In spite of popular rigidity about the force of rules and in particular the rule about promising, these rules are subject to exceptions, as rules are generally. St Thomas makes a special virtue about recognizing the exceptions and acting upon them. But it is too easy to award oneself the exceptions. Obama, breaking both his promise to go along with the restrictions associated with public financing and his promise to discuss public financing with McCain, cannot escape some discredit. The commentators, however, treated Obama with undue moral rigidity. Not only did they not recognize that in some circumstances departing from the rule about promising would be acceptable. They did not think beyond the box of credit vs. discredit. On the PBS Newshour, Shields as well as Brooks neglected to consider creditable arguments that Obama might have put forward for breaking his promises. One is that he was justified in taking precautions against what McCain or McCain’s people might do with well-financed 527 operations. To set aside his own mass-support would have been quixotic and a betrayal as well. Another argument was that in raising the money that he did from mass-support with small contributions had in an unexpected way achieved what the public financing arrangements aimed at – less influence by the big moneyed interests. The issue of discredit is thus a very mixed one.

RETIRING TWO TOPICS

The posts and comments on wasted votes and spoiler candidates have had several weeks’ run and
had some lively attention. "Spoiler candidates," in particular, caught the attention of Sirius Radio and Sirius Radio has proposed that I touch upon it along with some topics of my own in an interview soon to be arranged. I’ll let it run until a week after the interview. Then I’ll set it aside from the postings, along with wasted votes, which I’ll set aside now. Both topics, as I said when I posted them, relate to logic for politics, in the simple and informal sense in which I’m using the term "logic." However, they do not belong to the center of concern that I would like to have the blog concentrate on, namely, successes and failures in the argumentation currently being carried on by politicians and political commentators. I wish to renew that focus; and to do so, I’ll follow up this note with a post on the objections to Obama’s renouncing public financing.

SHOULD OBAMA GO TO IRAQ?

For Obama's going: McCain will lose a talking point. Against Obama’s going: he will be sucked closer to Bush"s and McCain’s view that there has been progress in reducing the violence in Iraq, and withdrawing U. S. troops would forfeit the progress. Closer: he need not just by going adopt the view, but he will be confronting Petraeus’s military judgment without having any military standing of his own. However, he could take with him people with the military standing to disagree with Petraeus: General Zinni comes to mind, as does Senator Webb. They could probe Petraeus’s weak points, which include his attempt to disown knowing about any plan for withdrawal. Not having a plan or ignoring the importance of having a plan is itself a lapse in military thinking. Worse, it undermines the prediction by Petraeus and others that withdrawal will lead to dire consequences. How dire the consequences will be depends on the care and precautions taken in the best plan for withdrawal. Testifying before Congress Petraeus was allowed to evade this point. Obama could combine with Zinni and Webb to pin him down on it. Then, with Obama in the lead, they could adopt Clemenceau’s maxim that war is too serious a matter to leave to the generals and raise the level of discussion. They could ask whether it is still the business of the U. S. to mitigate civil war in Iraq. If it is not, progress or no progress, our troops should not be there; and the progress, maybe a temporary lull, is just a bonus making it easier to bring them away.

THE "SPOILER" FALLACIES (REVISED)

When Ralph Nader announced he was entering the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton repeated the charge that he had "spoiled" the 2000 election for Al Gore and was responsible for Bush’s coming into office. When Bob Barr gained the nomination of the Libertarian Party last month, many pundits asked whether he might become a "spoiler" for John McCain. What is a spoiler supposed to be and by what reasoning are they identified?
In the case of Ralph Nader, the reasoning behind Clinton’s charge has the appearance of scapegoating. It is true that if all of those who voted for Nader had instead voted for Gore—and holding fixed all other votes as they were cast and recorded—Gore would have had more votes than Bush. However, looking at the vote totals for Florida in 2000, it is also true that if all of those who voted for Browne (or Buchanan or Phillips or Hagelin) had voted for Gore, then Gore would have had more votes than Bush. It might be that, on average, Nader voters were more likely to prefer Gore as a second option than were those who voted for the other minor party and independent candidates. However, the fact that any of these other groups of voters could also have swung the vote to Gore points to the real problem with spoiler arguments/accusations.
In most elections there are multiple candidates all competing with each other for as many votes as they can get. (But it is not just that there are a set number of voters who will vote and for whose votes the candidates are competing; the candidates are also all trying to "get out the vote.") And since the system is winner-take-all, every candidate covets the potential voters of every other candidate. In such a situation, every candidate wants to win (or so I am assuming here) and thus wants to spoil the election for every other candidate. Given this state of affairs, it would seem George W. Bush deserves Clinton’s ire as a "spoiler"—far more than Ralph Nader—since Bush took far more votes from Al Gore. Indeed, he took far more votes cast by registered Democrats!
Here is the vote count from Florida in 2000:
Bush 2,909,176
Gore 2,907,451
Nader 96,837
Browne 18,856
Buchanan 17,356
Phillips 4,280
Hagelin 2287
In this year’s election why shouldn’t Bob Barr or Ralph Nader claim that John McCain and Barack Obama are spoilers? If there is some asymmetry such that the "spoiler" label sticks only to underdogs and not to those who are favored in the polls, what principled account can be given of this asymmetry? The two major parties might want to perpetuate the assumption that a voter’s task is to choose between the two major party candidates. But this seems to me to be a false dichotomy.