McCain on Offense

I stopped buying John McCain’s moderate image when he stopped trying to sell it back in 2004. But he is driven by a stubborn commitment to what he thinks is right, and his latest verbal assaults against Democratic political opponents have proved the truism that George W. Bush has spent the last six years demonstrating – when you’re convinced that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, you wind up behaving badly. John Dickerson of Slate muses on McCain’s aggressive new stance:

What's new here is obviously not McCain's unhedged support for the war. He's talked about that at length. What makes this speech different is the full-force, no-caveats attack on his opponents. It went beyond attacking policy inconsistencies—such as the fact that Democrats voted to confirm Gen. David Petraeus as Iraqi commander but against his plan for action—or raising questions about how opponents of the war would deal with the chaos following an American withdrawal. It repeatedly questioned not just their views but their motives, ending with a moving story about a heroic Navy SEAL officer whose bravery McCain juxtaposes with those seeking "temporary political advantage."

There’s a chance, of course – a long, drawn-out, über-bloody chance, rife with tragedy and sacrifice and another generation of diffidence and loathing in our political culture – that the U.S. could eventually restore order to Iraq. God knows at the price of how many more billions, or how many more American lives, or how much more American prestige – not to mention the catastrophic cost an indefinite U.S. military tie-down would have upon global stability. If John McCain wins the Republican nomination, the 2008 election will be a referendum on how much Americans are willing to pay for victory.