McCain Leads Colorado as Tide Turns Against Obama Nationally

John McCain holds a slight but statistically insignificant lead in the Quinnipiac University poll on the Colorado presidential race.

McCain is up in Colorado 46 to 45 percent, but Quinnipiac notes that McCain holds advantages on key question items:

This latest survey might have more good news for McCain than might appear at first glance. Despite the closeness of the horse race numbers, he is viewed favorably 53 - 34 percent compared to Obama's 48 - 39 percent.

Colorado voters trust Obama more than McCain 49 - 42 percent to handle the energy crisis, 47 - 43 percent to handle the economy and 48 - 41 percent to handle a natural disaster.

But they trust McCain more, 51 - 37 percent, to handle Russia, 57 - 35 percent to handle a terrorist incident in the U.S. and 56 - 36 percent to handle a conflict between Iran and Israel.

"Colorado is one of the most important battleground states that will decide the presidency as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama slug it out nose to nose. If the national election is close in November, a handful of votes in Colorado will be decisive," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "Right now, independent voters are split with 46 percent for Sen. McCain and 44 percent for Sen. Obama.

"Who wins the election may wind up depending on whether voters look inward to the economy and fuel prices or outward to world hot spots."

It will be interesting to see how things play out.

International events have contributed substantially to the Democratic slide in the polls (Obama's disastrous European tour, for example, as well as Democratic weakness on the Russia crisis). Not just that, polls show Americans less gloomy about the economy, and gasoline prices have declined somewhat, taking some stress off U.S. pocketbooks, and neutralizing a bit of the Democratic advantage on economic issues.

Nationally, McCain and Obama are tied at 45 percent in the latest Gallup poll, and Obama's selection of Senator Joseph Biden is not likely to improve Democratic polling numbers.

All of this is awful news for Barack Obama and his supporters. Indeed, the Democrats at this stage of the campaign - on the eve of a historically diverse national party convention - should now be pulling out a double-digit advantage over the GOP.

The fact that they are not explains, I would argue, why the Democratic left is so terrified that many are resorting to the most spurious allegations and irrational attacks imaginable.

The worst example, at the moment, is Jacob Weisberg's, who argued yesterday that "racism is the only reason" John McCain might win the election (but don't forget Dave Neiwart, who argues that using the adjective "audacious" to describe Obama is the new "presumptious," which is racist code for "uppity," if you can follow that).

Closely following behind Weisberg are Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, and Matthew Yglesias, who are enraged at Mark Halperin's suggestion that Obama's recent attacks on McCain's "houses" have opened him up to GOP attacks on Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers. TBogg, as well, has added his screams to the left's totalitarian bid to silence AP reporter Ron Fournier for being friendly to Republicans.

And then there's the Newshoggers, who have joined the military-bashing meme attacking McCain for his political identification as a prisoner-of-war during Vietnam.

The fact is, despite a practically overdetermined Democratic election victory for this November, the tide has turned against Barack Obama and his partisans. Extreme fear and outrage on the left are starting to show as a result, so we can expect more desperate, unbridled attacks on alleged GOP racism or McCain's presumed media "adulation-advantage" going forward.

Note that with Barack Obama's selection of Senator Joseph Biden as running mate, some commentators have been offering up an Obama-Biden/Dukakis-Bentson analogy for the general election.

While clever, it's supremely unfair to Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentson.

Not only did Dukakis hold a 47 to 41 percent advantage in Gallup polling on the eve of the 1988 Democratic National Convention (and, recall, Gallup finds the 2008 race tied today), Dukakis and Bentsen were eminently more qualified for the Oval Office than are Obama and Biden. Dukakis was the longest serving governor in the history of Massachusetts, and Bentsen really did serve with Jack Kennedy during his 48-year career in the United States Congress.

I'll have more later.

Ties That Bind: Barack Obama and William Ayers

Barack Obama's association with Weatherman terrorist William Ayers has reemerged this week amid troubling questions surrounding a cover-up of Obama's failed leadership of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Michael Barone indicates that "Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers":

In my U.S. News column this week, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season....

Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state Senate campaign was held in Ayers's apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. "I don't regret setting bombs," Ayers is quoted as saying. "I feel we didn't do enough."

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder—if you don't know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, "don't want nobody nobody sent." That's what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it's a civic culture in which there's nobody better to send you than your parents.

Barone continues, explaining why Ayers' past as a domestic terrorist is no problem for Obama:

He was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance. An unrepentant terrorist, who bragged of bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, was a fit associate. Ayers evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics—how much, we can't be sure unless the Richard J. Daley Library opens the CAC archive. But most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers's past or of Ayers's beliefs. It's something voters might reasonably want to take into account.

Thomas Lifson covered the Obama-Ayers connection yesterday:

Obama and his campaign long have gone out of their way to downplay, in fact distort, the long and evidently deep relationship between Ayers and Obama.

Recall that Obama told ABC's George Stephanopolous that Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."

Yet, if Ayers was just a neighbor, why has Stanley Kurtz at the National Review been stonewalled by the University of Illinios Chicago regarding access to Annenberg files?

The university has agreed to open public access to the Daley Library's Annenberg documents, although Steve Diamond suggests questions remain on the hush, hush nature of the controversy:

Bill Ayers, the former terrorist leader of the Weather Underground, is now a prominent member of the UIC faculty in their College of Education. He was the founder of the CAC and helped pick Barack Obama as the CAC Board Chair in 1995....
Without a full explanation of the role of Ayers in this series of events, it is unlikely that the public will feel reassured that the CAC documents have not been tampered with.

As I've noted previously, the Ayers/CAC scandal is part of the new, broader pattern of Barack Obama's deceit, secrecy, and subterfuge.

So far, the press has largely given Obama a pass, but as attention mounts, the Annenberg case could further damage Obama's presidential aspirations. As Clarice Feldman notes:

The last thing Obama should want made public are his dubious associates....

Once the public learns more of the CAC, will the voters decide that the manner in which Obama exercised his sole opportunity at executive authority was so good that he deserves the keys to the Oval Office?

