Barack Obama has a good question:

Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also wants a quick end to the war. On Friday, he said: “”We still don’t have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. (John) Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?”

Matt Stoller observes, however, that Democrats are hardly on the same page over this and many are moving with worse framing. At the end of the day, however, though the tactical ins-and-outs of the surge are interesting in an academic sense, they’re only really relevant if you agree to ignore the strategic issues that Obama is raising.

John McCain’s latest big foreign policy speech was, bizarrely, reported as him positioning himself as more moderate than George W. Bush. Talking to rightwing radio, though, McCain is singing a different tune, emphasizing that “no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.” He goes on to explain that “there are many national security issues that I have strongly supported the president and steadfastly so.”

In some respects, though, McCain has been a less-than-steadfast supporter of Bush. He, for example, spent most of 1999 and 2000 criticizing Bush for being unwilling to adopt a doctrine of rogue state rollback. Back in 2002 while Bush was unwilling to publicly argue for invading Iraq, McCain was doing it. And while Bush was full of talk about disarmament, McCain was clear from the start that he would settle only for regime change. McCain spent a lot of time criticizing Bush for not sending enough Americans over to Iraq to be killed, and has also been known to criticize Bush for insufficient saber-rattling directed at such countries as Iran, Syria, and Russia. So, really, it’s not fair to say that McCain is just like Bush — he’s been a much more consistent proponent of the worst policies associated with the Bush administration.

I think we should be doing more to ameliorate poverty in America, but I don’t really think appointing a cabinet-level poverty-fighting guy would accomplish much to that end. The country badly needs sensible energy policies, but merely having a Department of Energy doesn’t accomplish that, any more than the Department of Transportation’s existence necessitates sound transportation policy. To fight poverty effectively, you need effective poverty-fighting policies — the precise details of the org chart don’t really matter, it’s not the kind of thing where the ins-and-outs of the chain of command are going to have a huge impact. If a new cabinet member is the symbolic manifestation of a substantive policy shift, then great. But if it’s a symbolic substitute for really changing anything, then who needs it. Cabinet status isn’t a magic powder that solves problems on its own.

In response to the bad jobs news, John McCain promises to continue George W. Bush’s policies and warns that “Democrats will continue to advance their anti-growth agenda.” But of course it’s easy to recall, and very easy to show with a graph that job performance was much, much, much better when the Democrats were in charge.

The period of job growth under Bush was slower growth than the Clinton-era growth period. And on top of that, the Clinton years were years of basically uninterrupted job growth, whereas the Bush administration has seen two separate employment downturns. Under the circumstances, the case for continuing with Bush’s policies seems like a bad idea — indeed, as John McCain argued back in 2001, Bush’s policies were a bad idea in the first place. But now McCain loves those policies and wants to continue them because, basically, all he cares about is acquiring power so he can start more wars and he’s decided that the Tax Cut Gospel is his best chance.