Obama, McCain, Clark, and Rove

Paul Krugman comments on the recent yammering over Wesley Clark's remarks about John McCain in today's NY Times:

It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.

But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing.

The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service.

The willingness of the McCain campaign to engage in these tactics, employing such tainted spokesmen, tells us that the campaign has decided to go negative — specifically, to apply the strategy Karl Rove used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 (but not so effectively in 2006), that of portraying Democrats as unpatriotic.

I'm a realist. I understand that some of my views are to left of center in America. I also know that the center is where the center is... right now. It shifts in one direction or another every day, albeit imperceptibly. Change happens over time.

So I have no major problem with Obama tacking to the center now that the general election campaign has begun. That doesn't mean that I'm not unhappy with some specific stances he's taken (his support for the latest FISA bill (HR 6304) being a prime example).

But I know that Gore would have taken us on a different path than Bush, and I know that Obama will take us on a different path than McCain. In my judgment, we'd be better off today had Gore won. And I believe we'll be better off in four years if Obama wins.

Unknowable, of course. But you have to make a stand somewhere.