Following McCain

At noontime yesterday came the revelation of departures from John McCain's presidential campaign executive staff and its implication for the senator's middling run. The pundit class would be innervated again by a Senate television feed broadcasting a temperamental scene, that of McCain making his first open statements about Iraq since his last visit, by chastising Barbara Boxer. "A lot of us are driven by principle," reads the transcript. "And a lot of us do what we think is right no matter what the polls say."

Estimates on the political wires put the Democratic Party's next interjection of war policy just days or weeks from now. Public dismay surely encourages this, though neither shows defeatism to be politically scandent nor materially observant. Two months of reported gains across Iraq culminated in Ayman al-Zawahiri's remote admission that the front is crucial to al Qaeda. As the New York Post suggested yesterday, all it takes is one man named David Petraeus to substantiate his command's bearing as the object of victory, and request more for soldiers and their mission, to force opposition caucuses into an abandonment not only of the commander-in-chief but American servicemen, too.

What if pessimism can no longer be sustained? The support of a fourth or a third of the country could be in play. If the president is not to which the disaffected could return, he can move stepwise: Your friends and loved ones, under a sterling generalship, have won this campaign. And in characteristic self-deprecation, add, This was always and obviously right and possible — even to me.

Americans will follow the first statesman credible enough to assume leadership in this, the war on Third World fascism. John McCain continued through published remarks — "We cannot walk away gracefully from defeat," he warned — and set the example of a man, dimly prospective for nomination, looking further and higher. Republican presidential contenders in manifest solidarity on the war, behind George Bush, would serve interests of both the one and the whole. Nothing can be had if Iraq and the Near East are lost.

«     »