Just Showing Up

Mike Tomasky has a good column about how Barack Obama's changing the game in the U.S. foreign policy debate, holding his ground and fighting and it seems to be working. One thing I'll note about this is that while it may not be true that 99 percent of life is just showing up, Obama's been showing us that showing up is a lot of it. There's nothing really shockingly novel about what he's been saying, it's just that as someone who's genuinely untainted by the failures of the past seven years he stands up and labels attacks on him continuities with the failures of the past seven years.

It's not that clever, but it doesn't need to be any more clever than that. George Bush has already handed the other side a huge dump of ammunition. And now there's a candidate who's ready to pick it up off the floor and shoot back. Shoot back, I might add, on point without shifting targets to the economy or veterans' benefits or whatever else.