When one eats, breathes and lives politics, it is often difficult to maintain a decent respect for those on the other side of the ideological aisle. Passions become inflamed, and a Manichean sense of good vs. evil begins to take hold. Every election becomes the most important election ever, and history itself, even the very existence of the American Republic, seems to hang in the balance. Those on the other side aren't just fellow citizens to be swayed or even opponents in a grand chess match; they become enemies of all that is near and dear. Friendship with those of a different political persuasion becomes difficult; relationships become impossible (unless your name is James Carville, apparently).
There are a few people, however, whose character, intelligence and intellectual integrity are such that they demand respect and are easy to befriend, despite their difference in political perspective.
Joshua Trevino is just such a person. Josh was one of the founders of RedState.com before leaving for personal reasons. RedState.com was once much more intellectually honest than it is today, and sometimes influenced my own thinking and perspective back when Josh had a greater influence over editorial control and content. Trevino was also Armando's sparring partner once upon a time over at Swords Crossed; the Hegelian dynamic there often produced a startlingly clearheaded synthesis that enlightened and elucidated what had been dark and opaque. He now runs Trevino Strategies and Media, and maintains his own blog.
It was from Josh that I first learned about the Overton Window. And it was a post about Josh's leaving RedState that earned me my first ever recommended diary on Daily Kos. Josh and I are friends on Facebook and have each other in gmail chat. As much as I disagree with him on policy and perspective, I respect and admire his acuity, integrity, eloquence and willingness to call a spade a spade, even when it doesn't serve his political interests.
It is therefore with an admixture of satisfaction and sorrow that I read Trevino's post today lashing McCain and admitting Obama won their first debate. Satisfaction because of the refreshing admission of the fact by one of the Right's few remaining straight shooters; sorrow because, as a fellow politico, I know much it must have pained him to write those words.
The whole thing is well-worth a read, and tough to cut-and-paste from. But I'll lift a few excerpts here:
Most shocking is the Democracy Corps survey which, though a Democratic outfit, stacked its focus group 2-1 with ‘04 George W. Bush voters — and yielded a plurality for an Obama win.
The bottom line is that John McCain did not accomplish what he needed to: discredit Barack Obama as a responsible steward of America’s fortunes abroad. A major theme of his campaign is Obama’s callowness and consequent unfitness to lead in wartime. The failure to expose this posited shallow grasp of the wider world — a remarkable proposition about a half-Kenyan raised in Indonesia anyway — is a serious erosion of credibility for McCain. To find a foundational proposition of one’s candidacy rendered ineffectual is a tremendous blow.
Josh is right: that's really the heart of the matter. It's not just that foreign policy is supposed to be McCain's strong suit, and that further debates won't be on as friendly a turf for him. It's that McCain again and again attempted to reinforce Obama's greatest negative in the minds of voters, and it completely backfired on him. Not only did Obama appear to be ready and presidential in spite of McCain's assertions to the contrary, McCain himself appeared to be condescending and provincial compared to Obama, whose very identity is a multi-racial one drawing from a background and heritage that spans continents and cultures.
Josh goes on to say that the key turning point in the debate was Obama's verbal excoriation of McCain for being wrong on Iraq from the beginning. Not only did McCain set himself up for the hit by claiming to have superior judgment on the surge, he also had no ready comeback for what should have been an obvious line of attack from Obama. Says Josh:
In one swoop, the superiority of John McCain on foreign affairs was laid waste. An effective debater would have responded with a series of his foe’s own grievous errors in the same sphere — and despite his thin public record, Barack Obama has several. Instead, McCain lamely replied, "I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy," and segued into a non sequitur about General Petraeus. To paraphrase Tallyrand, this was worse than a crime — it was a mistake. Assaulted on the very pillar of his candiacy, John McCain yielded.
Nor will he have a chance to get it back. The rest of the presidential debates (with the exception, perhaps, of a few townhall questions) will focus on the economy and domestic policy. If Sarah Palin is lucky, her vice-presidential debate with foreign affairs expert Joe Biden will have as few foreign policy questions as possible. This was John McCain's last real chance to discredit Obama's ability to keep America safe in the minds of American voters, and he blew it badly.
Of course, McCain's debate failure wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't come in the wake of at least two weeks of bad press and even worse polling numbers for his campaign. Instead, McCain looked nasty and testy at a time when he could least afford to. After a couple of weeks marked by erratic inconsistency, McCain needed to show a warm and steady hand. Instead, he appeared snarly, off-center, angry and unable to look his opponent in the eye. It reinforced the image of McCain as an unpredictable loose cannon set to go off at any moment, without respect for either friends or opponents. Josh ends his post thus:
The larger story here is not the debate. Rather, it is the story of which the debate is merely the culminating chapter: the three-week-long implosion of the McCain campaign itself. At the end of the first week of September, that campaign boasted its first lead in the national polls, a surprisingly successful convention, and an energizing vice-presidential nominee. At the end of the last week of September, the lead is gone, the convention is forgotten, and Sarah Palin is more disaster than delight. How this happened demands exploration, and we’ll get to it next.
I'm looking forward to reading what he says next. His analysis of how Republicans got themselves into this mess is bound to be an eye-opener, and I'll be very interested to see what he has to say.
In the meantime, progressives can take heart: honest conservatives know who won this debate, and it wasn't McCain. Conservatives, too, should take heart that they still have guys like Joshua Trevino around to let them know when they're in trouble, and what they should do about it. If the Republicans had more like him and less like Krauthammer or Bill Kristol, they'd be in much better shape than they are today--and so would America.