Why? It's a) simplistic and b) counterproductive.

On Sunday, former NATO commander (and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate) Wesley Clark made some provacative remarks about John McCain on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president," Clark said. "[McCain] has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn't a wartime squadron." (This echoed Clark's earlier claims that McCain has "never had leadership in crisis, or in anything larger than his own element on an aircraft carrier or [in managing] his own congressional staff.")

Many rank-and-file Democrats applauded Clark for his candor. "It's about time that someone told the truth (some of it) about Sen. McCain," Stumper reader D.R. wrote this afternoon in an email message. "He is not the hero that he or the media professes him to be, and there should be more questions about his life." This was hardly surprising. Attacking your opponent's strength is Rovian Political Theory 101, and there are few Dems better credentialed than Clark--who began his 30 year military career serving and sustaining injuries in Vietnam and would up successfully commanding NATO forces in the Kosovo War as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe--to lead a potential onslaught.

Unfortunately, questioning whether McCain's military service prepared him for the presidency isn't an onslaught worth leading. It's not that Clark's analysis is wrong; it's that it's so narrowminded and obvious that it doesn't do any damage at all. Of course spending five years as a POW doesn't automatically qualify McCain to take over the free world. No one--not even McCain himself--would argue that it does. There are only a few jobs, in fact, that provide direct, transferable training for the Oval Office--the vice presidency, the governorship of a large, complex state and/or military command service. Neither McCain nor Barack Obama has held any of these gigs, which means that Clark completely misses the point. Without a past "presidential"-seeming position to base their decision on, a la Dwight Eisenhower or Ulysses S. Grant, voters must instead examine all the available data points--the candidate's positions, plans, Senate votes and personal biographies--to determine who they trust to lead the country. Hiring a president isn't like hiring an accountant; there's no job like the presidency, so it's an informed leap of faith. To hint that McCain's searing Vietnam experience--especially his refusal to accept Vietnamese offers of early release--doesn't tell us something about his character, his sense of duty, his determination and therefore what sort of person he is and what sort of president he would be is simply absurd. It's not the whole picture. It's not his one and only qualification. But, like Obama's decision to forgo lucrative law jobs after college and work as a community organizer in Chicago, it's an undeniably, fundamentally relevant part of our portrait of a potential leader.

In the end, Clark's simplistic dismissal did little to hurt McCain. But it did hurt Obama. For starters, it provided the McCain campaign with the pretext to slam the Illinois senator for supposedly not living up to his lofty standards. Clark is not an Obama staffer, and Chicago did not sanction his statement; in fact, Clark supported Hillary Clinton until the bitter end. But as soon as the words "fighter plane" slipped out of his mouth on Sunday, Team McCain issued a pair of outraged statements attacking the candidate, not Clark. "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to question John McCain's military service, that's their right," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said at the time, conveniently ignoring the fact that Obama (and Clark, for the record) constantly calls McCain an "American hero" and expresses deep respect for his service. "But let's please drop the pretense that Barack Obama stands for a new type of politics. The reality is he's proving to be a typical politician who is willing to say anything to get elected, including allowing his campaign surrogates to demean and attack John McCain's military service record."

This was ridiculous, but it put Obama on the defensive, forcing him to do his opponent's PR work for him. "No one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign," Obama said today in Independence, Missouri. "And that goes for supporters on both sides. We must always express our profound gratitude for the service of our men and women in uniform. Period." (Spokesman Bill Burton added that Obama "rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark.") Finally, the media seized Clark's comments and cranked out a round of stories linking them to earlier (and often far more offensive) attacks--including the accusation that McCain was a North Vietnamese collaborator--leveled largely by fringe commentators who have even less to do with Obama's campaign than Clark (and would've been ignored in earlier, pre-Internet election cycles). This gave Team McCain cover to claim, as Rogers told reporters this morning, that "[this] is a pattern... Barack Obama wants to make... part of his campaign"--ensuring that questions of whether Democrats are conspiring to "Swiftboat" an honorable soldier would dominate the news for at least another 24 hours. Again, ridiculous. But today, Obama wanted us to talk about his patriotism. Instead we're talking about this.

