E very moment that Barack Obama is talking about foreign policy is a step backward for his candidacy, just as every moment spent talking about the economy is a setback for John McCain.
So why on earth has Obama seemingly dedicated the entire month of July to talking about threats abroad?
It’s no mystery. For all his talk about audacity, Obama is one of the most deliberate, calculating politicians we’ve seen since Richard Nixon.
As we read in Time magazine last week, Obama is a careful poker player who never made risky moves when he was elbow to elbow with lawmakers and statehouse lobbyists in late-night card games in Springfield, Ill.
Hands run hot and cold, but the disciplined players who know how to bet are almost always the winners. If you don’t get irrationally exuberant during ahot streak, you can’t go bust when the cards go as cold as Joe Lieberman’s reception at the Democratic caucus.
Whether Hillary Clinton was alternating between weepy self-pity and channeling Curtis LeMay, she still couldn’t come up with a winning hand. Her primary successes were about the demographics of the states, not whether voters liked Hillary version 10.0 more than the original.
Obama, meanwhile, stuck to the themes and strategies he had developed even before he began his bid.
We don’t know what Obama would have done if things hadn’t gone so phenomenally well for him. Maybe he would have panicked and mimicked her tears and bombast, but it doesn’t seem likely.
If Obama kept his discipline when he was giving Clinton a pasting during and after the Potomac Primary, it’s unlikely he would have panicked the way she did when she was losing. Every time he could have tried to deliver a coup de grace to Clinton and end the contest early, he smiled and bided his time.
And in the afterglow of his primary success, you can imagine Obama and his team laying out the summer and fall by month, week, day and hour.
John McCain’s team probably did the same thing, but with the inveterate crap-shooter McCain, they might as well have tried to predict the weather for the next 110 days.
The Obama effort, however, has retained its primary season discipline despite facing a sharply different environment, opponent, and electorate than that from January to June.
During a week when the news on the economy has been as bad as it’s been since Jimmy Carter was bundling himself in a cardigan to keep the White House thermostat lower, Obama has been trying to establish his foreign policy bona fides.
That’s a brutal task for Obama, who must hope that the world quiets down and he can get enough hawkish endorsements to keep voters from getting too edgy. For now, he remains stuck between moveon.org’s money and the confidence of persuadable voters in swing states. And as long as he’s talking about it, Obama also remains on McCain’s turf.
It must have made perfect sense for Obama to pick the July doldrums for a week of foreign policy pronouncements in advance of a trip abroad.
If he can avoid looking silly in Iraq, and CNN doesn’t show too many shots of joyous Palestinians greeting his arrival in the West Bank, Obama might have hoped to address the subject of the larger world and move on to his stronger suits by the fall.
While I might have counseled him to skip this overseas jaunt altogether, his choice to hit foreign policy right now is undeniably a mistake.
In a week in which inflation spiraled into the sky, the King of Beers bowed to a foreign power, and panicked depositors were making runs on banks, Barack Obama was talking about why he was right to oppose the Iraq surge, even if it has worked.
And while he’s modeling flak jackets in Baghdad and preaching peace in Jerusalem, Obama still won’t be talking about the incipient recession.
The most recent New York Times polls tell us that voters are more concerned about the economy in general and fuel prices in particular than they are about Iraq, let alone the West Bank.
A good poker player knows when to fold a bad hand, and Obama should have folded on his current foreign policy bluff.
