As he got his presidential campaign going, John McCain wound up flip-flopping on several crucial issues saying he would vote against his own immigration bill, repudiating his record on taxes to embrace Bush’s record, etc. But lately the campaign just seems to be off the rails, and unable to decide what McCain’s stance is on various topics. For example, McCain and McCain’s spokesman can’t agree on whether or not increasing the payroll tax cap should be “on the table” in terms of changing Social Security. It’s a point McCain has gone back-and-forth on many, many times over the course of the campaign.

Similarly, just yesterday we had McCain surrogates suggesting that McCain was going to abandon his support for cap and trade. Is he? Maybe with the Olympics coming up and the expected attendant lull in campaign coverage, Team McCain can slow down and huddle for a couple of weeks in Arizona to just go down the checklist and figure out where they stand on these issues. Hold some conference calls. Something. Is it possible that if McCain knew how to use email that he could maybe send some remarks out and get everyone on the same page?

Chris Bowers proclaims that if Barack Obama picks Tim Kaine as his VP nominee that “would also signal that Obama has no intention to govern as a progressive” whereas “by contrast, Obama / Sebelius would be fine, and Obama / Dodd would be exciting.” This seems to me to be reading way too much into the VP selection. Ronald Reagan’s selection of George H.W. Bush much more presaged Bush becoming a conservative than Reagan becoming a moderate.

The best guide to how Obama intends to govern isn’t who he picks as VP, it’s the stuff he’s said about how he intends to govern and what he hopes to accomplish. That’d put him to the left of the Clinton-Gore era of the Democratic Party but to the right of the Open Left vision of where the party ought to be, and that’ll still be the case no matter who Obama picks.

I didn’t see this AFP story last week:

The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk — either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.

“I’ll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups,” Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.

This, I think, does more than a little to underscore the limits of the “bribe our former enemies to be our friends” approach to Iraq. Of course, though the limits are real so are the possibilities. If keeping these guys on the payroll indefinitely were really crucial to American national security, I’m pretty sure we could find a way to work things out for quite a while. But it really isn’t crucial to American national security. Having insurgents not shooting at US troops is much preferable to the previous situation, but insofar as the safety of our soldiers is the primary concern then getting the soldiers out of Iraq is a much more reasonable long-term strategy.

The “cash for allies” approach makes sense as a way to make a military presence more sustainable in a place where the presence is strategically important. But for some time now, the main strategic purpose of our presence in Iraq seems to be simply to sustain our presence in Iraq. That’s not a good enough reason.

John McCain is asked whether he would order US forces to strike Osama bin Laden in Pakistan if they had a read on his location, and he bizarrely doesn’t commit to doing so citing Pakistani sovereignty as his concern. That seems a bit odd to me; it’s well-known and well-understood (though perhaps not by McCain) that the Pakistani government doesn’t exercise effective control over significant swathes of its nominal territory and that this is a large part of the problem of al-Qaeda hideouts there.

Under the circumstances, Pakistani sovereignty can’t be your top concern. The legitimate hesitation (though perhaps not the thing to say during an election) I would have before blasting away at OBL would have to do with collateral damage. Killing or capturing bin Laden would be an excellent thing to do, but with any of these targets it’s probably more important to check first and make sure you’re not also going to blow up a school bus or something as you go after the main target.