In the end, it isn't difficult to see why Clark probably just lost his spot on Obama's veep list. As Ben Smith wrote this morning, "McCain's heroism is too well-established, and a climate of respect for soldiers too strong, for attacks on his service to do anything but backfire." Whether you agree with Clark or not, it doesn't take a pollster to determine which side of this particular debate most voters will favor: the side that seems to be questioning whether five years of torture, broken limbs, stabbings and starvation are relevant (or worse), or the side that is defending that record from criticism. The costs of Clark's comments simply outweigh the benefits. There are plenty of things Democrats can (and should) say about McCain. But as Obama knows, dismissing his service isn't one of them.
 

On May 27, I assessed the chances of John McCain choosing former Massachusetts governor and rival for the Republican nomination Mitt Romney as his running mate. My conclusion? That Romney would a) "help dispel doubts about the managerial and economic acumen of his partner, a career legislator"; b) "could very well boost his boss's bid in the increasingly purple swing state of Michigan, where his father was governor and the Romney brand is strong"; c) "could also help close the massive fundraising gap between McCain and Barack Obama" thanks to his "proven skill at soliciting donations and a personal fortune of $250 million"; and d) "would probably do the most of all the potential picks to excite dispirited, ground-level Republicans." In the end, I concluded that Romney's odds were only "moderate," mostly because of McCain's "lingering animosity" toward Mitt. "In the wake of Romney's February withdrawal, it was widely reported that Team McCain considered their recently vanquished rival an unprincipled opportunist," I wrote. "And in interviews and speeches at the time, the candidate was barely able to keep his contempt in check." But overall, I was bullish--prompting commenters (and at least one reporter who'd spent the winter covering Romney) to call me, in effect, crazy.

Turns out I wasn't crazy enough. Over at the Politico, F.O.S. (Friend of Stumper) Mike Allen is reporting this afternoon that--surprise!--"Romney is at the top of the vice presidential prospect list for John McCain." "One of the chief reasons the Massachusetts governor is looking so attractive is his ability to raise huge amounts of money quickly through his former business partners and from fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," writes Allen. "McCain sources tell Politico that they believe Romney could raise $50 million in 60 days. One close Romney adviser said it could even be $60 million." The rest of Romney's advantages will sound familiar to Stumper readers as well: he's "squeaky-clean and fully vetted by the national media"; he "has presidential looks and bearing and immediately would be a strong campaigner who could be trusted to stay on message"; and his "family’s Michigan roots would help in a swing state that went Democratic in 2004." Same goes for the major minus: "McCain remains less than enamored with Romney." Seems like Team McCain and I see eye to eye.

Though the character clash could ultimately derail a GOP "dream ticket," I can't help but conclude (at this admittedly early stage) that Romney is the man to watch. Over at the New Republic, Noam Scheiber asks if "McCain stays within the public financing system for the general election, how useful is the money Romney raises?" Pretty useful, I'd imagine. If McCain opts in, Romney can divert the dinero to the RNC; if he opts out, the cash will go directly to the candidate's coffers. Anything that can cut into Barack Obama's estimated $100 million general-election advantage is hugely helpful--even if, as Scheiber notes, there'd only be 60 days or so to spend it. What's more, the other major objection to Mitt--"concerns about whether his Mormon faith could imperil McCain in Southern states that Obama hopes to put into play"--is, I think, overplayed. Yes, evangelicals are deeply suspicious of Mormons. But I'm not convinced that the difference in evangelical turnout between, say, a McCain-Pawlenty ticket and a McCain-Romney ticket is enough to sink the Arizona senator in the South and Midwest. Why? Well, I suspect that the evangelicals who'd stay home because Romney is No. 2 are the ones most likely to already be staying home because of McCain, and that he won't be able (given the importance of appealing to moderates, too) to pick running mate who'd win back enough of those hardliners to make a significant electoral difference. In other words, McCain has an evangelical turnout problem with or without Romney, so it may be savvier to pick a veep--maybe Romney, maybe not--who can shore him up in red swing states like Colorado and Nevada (where there happen to be a lot of Mormons) while helping to flip a blue swing state like Michigan.
 

In which Stumper examines the Republican nominee's possible--and not-so-possible--vice-presidential picks. (Previous McCain installments: Bobby Jindal; Mitt Romney; Charlie Crist; Tim Pawlenty. Previous Obama installments: Ted Strickland; Jim Webb; Wes Clark; Hillary Clinton.

