Iraq Quicksand

The Wall Street Journal reminds everyone to give the McCain campaign some credit for the Iraq Quicksand that Barack stepped in Thursday. They've been pushing Barack on Iraq, a topic which was always good for McCain, but gets better as the Obama campaign prepares his pending betrayal of the anti-war movement.

In recent weeks, McCain and his campaign sounded the drumbeat for Obama to travel to Iraq. McCain mentioned it at nearly every town hall meeting. The Republican National Committee went so far as to add a clock to its Web site, ticking off the time since Obama last set foot in Iraq (It currently stands at 908 days, about two and a half years.)

Barack has been committing major flip-flops on a host of issues, and he won't pay the political price he deserves without a spotlight shining on each one.

At the end of June, word broke that the junior senator from Illinois would head to the war zone. So last week the McCain campaign offered a new critique: that the visit is nothing more than a photo-op. The McCain campaign held a conference call Wednesday to jump on remarks of Claire McCaskill, a senator from Missouri and an Obama national co-chair, who said that Obama would not change his Iraq policy before November.

“I guess the question is, if indeed he’s going to go to Iraq and nothing that he sees will change or impact his decision-making on this, then why is he going?” said Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman.

How will mainstream Americans react to the realization that Barack is not the practitioner of a new kinda politics, but instead, used that posture as a technique for mastering the old fashioned sleazy kind? On Thursday,

Obama told reporters he would be open to refining his 16-month withdrawal timetable, something the McCain campaign has urged him to do for awhile.

But even then, the McCain campaign found a way to attack. “Since announcing his campaign in 2007, the central premise of Barack Obama’s candidacy was his commitment to begin withdrawing American troops from Iraq immediately,” Rogers said in a statement. “Today, Barack Obama reversed that position, proving once again that his words do not matter.”

And then he dug the whole deeper.

Obama held a second press conference Thursday to clarify his remarks. “Apparently, I wasn’t clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq,” he said.

Petulant and impatient, playing the victim of a pathetic media, Barack added fuel to the fire by reiterating his commitment to his timetable even while throwing it under the bus. Voters can feel as trusting of Barack's word as Reverend Wright could when Barack offered him permanent family-member status.

Give McCain credit.