Will the voters conclude that the old- professor- in- the- neighborhood story was so disingenuous that Obama was lying to hide from them facts they deserved to know — indeed, facts every bit as relevant as Hillary’s failure at health care reform about which they were informed in the primaries?

Will voters who consider education an important issue — and surely that includes many important voter groups for Obama — take kindly to a man who took $110 million of charitable funds which were earmarked for improving public education and squandered it on salaries for men like Weatherman Ayers and Michael Klonsky, the Maoist leader of the Revolutionary Youth Movement which worked with the Weather Underground and who at the time of CAC’s lavish grants to him worked as a cab driver?

I don't think so.

Obama's a classic Chicago machine politician, and as revelations continue to surface, Democratic buyer's remorse may be this year's October Surprise.

Joe Biden's Disastrous Foreign Policy Liabilities

Barack Obama's selection of Senator Joseph Biden was designed to bolster the Democrats' flagging standings on the national security issue. Biden, a 35-year veteran of the Congress, serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looked to provide foreign policy gravitas to Obama's dangerous inexperience on the international stage.

Yet, as analysts and bloggers take a closer look, Obama's Biden pick may end up being a disastrous liability for the campaign.

For one thing, Biden's holds a near-religious commitment to diplomacy before the resort to military force in a crisis. Biden's hedging has left the Delaware Senator a legacy of vacillation and hypocrisy in foreign affairs. For some background, here's Michael Gordon:

As the Bush administration was fine-tuning its plan to invade Iraq, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. helped draft a proposed resolution that emphasized the need for diplomatic efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs but gave President Bush the authority to use military force as a last resort....

Mr. Biden is widely seen as a liberal-minded internationalist. He has emphasized the need for diplomacy but has been prepared at times to back it with the threat of force. An early advocate of military action to quell the ethnic fighting in the Balkans, he has not been averse to American military intervention abroad. As the debates over Kosovo and later Iraq showed, he has been loath to give the United Nations a veto over American policy decisions. But he has also sought to ensure that the United States acted in concert with other nations.

The Los Angeles Times has more:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. joins the Democratic ticket as an acknowledged foreign policy sage whose 36-year record has won him bipartisan praise as a liberal internationalist who generally hews close to his party's center. But he has sometimes found himself at odds with members of his own party as well as with Republicans.

Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for U.S. military action in the Balkans in the 1990s. He also advocates U.S. action to stem the continuing bloodshed in Darfur.

Some liberal Democrats remain distressed by his 2002 vote for the Iraq war, which Barack Obama opposed. Other critics say Biden was misguided or even naive in his most recent proposal to resolve sectarian conflict by giving broad autonomy to Iraq's three major population groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. And he opposed last year's troop "surge," which by most accounts has contributed significantly to the reduction in violence in Iraq.

What appears to bind Biden and Obama in the realm of foreign affairs, however, is a shared belief in strong cooperation with America's traditional allies and in the use of force only as a last resort. The Democratic standard-bearers reject the belief of President Bush and some other conservatives that the United States should not hesitate to act unilaterally if other nations demur.

Biden's partition plan has not endeared him to Iraqis, as TigerHawk points out:

Reuters is reporting that Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden is not popular among Iraqis, who very much dislike Biden's proposal to partition their country....

The Biden partition plan was a bad idea from the beginning, and all Iraqis should be grateful that - so far - it has gained no footing within the executive branch.

Anyway, it is a reflection of the diminishing political significance of the Iraq war that Barack Obama, who secured the Democratic nomination in part by making much of his opposition to the war and his plan to withdraw our troops on a fast schedule, is now able to pick as his running mate a senator who voted for the invasion in 2002 and whose favored "solution" would have required more rather than less American involvement in Iraqi domestic politics.

What's particularly bothersome about Biden is his shameless antiwar pandering.

Recall that Obama's greatest weakness on foreign policy is his awful judgment on the Iraq war. When the conflict was going poorly in 2004 he advocated sending more troops to rectify the "botched" Bush-Rumsfeld light infantry invasion and failed post-conflict stablity operations. Yet, when the administration made key strategic adjustements in 2006-2007, Obama was one of the most vociferous oppoents of the surge in the U.S. Senate.

Yet, by selecting Biden, rather than choosing a running mate who has consistently advocated firmness and careful resolve on the conflict, he's found a campaign partner who has eschewed strategic clarity and carried water for the antiwar hordes.

As the National Review noted, commenting on Biden's selection as veep:

...Biden is a typical liberal who has no claim to post-partisanship...

His vaunted foreign-policy judgment is seriously flawed. Although he was not as irresponsible as other Democrats in calling for an immediate pullout from Iraq, he opposed the surge and plugged for an unworkable plan to partition the country, one long ago overtaken by events, even though his office was saying as of only a week ago that he still supports it.

The cardinal rule of vice-presidential picks is: Do no harm. It remains to be seen if Biden will meet even this low standard.

Scott at Power Line agrees:

Rather than adding to Obama's attractions or neutralizing Obama's liabilities, if he does anything, Biden subtracts from Obama's strengths and contributes to his liabilities.

Obama's selection of Joe Biden may prove a disastrous liability, accentuating weakness in foreign policy rather than strengthening it. As Michael Rubin concludes:

Obama may have wanted Biden's foreign policy experience, but he may soon find that Biden's track record leaves a lot to be desired. On Iraq, on Iran, and elsewhere...

The New York Times has a lead story this morning entitled, "In Obama’s Choice, a ‘Very Personal Decision’.

Unfortunatly for the Democrats, Obama's choice may end up as a very personal disaster.

Obama Passes Over Hillary Clinton With Snub Biden Pick

A big development this morning is the McCain campaign's release of a brilliant new ad buy hammering Barack Obama for passing over Hillary Clinton as running mate:

NARRATOR: She won millions of votes.

But isn't on his ticket.

Why?

For speaking the truth.

On his plans:

HILLARY CLINTON: "You never hear the specifics."

NARRATOR: On the Rezko scandal:

HILLARY CLINTON: "We still don't have a lot of answers about Senator Obama."

NARRATOR: On his attacks:

HILLARY CLINTON: "Senator Obama's campaign has become increasingly Negative."

NARRATOR: The truth hurt.

And Obama didn't like it.

JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approved this message.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have stories. McCain's targeting the gender vote still smarting at the perceived sexism of the primaries (Rassmussen finds women in general less than thrilled with the selection of Joe Biden as Democratic running mate).

This morning's commercial is the latest in McCain's smart aggressiveness hoping to blunt any positive bounce for Obama during the Democrats' big week in Denver. Yesterday, the campaign released a spot showing Biden saying he'd be honored to serve with John McCain "because I think the country would be better off."

Friday the campaign published a strategy press release predicting a 15 percentage-point convention bounce of Obama (floating high expectations).

On top of all this, of course, will be McCain's strategically-timed vice-presidential announcement. Planned for August 29, the day after Obama's INVESCO triumph-of-the-will acceptance speech, a solid veep selection for the GOP will tamp down public enthusiasm for the Democrats and shift the campaign narrative back to Obama's failure to pull out a big lead in public opinion.

Latest polling shows the presidential horse race holding steady. Today's Washington Post poll, conducted before the announcement of Biden as running mate, has Obama up four points among likely voters, which is just a little better than the rolling average we've seen this last couple of weeks.

The selection of Biden does little to help Obama in public opinion. On top of that, Biden's selection has enraged top Clinton advisors, so Tuesday night's Hillary Clinton speech to the delegates may be one of the most consequential turning points in this campaign.

Victory in Iraq Confounds Antiwar Forces

A couple of months back I wrote a post outlining the ever-shifting antiwar positions in opposition to the Iraq deployment (going all the way back to 2003).

This year, for example, when John McCain made remarks in January about having a U.S. commitment in Iraq for "100 years," his comments were twisted by war opponents to mean a century of anti-insurgency, urban combat, and Dover landings. As progress has continued more recently - and as long-term U.S. basing arrangements in Iraq haven been discussed - the 100-year meme has been described as "neo-imperialism." Now, amid signs that a preliminary security pact with Iraq is near agreement, as well as reports suggesting that the Iraq army is being transformed to a stand-alone fighting force transitioning beyond counterinsurgency to the defense of the nation's borders from outside threats, there's some antiwar buzz insisting that Iraq's army is ill-equipped for robust, independent operations, and that security on the ground is tenuous - a condition that would strengthen Barack Obama's electoral position on the war.

Alas, the antiwar elements look like some of those long lost Japanese soldiers who continued to fight long past the surrender of Japan in 1945.

These are the misfortunes of the left's antiwar forces. As it turns out, Noemie Emery has examined the irrationalism of Barack Obama and the Democratic antiwar base now that defeat on the ground has essentially been ruled out:

McCain and his party ... wanted to win the war all along, but for Obama and many Democrats, the sudden lurch from the catastrophic Bush failure to unexpected victory has caused incoherence. Last year, in damage control, Chuck Schumer declared that the surge itself had been counterproductive: "The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge," he insisted, without quite explaining it. "It wasn't that the surge brought peace." Nancy Pelosi said the surge hadn't worked, and then said it worked only because Iran let it. To Time's Joe Klein, the surge is whipped cream on top of the pile of excrement that is the war, a debacle that somehow produced undeniable victory. "The reality is that neither Barack Obama nor Nuri al-Maliki nor most anybody else believes that the Iraq war can be 'lost' at this point," Klein wrote on July 22, a day after he compared the war effort to fertilizer, and the same day he called the war he said had been won a "disastrous" enterprise. Obama tried the same thing when he called the surge a tactical success within a larger strategic debacle, but a success he would still vote against - knowing in advance it would still be successful - if once again given the chance.

A commander in chief who votes against the success of his own armed forces? Is this the judgment - and change - that we can believe in?

Last month, amid all the political jockeying over the definition of "time horizons" in Iraq, Spencer Ackerman exclaimed:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like.

Actually, this is what denial looks like. But they do keep trying.

Biden's Debut Speech: What Beautiful Day?

Joseph Biden, in his speech today after being introduced as Barack Obama's running mate, made it clear that the Democrats plan to campaign against the "failed" policies of eight years of "Bush-McCain."

This, of course, is the "McCain = Bush's Third Term" meme. It's been pushed for months, with little positive effect for the Democrats. Polls continue to show a statistical dead heat in the presidential horse race (and tapping Biden is not expected to improve the numbers). Obama's weeks-long slide in public opinion will likely pause this week, only to continue its stall after a brief polling-bounce turnaround.

What struck me about Biden's debut, however, was the tremendous incongruity between his attack-dog message and his congressional-insider, pro-war record.

Biden, for example, slammed the administration's "disastrous" economic legacy and the war in Iraq, yet as Jonah Goldberg asks:

How can Joe Biden run against a broken Washington when he's such an integral figure in it?

Yeah, how can he?

Biden began his Springfield speech praising our nation for allowing anyone to pull themselves up if they work hard, then in the next breath he announced that "the American dream is slipping away."

Biden continued, saying Americans are up late worring about paying the bills, while housing values have dropped "off a cliff." He then jabs John McCain for not knowing "which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at." Class warfare? I thought everyone in America could get ahead with hard work? No wonder Biden's plagiarizes speeches ... his aren't really coherent.

Meanwhile, speaking of economic classes, Barack Obama's reported income for 2007 was $4.2 million, placing him in the top 1 percent of households for 2007. Yep, hard work will do that for you, with a little help from the Chicago machine, of course.

Biden goes off on foreign policy, saying we "can't afford four more years of a foreign policy that has shredded our alliances and sacrificed our moral standing around the world."

But as Betsy Newmark points out, Biden said in 2002 that we needed to topple Saddam Hussein:

Biden on Meet the Press in 2002, discussing Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security...

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”Biden on Meet the Press in 2002: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”

Biden concluded his Springfield address saying "God bless America, and may he protect our troops." Well, folks aren't looking for divine leadership in protecting American forces in the field. Public opinion, by a decisive margin, sees McCain with the requisite experience to lead the troops in national security and crisis management, not Barack Obama (and not the man upstairs, with all due respect).

Biden's incongruity was topped off, at the conclusion of his speech, by the pumping sound of U2's "Beautiful Day," with the volume rising as the Delaware Senator joined hands triumphantly with Obama at the center of the stage.