In this week's dead-tree NEWSWEEK--our annual superduper Global Literacy summer special on "What You Need to Know"--my colleagues Evan Thomas and Jonathan Darman debate whether flip-flopping makes the flip-flopper a typical, opportunistic pol (Evan) or a flexible public servant (Jon). Obviously, there's a ton of gray area here. But with much of the punditocracy obsessing over McCain's seemingly expedient reversals and Obama's post-primary maneuvering, it's one of the key questions in presidential politics right now. So check out these excerpts and weigh in below. The comments are all yours.

THOMAS: Candidates Think Flip Flopping Is the Only Way to Win Elections 

Since he clinched the nomination, Obama has become a fairly traditional presidential candidate, shoring up the party base by telling interest groups what they want to hear. With polls showing a weakness with Jewish voters in Florida, a key swing state, Obama recently made a get-tough-with-Iran show of support for Israel before AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. To be sure, his show of devotion to Israel was no more fervent than John McCain's. McCain, too, has become an uncharacteristically cautious pol of late. The candidate who once loved to riff on the record for hours with reporters can now be seen reading his talking points from index cards. Just before he secured the GOP nomination in March, McCain seemed wistful about the free-wheeling old days. Appearing before reporters, flanked by two handlers, McCain said, "I think they think I'm going to say something I shouldn't." He raised his eyebrows as though he were a rebellious teenager talking about his overly strict parents.

Neither Obama nor McCain seems to enjoy the role of political hack. McCain has a slightly pained or hangdog look when he starts trying to appease the Republican right. Obama gets testy or huffy when reporters draw attention to his expediency. Last week, after the L.A. fund-raiser, a reporter asked him why he had abandoned the federal finance system. "Well, we talked about this, I think in Florida, I answered almost exactly the same question," he said in an exasperated tone, as if a candidate should never have to answer the same question twice over several days. "So, I will say it again," he said, and launched wearily into an elaborate and not altogether candid speech about his reliance on small donors.

The 2008 election was supposed to be different. McCain and Obama were the refreshing outsiders, the antipoliticians who fulfilled the public's desire for change. McCain had the bracing idea of putting on a road show with his rival this summer—standing on the same stage to debate the great issues, no reporters to ask canned questions. McCain wanted to debate every week, but Obama—wary of McCain's skills in informal "town hall" settings—suggested only two debates. The negotiations collapsed in accusations of bad faith.

It may be inevitable that presidential candidates become less free-spirited as they enter the general election. "When you get to the general, every huckster and ad man and consultant wants in," says Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. "And the consultants always push you to the lowest common denominator … Candidates are afraid to abandon the conventional wisdom of consultants, that the way to win is to be handled, controlled, scrubbed of all your rough edges."

DARMAN: The Noble History of Flip Flopping

It is worth remembering, before the depression sets in too deep, that flip-flopping has a noble history in this country. In his first run for the presidency, Abraham Lincoln vowed not to force the end of slavery in the South. But by his second Inaugural, he could swear that, God willing, "every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword." Where was the greatness when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964? In the fact that a white politician, who'd come of age in Jim Crow Texas and had been a sometime segregationist in the Senate, knew he was sacrificing his party's domination of the South—and did the right thing all the same. What made Bobby Kennedy's antiwar campaign of 1968 so remarkable? In part, the fact that he had been the fiercest of cold warriors, a lieutenant to Joseph McCarthy himself. Schoolchildren know what grace means in America: I once was lost but now am found,'twas blind but now I see.

That doesn't mean that the men who seek to replace him should feel free to reinvent themselves with full impunity. But the partisan activists, and perhaps especially the press, ought to give them the chance to prove that their conversions have been genuine ones. Rather than obsessing over the flip-flops, we might dig deeper at the motives behind them. When was Obama being honest: last year when he supported public financing, or now, when he has abandoned it? What does that say about him as a man? Does John McCain really now believe in offshore drilling? Or is he just taking advantage of anxiety over the high price of gas? Both McCain and Obama are seeking the White House in a year when the new president will have to restore Americans' faith in so many things, not least in courageous conversion narratives. How do they do that? By starting with three words seldom heard in contemporary politics: "I was wrong."
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

IN FLAG CITY, FALSE OBAMA RUMORS ARE FLYING
(Eli Saslow, Washington Post)
On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance... Here in Findlay, a Rust Belt town of 40,000, false rumors about Obama have built enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography. Born on the Internet, the rumors now meander freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio -- through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants... Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his "love of country"? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin? Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?

