Obama Hearts the Surge

[silverscreenselect]

Whenever you get Obama off his teleprompter and his speechwriters he's in trouble, as he indicated last night in his talk with Bill O'Reilly:

http://tinyurl.com/6g6xzg

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated, "

"I already said it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Obama doesn't need Biden or Hillary to provide opposition sound bites. He's doing a good enough job of providing them on his own.

Appearing on O'Reilly on the day of McCain's convention speech was in poor taste (traditionally, the opposing candidate keeps a low profile for that brief period of time out of respect), but it also is proving to be exceptionally poor judgment on his part as well. There's three more days of Obama's "interview" with O'Reilly to come and I'm sure the Republicans are just eager to hear what he has to say next.

Palin has already used Obama's words in her stump speech to the effect that John McCain foresaw the success of the surge last year and staked his career on it.

And as I already indicated, I think the surge was minimally successful in changing the picture on the ground in Iraq. Pretty much the same thing would have happened at the same troop levels if we had decided to start paying off the various militias two years earlier (when they first suggested it) rather than shooting it out with them in Fallujah.

It's too late now for Obama to take this tack, if he even realizes it. The time to do something was back when the story about the Anwar "miracle" began by reframing the dialogue by praising Petraeus for realizing that the quickest way out of Iraq was to "work closely" with these local militias that Bush had been treating as all part of the enemy up until then.