So, let's think about this, "It's a beautiful day ... don't let it get away..."

It's Bono, of course, singing of hope and uplift, but the Irish singer-activist has consistently praised the Bush administration for pledging $15 billion for AIDS relief in Africa. First announced in this year's State of the Union, the administration has increased the appropriation to $39 billion, but it's been the the Democratic Congress that has balked in funding the initiative.

It's a beautiful day? "See the world wasting away, while U.S. Congress dawdles and plays."

Hope and change? Joe Biden's part of that Congress, serving his sixth term. "Don't let him get away..."

What beautiful day?

Related: For the text of Biden's Springfield debut, see Real Clear Politics, "Elect Obama to Reclaim America."

Obama's Veep: The Perfect Accompaniment of Lies and Deceit

Barack Obama officially launched Democratic convention week with the selection of Delaware Senator Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate.

No matter who he picked, Obama would have received both praise and censure. With Biden, it's clear that Obama's deeply concerned about his lack of experience in foreign affairs. Biden, a member of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, has served in Washington for 35 years. The obvious hope is that Biden will provide ballast on international affairs, and he might help Obama negotiate the political attack culture that's central to electoral battles.

I'm not sure I can add a whole lot of incisive analysis on Biden's assets or liabilities. Lots of folks have already weighed in, and we'll have a full week of near-exclusive focus on the Democratic Party, with all types of interesting analyses.

I can say that the first thing that always pops into my mind when Biden's in the news is his disastrous plagiarism scandal from the 1988 presidential primaries.

Fortunately, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred have provided some nice links to refresh our memories of Biden's ignominious debut in presidential politics. Here's this, from the Washington Post:

Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

It turns out that the Biden's Kinnock klepto-moment was not an isolated incident. Here's more from Sigmund, Carl and Alfred:

In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper. Such “stressless scholarship” as it is euphemistically called has become all too common in the modern Internet era with countless cheatsites and “research services” offering to sell students papers on topics from A to Z.

Biden’s case demonstrates that student plagiarism is nothing new. Only the methods of cheating have changed. Today, cheating has gone digital with the proliferation of Internet based paper filing and distributions systems, but the principles—or lack thereof—are the same. And as the Biden case illustrates, getting caught for such academic dishonesty may have serious ramifications for one’s political career. Joe Biden’s failed bid for the Democratic ticket is a case in point.

“Stressless scholarship” may seem like a pretty good idea at the time that many students make that decision to ‘crib’, copy, or dowload a paper off the Internet, but in Biden’s case the plagiarism of his student days came back to haunt his bid for the democratic presidential nomination like a spectre from his past.

In an article entitled “Biden’s Belly Flop”, Newsweek printed Joe Biden’s yearbook picture from his college days and a copy of his law school transcripts with the big “F” in his transcripts circled. Biden was given a chance to repeat his legal methods course, and above the “F” his retake grade of 80% was eventually penciled in. Being a repeat offender when it came to plagiarism made things much, much worse for Biden than they might have been otherwise in his failed bid for the Democratic presidential ticket in 1987.

Senator Biden’s plagiarism of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neal Kinnock took place at a campaign stump at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. In closing his speech, Biden took Kinnock’s ideas and language as if they were his very own inspired thoughts, prefacing Kinnock’s ideas with the phrase “I started thinking as I was coming over here . . . “. Little did Biden suspect that video footage of this speech would be spliced together with footage of Kinnock’s speech in an “attack video” which would be distributed by members of the Dukakis campaign.

Making the headline news in the New York Times, and the evening news on TV, the video was a stab in the back for Biden by his democratic competitor, and although he insisted that “I’m in this race to stay. I’m in this race to win,” the resulting publicity surrounding his unacknowledged use of Neal Kinnock’s speech was what eventually forced him out of the race. Name recognition was no longer a problem for Biden, but not the kind of name recognition which would assist his campaign for the democratic presidential nomination. His name was now a byword for plagiarism. His situation became a classic example of plagiarism for high school teachers and college instructors across the nation lecturing on the evils of unacknowledged source use.

You know, "Biden" really is a "byword" for plagiarism. When the Delaware Senator ran for the Democratic nomination this year, the Kinnock controversy was always front and center for me - and that's the case even though Biden appears as an otherwise good man.

But let me close with one more quote, from Tom Bevan at Real Clear Poliltics, who shares this passage on Biden's character from Peggy Noonan:

The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations--as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back--you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He's human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

More on Biden, of course, will be forthcoming. Obama's pick, for me, is a classic "birds of a feather" selection. Biden's plagiarism is a perfect accompaniment for Obama's presidential campaign of lies and deceit, seen now in the Illinios Senator's abortion and Annenberg scandals.

It's not a good sign, however, that Obama's running-mate is already being attacked as "racist," and that prominent left-wing bloggers are distressed at the pick, with one saying "I'm going to try and come around to believing I should vote for this ticket. It won't be easy."

The Secret Life of Senator Infanticide

Barack Obama's abortion extremism puts him almost alone on a scale of brutal opposition to the right to life.

Indeed, his consistency in voting against Illinois' Born Alive Protection Act has earned Obama the grand title of "Senator Infanticide." As Andrew McCarthy writes, for Obama, the protection of abortion doctors is more important that protecting the lives of children:

There wasn’t any question about what was happening. The abortions were going wrong. The babies weren’t cooperating. They wouldn’t die as planned. Or, as Illinois state senator Barack Obama so touchingly put it, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.”

No, Senator. They wouldn’t go along with the program. They wouldn’t just come out limp and dead.

They were coming out alive. Born alive. Babies. Vulnerable human beings Obama, in his detached pomposity, might otherwise include among “the least of my brothers.” But of course, an abortion extremist can’t very well be invoking Saint Matthew, can he? So, for Obama, the shunning of these least of our brothers and sisters — millions of them — is somehow not among America’s greatest moral failings.

No. In Obama’s hardball, hard-Left world, these least become “that fetus, or child — however you want to describe it.”

Most of us, of course, opt for “child,” particularly when the “it” is born and living and breathing and in need of our help. Particularly when the “it” is clinging not to guns or religion but to life.

