No Preference? McCain-Obama Matchup Would Be Better

I've looked for the links unsuccessfully (this is all I could find), but John McCain said today he has no preference between Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as his general election opponent in the fall.

But which candidate would really be better for McCain?

Stanley Fish at the New York Times offers his handicap:

If it is McCain vs. Obama in the general election, look for something to happen that was unthinkable only a short time ago. The Iraq War will become a Republican plus.
The reason is that McCain’s position on the war, as on so many other issues, looks in (at least) two directions.

On the one hand, he voted to authorize the invasion. On the other, he consistently disagreed with the administration’s prosecution of the war in general and with the judgment of defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular. And on the third hand, he advocated for a course of action that was at last implemented in the so-called “surge,” and with some success.

So, at any moment, he would be able to present himself as a strong patriot, and at another moment as a critic of the hard-line hawks, and at still another as a hard-line hawk with more experience and military knowledge than the others. And, depending on which position he was occupying, he could deny that he was an uncritical supporter of the war or that he was inattentive to the needs of the troops, or that he had nothing positive to offer.

Meanwhile, as McCain was nimbly moving around, Obama would be standing still, stuck in the one-note posture he has assumed from the beginning of the campaign. In the democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama’s strong suit – the club he used to beat up Hillary Clinton – has been the absolute consistency of his position on the war: he would have voted against it had he been in the senate at the time; he has spoken out against it repeatedly since becoming a senator; and he has promised to end it and bring the troops home within a short time.

But once McCain, and not Clinton, is his opponent, that position becomes a liability, because it can be attacked as being inflexible and without nuance. McCain can ask, Don’t you see that the situation has changed in recent months, and shouldn’t a responsible leader adjust his or her stance according to the facts on the ground? And he can add, I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results. Moreover, by saying something like that he would be reminding the electorate that he knows how to think tactically about military strategies, while his opponent’s only experience in combat has been trying to figure out how to beat Alan Keyes in the Illinois senate race, something anyone with the letter D (for Democrat) after his name would have been able to do easily.

Up till now, Obama has had a free ride on the Iraq War issue because Senator Clinton has been on the defensive since the campaign began. In her desire to avoid copping to a failure of judgment and apologizing for it (as John Edwards did), she came up with an explanation – I voted to authorize the use of force, but I wasn’t voting for it be actually used – that raised new questions about her credibility and made her vulnerable to the charge that her subsequent anti-war position had been adopted more out of political expediency than conviction.

Like McCain, Clinton tells a complex story about her relationship to the war, but unlike McCain. she tells a story whose parts pull against one another, and she has been caught in a cul-de-sac between them.

The parts of McCain’s story, even with one or two twists and turns, fit nicely into a coherent narrative that brings credit to him in every chapter. I was resolute in the beginning, I demurred for a while but for good reasons, and now I am resolute again, and you can trust me because, in this area especially, I know what I’m doing. He can rehearse this narrative without apologizing for anything and then turn around to Obama and (borrowing from Clinton’s attacks on him), declare: You, on the other hand, don’t know what you’re doing, as everything you say, not only about the war, but about the conduct of foreign policy, proves. (He and President Bush are already pushing this line in anticipation of Obama’s nomination.)

Indeed, every criticism Clinton has made of Obama – he lacks experience, he is all flourish and no substance, he gives shoot-from-the-hip answers to serious questions – falls into McCain’s lap, ready for instant use in the general election.

But, unfortunately for Obama, the reverse is not true. The criticisms of McCain made by his primary opponents – he twice voted against Bush’s tax cuts, he cooperated with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform and with Russ Feingold on campaign-finance reform, he said that waterboarding was torture and should not be used, he scorned fundamentalist Christian leaders, he supported stem cell research, he opposed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, he expressed doubts about Samuel Alito – cannot be appropriated by Obama because these are his positions, too.

With the Iraq War either neutralized or migrating to McCain’s side, and with the sharp distinction on social issues blurred by McCain’s heterodoxy (called apostasy by his critics from the right), Obama is left with health care (he would probably get the better of that one) and with the economy where there is in fact a genuine opposition between a firm free-trader and tax-cutter on the one hand, and a critic of Nafta whose economic policies might have the effect of raising taxes on the other. But that is a contrast that might not play too well in a general election campaign that lasts less than two months.

And Obama will not even be able to saddle McCain with the legacy of an unpopular administration, given that more often than not he has been viewed as a Bush opponent, except on the war, and on that issue his loyalty to the president’s policy will do him harm only with those hard-core liberals who would never vote for a Republican anyway.

With Obama as his opponent, McCain has the advantage every which way. He continues to get mileage out of the straight-talk express, and at the same time he also has the political flexibility that comes along with having taken a few detours along the way, and talked out of several sides of his mouth.

Things could change, of course (and Fish provides some flourish on his essay to that effect), but I think McCain will also have a winning issue in Iraq if Hillary winds up winning the nomination.

It's not completely a long shot for her, surprisingly.