As Clinton and Obama continue to fight things out, it falls to the DNC to attack John McCain:
Ambinder says it’s “a preview of how they’ll run against him in the fall.” If so, the good news is that they’re going straight at his alleged strength on national security. The weakness, though, is that this attack really has nothing to do with the issue at hand. It’s good as a side dish or an appetizer, but the point needs to rest at some point not on McCain’s occasionally contradictory mumbling but on his ideas. The Bush years have seen repeated disasters in U.S. foreign policy, and those disasters have been the consequences of Bush’s ideas about America’s role in the world, ideas that John McCain seems to share.
This is inherently a bit difficult to do without a nominee, since making a meatier critique of McCain’s ideas is probably going to require sketching out a bit more of an alternative set of ideas. At some point, though, it’s going to have to be done. This kind of poking fun at McCain is a good way to try to take the guy down a peg or two, but at the end of the idea he’s still going to be a war hero and Clinton or Obama won’t be — purely personal critiques aren’t going to cut it for the long haul.