But not Barack Obama. As an Illinois state senator, he voted to permit infanticide. And now, running for president, he banks on media adulation to insulate him from his past.

The record, however, doesn’t lie.

Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.

The child had lacked the good grace to expire as planned in an induced-labor abortion — one in which an abortionist artificially induces labor with the expectation that the underdeveloped “fetus, or child — however you want to describe it” will not survive the delivery.

Stanek encountered another nurse carrying the child to a “soiled utility room” where it would be left to die. It wasn’t that unusual. The induced-labor method was used for late-term abortions. Many of the babies were strong enough to survive the delivery. At least for a time.

So something had to be done with them. They couldn’t be left out in the open, struggling in the presence of fellow human beings. After all, those fellow human beings — health-care providers — would then be forced to confront the inconvenient question of why they were standing idly by. That would hold a mirror up to the whole grisly business.

Better the utility room. Alone, out of sight and out of mind. Next case.

Stanek’s account enraged the public and shamed into silence most of the country’s staunchest pro-abortion activists. Most, not all. Not Barack Obama.

My friend Hadley Arkes ingeniously argued that legislatures, including Congress, should take up “Born Alive” legislation: laws making explicit what decency already made undeniable: that from the moment of birth — from the moment one is expelled or extracted alive from the birth canal — a human being is entitled to all the protections the law accords to living persons.

Such laws were enacted by overwhelming margins. In the United States Congress, even such pro-abortion activists as Sen. Barbara Boxer went along.

But not Barack Obama. In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive tooth and nail.

The shocking extremism of that position — giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life — is profoundly embarrassing to him now. So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations, ranging from the assertion that he didn’t oppose the anti-infanticide legislation (he did), to the assertion that he opposed it because it didn’t contain a superfluous clause reaffirming abortion rights (it did), to the assertion that it was unnecessary because Illinois law already protected the children of botched abortions (it didn’t — and even if it arguably did, why oppose a clarification?).

What Obama hasn’t offered, however, is the rationalization he vigorously posited during the 2002 Illinois senate debate.

There's more at the link.

One of the most amazing things about all of this, is that as much as I've vehemently opposed Obama on his postmodernism and his deep ties to ideological radicalism, the news of Obama's votes against protecting babies is not only personally insulting, it feels like an assault on basic human decency.

Back in March, when we learned about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I remember thinking that it couldn't get worse for Obama than this, it couldn't get more controversial than “God damn America.”

But it has gotten worse.

What's become clear this week is that Barack Obama is an inveterate liar. He's not told the truth about his past positions on abortion (his "life lies," in David Freddosso's words), and he's also not been forthcoming on his ties to fugitive terrorist William Ayers and his leadership of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

But that's not all!

We've learned today that Obama published a brief research note in the Harvard Law Review which outlined his early pro-choice jurisprudence. What's most striking about this is not so much Obama's views (as reprehensible as they are), but that he's specifically claimed not to have authored any research during his law school tenure at Harvard University. As Ann Althouse rightly notes:

What is odd is that up until now, we'd been led to think that Obama, despite his stature as president of the Harvard Law Review, had never written anything. Once Politico tracked down the article, the campaign acknowledged that Obama had written it. But why the urge to suppress it? Obama took knocks for his supposed failure to produce any legal scholarship. It seems that abortion is just not something he wants to have to talk about.

Absolutely, and as we're seeing, it's not just abortion: From Trinity United Church of Christ to the Richard J. Daley Library at University of Illinois at Chicago to the pattern of secrecy surrounding every move of his presidential campaign, Barack Obama is engaged in a deep program of deception, dishonesty, obfuscation, and prevarication.

What's shameful is the media's protective cocoon that's enabled this perfidy. As Michael Barone asks, "Why Won't the Mainstream Media Question the Obama Narrative?"

The answer? "Obama's Secret Weapon: The Media."

It's worth a thought...

Related: "University of Illinois to Release Obama Records."

Obama Lags in Democratic Backing

Gallup reports that while more voters identify as Democratic, Democrats are less likely to support Barack Obama than are Republicans to support John McCain:

As the national political conventions are poised to start, the party orientation of U.S. voters clearly favors the Democratic Party, similar to the pattern seen for the past five months. Among all national registered voters interviewed thus far in August for the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, 35% identify as Democrats compared with 28% who identify as Republicans. An additional 36% are independents.

The current 7-point Democratic advantage in party ID expands to 10 points when the party leanings of independents are taken into account. Fifty percent of U.S. registered voters identify with or lean to the Democratic Party and 40% are Republican or lean Republican.

This Democratic advantage contrasts with the close nature of the presidential contest between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain in monthly averages of the Obama vs. McCain horse race since March....

The reasons this is not translating into a stronger lead for Obama are twofold:

1. Although Democrats outnumber Republicans in the electorate, McCain receives the support of a greater share of his party base than does Obama.

Whereas 84% of Republicans polled from Aug. 11-17 say they will vote for McCain in November, only 79% of Democrats say they will vote for Obama. A similar gap in party loyalty has been seen each week since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in early June. Over this period, Obama's Democratic support has ranged from 78% to 82% while McCain's Republican support has ranged from 83% to 85%.

2. The race has been extremely close among the roughly 36% of voters who call themselves political independents.

Since early June, Obama and McCain have swapped the lead among independents, with neither ever achieving a very large lead. Overall, Obama has averaged just a 1-point lead over McCain among independents, and in interviews conducted Aug. 11-17, the two were tied at 42%....

If each candidate were supported equally by his partisans, and independents split equally, that would translate into a 7- to 10-point lead for Obama over McCain in the race for president. But the race has been closer than that, primarily because a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats are backing their own party's candidate for president.

Going into the convention period, it thus appears that a crucial test for Obama will be winning over heretofore reluctant Democrats to his candidacy, and the challenge for McCain will be retaining his Republican base. The vice presidential selections could be key factors in both cases. At the same time, both candidates will face the challenge of attracting more independents to their candidacies. In a close race, even a slight swing in the preferences of this group could be decisive.

