maybe it should be mccain

**UPDATE** although this essay was written with half-serious intentions, it should now read as, at worst, a joke, and at its best it can be considered an exercise in critical thinking. as the final paragraph made clear, the onus was on mccain to show us the improvement in iraq. and then came THE Photo Op...the one where he talked about safer strolls through the market in baghdad than ever before...while being protected by the entire united states army. so yeah, he's pretty much dead in the water, which seems worth mentioning.















the '08 presidential election is a long ways off and yet john mccain finds himself in an early hole.

according to rasmussenreports.com:

Arizona Senator John McCain (R), now trails Giuliani by twenty percentage points. For the second straight week, the Rasmussen Reports poll measured McCain’s support at just 15%. That’s the lowest level of support measured so far for the man who began the campaign season as the presumed frontrunner. For the full month of March, McCain’s support has averaged just 16%, down from 18% in February and 21% in January.

at this rate, johnny mac will be down to 0% before the end of the year, which must be embarrassing for his campaign backers. of course, conventional wisdom says that mccain's faltering support is directly related to his iraq strategy: namely, that he wants to keep The Troops in the desert until things get better (also important: he wants to add more troops to the region, not subtract). the majority of the american republic tends to disagree with mr. mccain on this front, which is hurting his popularity.

but here's the kicker: what if mccain is right? what if staying in iraq is the right thing to do? i, like so many others, have refused to even consider this strategy to this point. for me it was simple: if we aren't stabilizing iraq then why are we there? let's get out.

down the line, the dems are telling us whatever we want to hear. they are speaking in terms of exit strategies. they are passing antiwar bills in the House. they are declaring bush a failure, and rightfully so. bush has failed. but still, there is a concern that the dems are overcompensating for bush's mistakes, like they want to leave iraq just to zag away from the president, to prove his war was a failure, to gain the fleeting support of a fickle public. but wouldn't it be foolish to pull the troops in spite of the president?

leaving iraq before it has legs to stand on could lead to seriously dangerous results in the region. yet i don't here the big-boy dems talking about this, which is troubling.

mccain, on the other hand, knows he's killing himself by siding with the surge. *he knows this!* yet he remains faithful to his conviction. and his conviction is based on the fact that he's been studying the circumstances in iraq on his own. his opinion seems to have little to do with focus groups and polling. mccain seems genuinely like he's just trying to do the right thing. and today on cnn he said that the new approach in iraq is starting to show some positive results, which helps secure him in his convictions.

as much as i like the idea of obama or the charm of edwards or the clintonness of hillary, i can't help but find the do-the-right-thing-know-matter-how-you're-perceived mccain to be honorable and also electable.

however, standing by such tough medicine makes this a hard sell to the general public. if he wants to regain favor with the polls, john mccain must explain to us in plain english the progress that is being made in iraq.