During Obama’s visit to Israel and Palestine he went to the Yad Vashem which is Israel’s Holocaust museum. As is customary, he signed the guestbook in which he wrote:
“Let our children come here and know this history so they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again.’ And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us and who have become symbols of the human spirit.”
Seems innocent enough, right? A powerful comment that I don’t think anyone would disagree with. Well…apparently some people have a problem with what he said. After he wrote this, the McCain camp lashed out at Obama in which the basically labelled him as flip-flopping on genocide. Tucker Bounds emailed out that quote paired with the following quote from an AP article:
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
What they were essentially arguing was that Obama said earlier that the military shouldn’t be used to stop genocides, and then turning around and writing in the guest book that we’ll never let another one happen. Ironically, just a little bit later in the same quote he essentially calls out the hypocrisy of wanting to prevent a genocide in Iraq (which could be argued that we enabled) while letting full blown ethnic cleansing like the Congo go unimpeded (I suppose the argument could be extended to Darfur as well).
But when the McCain campaign was asked to clarify what it was that they were trying to say, Michael Goldfarb said the following:
“Today he says ‘never again.’ A year ago stopping genocide wasn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. Doesn’t that strike you as inconsistent?”
Well, first off, Obama has said explicitly that there will still be US forces in Iraq after the main forces have been withdrawn so if ethnic cleansing began, we would have a presence there to prevent it until larger peacekeeping forces can be brought in to secure the country.
But really, this whole effort to try and paint Obama as “inconsistent” on genocide serves only to highlight the nightmare of a week that McCain has been having. After having a shakeup in his campaign amid calls from other Republicans, he inserted Bush 2004 campaigner and close friend of Karl Rove Steve Schmidt as Campaign Manager. This change doesn’t seemed to have helped the campaign, though, as McCain has become increasingly defensive and hostile to the point where they are whining about the media not covering him and passing out luggage tags that say “Junior Varsity, Stuck Covering America” to those reporters who are traveling with him.
I doubt that this stumbling on the part of McCain will continue because we all know that campaigns have their ups and downs and this was just one of those times. What enhanced all of this, I think, was that Obama has been having an outstanding week that’s been almost free of mistakes and has shown him in a Presidential spotlight. You could even argue that this was the product of McCain’s design because of the pressure he and the RNC put on Obama to travel to the Middle East.
Either way, the most telling part will be how McCain recovers from these mistakes and gets their campaign back on the right track. They’ll need to try and do something to capture the media cycle for at least a few days with something like a VP announcement.