In other words, Obama should be much farther ahead in public opinion polls, not just in terms of voter indentification trends, but also in what's ostensibly a Democratic year with public approval ratings for George W. Bush in the low 30 percent range.

For a variety of factors, the Democrats will likely see a historically small polling bounce for Obama coming out of Denver, if he gets one at all.

As more and more revelations of the Illinois Senator's radicalism and secretism come to light, Obama's numbers may well continue their collapse. At this rate, a Michael Dukakis-style debacle in November looks increasingly possible.

Obama's Socialist Economics

Mark Hemingway points readers deep into the text of Sunday's New York Times article, "How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy":

Buried in that 8,000 (!) word NYT magazine article about Obama's economic plan that I mentioned yesterday, is this bit flagged by Geraghty at Campaign Spot:

“If you talk to Warren [Buffet], he’ll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all — let the market work, however way it’s going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it,” Obama said. “That way you’re not impeding efficiency, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.” He continued by saying that he thought there was some merit in Buffett’s argument.

Now, over at Investor's Business Daily, the newspaper discusses its recent opinion poll on markets and economic redistribution:

Candidate Obama is proposing higher taxes for those with incomes above $250,000 and lower taxes for those below that line. He has also proposed more spending for social programs. Assuming the social programs would be aimed at lower-income people, do his proposals not amount to redistribution?

Here's IBD's graph detailing the findings:

IBD's poll bolsters Gallup's earlier finding that an overwhelmingly majority of American opposes economic redisitribution, "Americans Oppose Income Redistribution to Fix Economy."

Obama's Recipe for Economic Disaster

As I reported yesterday, in "Obama's Class Warfare," and as the Los Angeles Times reports in its expose, "McCain and Obama Tax Plans Diverge on Wealth," Barack Obama has adopted a radical redistributionist economic platform, which poses risks to both taxpayers and the U.S. economy.

The McCain campaign has noticed, and it's got a new ad buy out hammering Obama's high-tax solution to current economic difficulties:

See also the penetrating editorial at Investor's Business Daily, "Just Don't Call It Socialism."

The Obama Camp, Health Care, and South Side Radicalism

The Washington Post has a major piece on the Obama camp's relationship to the University of Chicago Medical Center.

It turns out that Michelle Obama, an executive at the hospital, headed a program to foster clinical health programs in neighborhoods adjacent to the medical facility. The success of the initiative has been mixed, with some critics arguing that the medical center's goal was to reduce indigent access to the hospital's emergency room. If so, the neighborhood clinics were more about cost-cutting for Michelle Obama's employer, rather than forward-looking health care planning for the consituencies central to Democratic health reform talking points.

That said, Stanley Kurtz sees the Post's coverage of Michelle Obama's South Side Health Collaborative as an opening for a deeper discussion of the Obama campaign's deep ties to the anti-American radicals of Chicago's South Side:

The Hyde Park Herald first reported that Michelle Obama would be hired for a newly created community relations position at the University of Chicago on June 5 of 1996. Obama was to be Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University of Chicago Community Service Center, effective September 1, 1996. So Michelle Obama was appointed to a job that had never existed before, shortly after Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination in his first race for Illinois State Senate. In Hyde Park and the South Side of Chicago, the Democratic nomination is tantamount to election.

Michelle, the Herald reported, had been executive director of Public Allies Chicago since 1991. Public Allies Chicago currently partners with the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, led by noted community organizers John McKnight and Jody Kretzman. Michelle and Barack both have close links to Public Allies, to the Asset-Based Community Development Institute, to McKnight and to Kretzman. The Asset-Based Community Development Institute and its leaders are closely tied to the Gamaliel Foundation. Barack himself worked directly with the co-founder and Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation, Gregory Galluzzo. And as I show in my piece, "Senator Stealth," in the current print issue of National Review, the Gamaliel Foundation is guided by an extreme, anti-American ideology, much like Revered Wright’s. In other words, Both Michelle and Barack Obama were part of a tightly knit network of Gamaliel Foundation organizers, and the guiding ideology of Gamaliel is deeply radical and anti-American.

As the Hyde Park Herald reported in an article on Michelle’s new position on January 8, 1997, her job would be "to direct hundreds of would-be volunteers from the university to the dozens of local causes that need help." So her new and never-before-existing job put Michelle Obama in a position to effectively recruit large numbers of new organizers for the radical community groups that she and Barack worked with. As the Herald makes clear, the University of Chicago was looking to Michelle Obama’s "newly created position" to "help bridge the gap, the real one and the perceived on, that exists between the school and the Hyde Park Community."

In short, just after Barack Obama effectively secured a seat in the State Senate, the University of Chicago invented a new job, for which it hired Michelle Obama. In that job, Michelle would be able to channel University of Chicago students into the radical anti-American groups that she and her husband worked with, and whose ideology has received far too little scrutiny. Some of these organizations, even if unofficially, provided campaign workers for Barack Obama on election day (see "Senator Stealth").

So we see here an unusual arrangement between the University of Chicago and its new teacher/State Senator. The Senator’s wife provides political cover for the university with the community, in return for which the university provides a previously non-existent and prestigious position to the Senator’s wife, which allows her to funnel students into hard-left political groups that sometimes provide campaign workers to the Senator. At any rate, that’s how it looks. It seems to me that if the mainstream papers like the Post are going to look into Michelle Obama’s work bringing medical care to poor South Side residents, her earlier position and its link to politically radical–even intensely anti-American–community organizers deserves scrutiny as well.

I agree, and I would expect that the press would pick up the investigatation into the University of Illinois Chicago's cover-up of Obama's Chicago Annenberg Challenge. For more on that, see Tom Maguire, "Obama, Ayers, and the Annenberg Challenge Cover-Up."

Defining the Campaign's Iraq Narrative

I get the sense, from the response to my Iraq post this morning, and by a look around the leftosphere, that the antiwar types still think Iraq's a winning campaign issue for Barack Obama. Of course, we heard all about it last month when the leftists went ape with claims that Nouri al-Maliki had endorsed Barack Obama's 16-month plan for retreat from Iraq.

The truth is that no matter how much Democrats try to spin it, Obama's been a surrender hawk from the beginning, and he opposed the surge that has made all of this discussion possible. Not only that, McCain's runaway train in national security polling long ago left the station.

