Campain Gets Tenses

John McCain (and his echo chamber) and Barack Obama (and his echo chamber) are today arguing about who knows less about Iraq and whether John McCain ought to have used a gerund instead of the past tense. The point of debate is inconsequential because the truth is knowable; John McCain is, at worst, wrong, or, at best, imprecise:

"We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr City are quiet."

Some brigades have returned home, so in some areas of Iraq, US troops have been drawn down to pre-surge levels; but other unit are returning, and while the number of combat troops in Iraq is slowly returning to pre-surge levels but it's not there yet -- not there by 20,000 troops -- and might not be there for a while. In what way is he wrong? Is he wrong because he knows the truth and wants to obscure it? It requires a willful suspension of belief to assume that McCain would lie about the status of the withdrawals, just as it requires a leap of imagination to envision a scenario wherein the Democrats wouldn't have pounced on his error like Tom on Jerry. Was McCain wrong because he spoke in the short hand and conflated the future with the present?

On another level, this debate is about whether McCain looks at Iraq through rose-tinted glasses and whether Obama is deliberately shielding himself from signs of progress. Politics abhors a middle ground: either Iraq is getting better or it isn't. McCain has every incentive to maximize the success stories and project forward; Obama has every incentive to maximize the chaos and project forward. The question for voters is: the present is almost as unknowable as the future, so whose vision do you trust more? Polls show that less than half of Americans trust McCain and less than half trust Obama. Obama has an advantage on policy -- Americans want troops home soon and consider the Iraq adventure a failure -- , but the advantage disappears when voters are asked to think about who should lead the policy, whatever it turns out to be. That's probably because McCain retains enough of the aura of a straight-talking, tell-it-like-is-is reformer whose words reflect reality.

So McCain has to be extra careful here; when he uses shorthand, he inevitably has to go back and explain what he meant. Getting Iraq Right is the sine qua non of his campaign, and imprecision exposes his flank and it degrades his brand. The campaign contends that the press is frothing over a question of semantics, but that's tough to argue. The scope of U.S. troop deployment in Iraq is the central issue of the presidential election. When combat brigades withdraw is not a detail. It is an essential element of the question.

The McCain campaign, in any event, professes to be comfortable with any argument about the future of Iraq. For that matter, so does the Obama campaign. One Dem points out: "Look how angry McCain gets everytime someone dares to challenge him about Iraq?'" .... It is hard to determine who is getting the better of whom.