Nevertheless, as the left continues to hammer away on the "Iraq disaster" meme, it might be helpful to clarify the narrative on the war for the post-Labor Day campaign.

Thomas Donnelly makes the case in his esssay, "McCain Is the Clear and Courageous Commander in Chief":

In the end, it’s about Iraq. Sure, pocketbook and social issues matter, but the president does not command the economy or the mores of the American people. For Barack Obama, the clear call to withdraw from Iraq was the sole policy difference with Hillary Clinton; the rest was personality. For John McCain, the clear call to stay the course was the rallying point that brought his candidacy back from the graveyard.

Thus the presidential contest remains, most centrally, a contest to define the Iraq narrative, both in content and meaning. To Senator Obama, it was a mistake from the start and a strategic sideshow that diverted American attention from finishing the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. To Senator McCain, Iraq was the central front in the struggle against Islamic extremism and in what we have come to call “the long war” to build a more liberal and stable order in the greater Middle East. So when the candidates made back-to-back appearances before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, the Iraq debate was the lead item in both candidates’ speeches, elbowing aside any discussion of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and even the necessary kowtowing on the subject of veterans’ benefits.

Senator McCain spoke on Monday and went right at it: “Though victory in Iraq is finally in sight, a great deal still depends on the decisions and good judgment of the next president…. The lasting advantage of a peaceful and democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East could still be squandered by hasty withdrawal and arbitrary timelines.” The success of the Iraq surge has reinforced Senator McCain’s belief in his own judgment and the possibility of victory.

Senator Obama isn’t backing down from the narrative of trying to minimize the consequences of what he sees as an Iraq defeat. To him the surge was a costly failure: “We have lost over 1,000 American lives and spent billions of dollars since the surge began, but Iraq’s leaders still haven’t made hard compromises or substantial investments in rebuilding their country.” Echoing the line long ago advanced by Carl Levin, the Democratic senator from Michigan and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Barack Obama argues that a redeployment from Iraq within 16 months is the only way to “press the Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”

It was also revealing to note where the speeches sought sources of authority for their arguments. Senator McCain cited Gen. David Petraeus and “our troops on the ground when they say, as they have on my many trips to Iraq, ‘Let us win. Just let us win.’” Senator Obama noted that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, has embraced his 16-month withdrawal timetable.

How the candidates interpret the larger strategic meaning of Iraq uncovers an even deeper divide. Senator McCain sees Iraq as one theater — the central theater — among many in the long war. Underlying that analysis is a traditional understanding of geopolitical realities: Iraq is an inherently strong and oil-rich nation in the Arab heartland (a view shared, as it happens, by Osama bin Laden). Senator Obama sees Afghanistan and the tribal areas that have been Al Qaeda sanctuaries as the key front. While he realizes that these may be inherently poor and powerless regions in the traditional sense, he still sees the struggle as a “war on terrorism” and Al Qaeda in particular. In sum, we have a choice between the broad and narrow interpretations of what the war is.

Americans haven’t quite decided which of these Iraq narratives they prefer, which is why the presidential race is essentially a tie. According to a Reuters/Zogby poll released Wednesday morning, John McCain has overtaken Barack Obama. Americans prefer commanders in chief who exhibit clarity and courage rather than nuance and intellect, Dwight Eisenhower to Adlai Stevenson. That’s an advantage for John McCain.

As David Gergen noted on Wednesday, Barack Obama needs "a game changer," and the change needed is to shift the campaign's narrative away from national security.

See also, Josh Hartman, "Obama Lacks Substance That McCain Displays."

McCain-Lieberman 2008?

As I noted previously, the selection of Joseph Lieberman as John McCain's running mate would probably cause a revolt at the GOP Convention in Minneapolis. The safe choice is Mitt Romney, who - for all is flaws - would energize the Republican base, and would probably be the ultimate salve in healing whatever scars are left over from the primaries.

What I didn't note is that I'm secretly favoring a Lieberman pick. Naturally, for me, as a dreaded "neocon," McCain couldn't possible select a better running-mate than an Israel-backing war hawk who has denounced the Democratic Party as beholden to netroots extremists. If McCain really plays the "Maverick" in tapping the Connecticut Senator, let's just say, with apologies to McDonald's, that I'm lovin' it!

I found a pleasant surprise in the Wall Street Journal's essential endorsement of Lieberman yesterday:

Our own view is that Mr. Lieberman would make a fine Secretary of State, and that, given the political risks, making him vice president would probably be too great an election gamble. But Mr. Lieberman's national security credentials are first-rate, and we've known him long enough to remember his opposition to an income tax in Connecticut, and his support for lower capital gains taxes, school vouchers and private Social Security accounts. Liberated from having to run as a Democrat, he might recall those policy instincts.

We have no doubt he'd be a better vice president than many oft-mooted Republicans, including some of those who are favorites of the anti-Lieberman alarmists.

Lieberman's also solidly conservative on moral issues - recall in the 2000 presidential camapaign, the Senator took issue with the Hollywood film industry's infatuation with sex and violence, and in 1998 Lieberman denounced former President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky as "immoral."

Yet, for all of Lieberman's conservative assets, it's hard to dismiss Captain Ed's observation that his selection as veep "will convince an already-skeptical GOP base that McCain is a RINO."

Still, speculation's swirling over a potential Lieberman pick, and what's surprising is the warm reception the idea's getting in some for the deepest corner's of the right-wing universe.

For example, National Review's Rich Lowry supports a McCain-Lieberman ticket as part of a one-term pledge for a McCain administration (McCain, of course, should never pledge to serve one term, as he'd be a lame-duck from the moment he took office). Also, Dan Schnur, McCain's national communications director in 2000, is making the case for McCain as well:

Speculation has grown in recent days that Mr. McCain is still considering Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic-turned-independent senator from Connecticut, as a potential running mate, which frames the two sides of John McCain in stark relief. On one hand, he is an unconventional politician who has made a career out of violating partisan and establishment norms. But he is also a strong conservative, not just on the national security issues on which he and Mr. Lieberman agree, but also on economic and social policy matters on which Al Gore’s former running mate is well to the left of center.

Mr. McCain is also a very visceral politician, someone who works best with those with whom he has close personal ties. That type of comfort level is critically important to him, so Mr. Lieberman’s presence next to him would undoubtedly make him a much more effective candidate and more successful president as well.

Even though Mr. Lieberman has largely isolated himself from congressional Democrats by becoming an independent, his political history allows Mr. McCain to plausibly make the case that he is reaching across party lines with the selection. And there’s no doubt that the current crisis between Russia and Georgia puts a premium on Mr. Lieberman’s foreign policy experience and underscores his support for Mr. McCain’s approach to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the most important benefit that Mr. Lieberman would bring to the ticket is that it would allow Mr. McCain to be a maverick again. There is nothing that John McCain treasures more dearly than his nonconformist reputation, the idea that he’s a different breed of politician. Even as he makes up ground in the polls, pulling even or slightly ahead this week, he has done so by running a very effective, yet extremely conventional campaign. Make no mistake: John McCain would rather be a president than a maverick. But in his ideal world, you have to believe he’d like to do both.

I'm sold, personally, except I dread a long post-Labor Day war with the Coulter-Malkin-Limbaugh axis of evisceration should McCain throw the conservative base under the bus with a Lieberman selection.

Most of all, however, I want to win, and as Ronald Brownstein notes, bipartisan "unity tickets" haven't done well historically, so I'm going to say again, "better safe than sorry."

For more on that, see "Republicans Worry That McCain Pick Will Rile Party Base."

Iraqi Army Stands Up

Last summer, the antiwar debate focused on Iraq's presumed failure to meet congressionally-mandated benchmarks on political and military progress. In spring 2008, prominent leftists claimed Iraq's army was disastrously weak, going so far to announce that "the Iraqi Army is forever too weak to be an effective force without massive American presence."

Well, it turns out this morning's Wall Street Journal has some news for the "reality-based community": The developments of the Iraqi army have been so substantial that they are facilitating the drawdown of U.S. troops under the new bilateral security pact:

The Bush administration's preliminary security pact with Iraq calls for withdrawing most American combat troops by 2011, a development that seemed almost unthinkable even a few months ago.

One reason they're thinking about it now: the new assertiveness of Iraqi soldiers such as Brig. Gen. Sabah Fadhil Motar al-Azawi. His brigade helped chase militants from Ramadi and wrest control of Basra from the once-feared Mahdi Army. Now, it's helping to push the U.S. out of Iraq.

Several factors have helped bring a withdrawal deal closer. Tribal leaders from the Sunni Muslim sect turned against the terrorist group al Qaeda in Iraq; the Mahdi Army called a cease-fire; and the U.S. began a new counterinsurgency strategy, deploying units to small outposts in Iraqi towns and neighborhoods.

But above all, the Iraqi army has needed to reverse a track record of high-profile failures. In earlier years, Iraqi forces often fled and left heavy fighting to the U.S. Now the Iraqis are mounting large-scale operations in restive areas like Diyala Province, a longtime stronghold of Sunni insurgents, and holding large swaths of territory -- 10 of Iraq's 18 provinces -- largely on their own.

"History is replete with armed forces having to get bloodied a little bit before they get better," says Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, who commands U.S. forces in central and southern Iraq. He says the Iraqi forces have improved from five years of fighting and from mentoring by U.S. military advisers. The recent surge in U.S. troop levels allowed senior commanders to deploy larger numbers of American trainers, accelerating the Iraqis' improvements, U.S. officials believe.

The U.S. gives Iraqi troops access to American air power and helps them resupply their forces, but many of the Iraqi units plan and conduct their operations independently. In many of the Iraq army's 10 provinces there are no U.S. troops at all, and where there are, U.S. troops coordinate their operations with the Iraqis. When the former Soviet country of Georgia unexpectedly recalled its 2,000-soldier contingent to fight the Russians, Iraqis, not Americans, were sent to replace them.

The Iraqi army's growing capabilities bolstered Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's insistence on setting at least a rough timetable for U.S. withdrawal. The preliminary security pact calls for the Iraqi army to take responsibility for all major cities next summer, with most U.S. combat forces withdrawing to the outskirts and then leaving the country altogether by 2011.

The pact still has to be formally approved by the Bush administration and several layers of Iraqi government. Some of its provisions -- including the target dates -- could still change before it's final, and the draft also allows for U.S. and Iraqi officials to jointly change the withdrawal goals later based on security conditions.

Senior American military officers in Baghdad say, however, that the final agreement is virtually certain to retain the U.S. commitment to gradually withdraw its combat forces and turn missions over to the Iraqis. "Everyone understands that the clock is ticking," one senior officer said. "We're not leaving tomorrow, but it's the beginning of the end."

The prospect of major U.S. withdrawals comes at a pivotal moment in the five-year-old war here. The recent numbers of U.S. and Iraqi casualties are down; the 13 American military personnel killed in July were the lowest monthly death toll since the 2003 invasion. Iraqi troop and civilian casualties also have been falling steadily for months, to a fraction of their peak about 18 months ago. The Iraqi economy is growing sharply because of soaring oil revenues, and Mr. Maliki's political standing is at an all-time high.

Many potential pitfalls, both military and political, remain. The Iraqi government has spent little of its oil windfall to improve basic services for its citizens. Most Iraqis only get roughly 12 hours of electricity per day, despite billions of dollars in U.S.-funded reconstruction projects. A long-sought law setting up provincial elections remains bottled up in Iraq's fractious Parliament. Corruption remains endemic.

There is no guarantee that Iraqi forces will continue to improve -- or even maintain their current levels of performance. Iraqi units in many parts of the country complain that they are chronically short of fuel, ammunition and spare parts for their vehicles. The army's performance can vary widely across the country, says Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University who studies the Iraq war and visited Basra this summer.

"You have new units fresh from basic training that sometimes desert and then you have older units that have had years of American advising and fight quite well," he says. "There's no doubt they're a lot better than they used to be, but there's still tremendous variation from unit to unit."

There's more at the link.

See also, Long War Journal, "Iraqi Army Beefs Up Armored Forces."