'IT'S OVER, LADY'
(Maureen Dowd, New York Times) 
Unity was spared the banality of unanimity... When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears. As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears. When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears. “Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.

OBAMA'S IRAQ PROBLEM
(George Packer, New Yorker)
Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.”

THE OBAMA AGENDA
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
We could — and still might — do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more. Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade. They may have had it backward. Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination... The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands. In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.

PRESIDENTIAL IMPOTENCE
(Daniel Gross, Slate)
Today, while the president of the United States may be the most powerful person in the world, "his influence on the short-term macro-economy is generally overestimated by voters," says Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Partisans might think the economy got off the mat the minute Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 or when Bill Clinton took the oath in January 1993. But the factors that influence the business cycle are so myriad, powerful, and unpredictable that not even an executive as muscular as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could bend them to his will. The megatrends that made the 1990s a long summer of economic love—the end of the cold war, the deflationary influence of an emerging China, the Internet—would have happened with or without Rubinomics. And most of the factors now making life miserable—commodity inflation, a housing bubble and a weak dollar engineered by the Federal Reserve's promiscuous policies, the demand-driven surge in oil—would likely have materialized had John Kerry won in 2004 (sorry, MoveOn.org).  

SOME ON LEFT TARGET MCCAIN'S WAR RECORD
(Ben Smith, Politico)
The highest voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex, or age, but Senator John McCain's military service. McCain's campaign Sunday issued a pair of outraged statements after retired general and Barack Obama supporter Wesley Clark said he didn't think that McCain’s service as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war was relevant to running the country. Obama has consistently praised McCain's service, and called him "a genuine American hero."  But farther to the left—and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well—harsher attacks are circulating. Critics have accused McCain of war crimes for bombing targets in Hanoi in the 1960s. Sunday, a widely read liberal blog accused McCain of "disloyalty" during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

According to USA Today, the "battle for the Hispanic vote is on." But what the paper doesn't mention is that one of this year's White House hopefuls is already the heavy favorite to win.

In a piece pegged to John McCain and Barack Obama's back-to-back appearances tomorrow before the annual meeting of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Kathleen Kiely reports (in the words of her headline) that the "Latino vote [is] 'up for grabs' [and] could swing [the] election outcome." The second part of that assessment is true. The first part? Depends how you define "up for grabs." 

One of the most persistent myths of the interminable Democratic primary clash was that Hispanic voters didn't like Barack Obama. (The oft-cited but largely inaccurate reason: his race.) Yes, Latinos preferred Hillary Clinton to Obama; her longstanding ties to the community (and her husband's popularity) typically gave her a two-to-one edge over the Illinois upstart. But pundits too often predicted--illogically--that this outpouring of Latino support for Clinton in the primaries would translate into lack of support for Barack Obama in the general election. They've been proven wrong. In early May, a Gallup poll showed Obama beating McCain 51 percent to 41 among Hispanics--a relatively narrow margin. But by the end of the month--as the Democratic race was winding down--Obama's support had skyrocketed to 62 percent, and McCain's had plummeted to 29. Polls taken since then have mirrored that massive 30-point gap, with the most recent (AP/Ipsos) showing Obama clobbering his Republican rival 65 to 21.

This means that if Hispanics do, in fact, swing November's election, they're much more likely to swing it to left. According to NALEO, 9.2 million Latinos will cast ballots this fall--a 21 percent increase over 2004. (In the Democratic primaries, Hispanic turnout was up 42 percent.) What's more, many of these votes tend to be concentrated in a quartet key swing states--Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. In 2004, George W. Bush received record Latino support (for a Republican) of between 40 and 45 percent, which propelled him to victory in each of those crucial contests--and the election overall. But as it stands, McCain is trailing Bush by 15-20 points among Latinos, and Obama's beating John Kerry's final numbers by 10. That's one reason the latest polls show him leading in Colorado and New Mexico and closing in Florida and Nevada. In the end, it's pretty simple: a major surge in Latino turnout is better for the candidate who's getting two-thirds of their support than the candidate who's not. End of story.

Of course, Election Day is still four months away. John McCain has long history of appealing to Hispanics. He won 54% of the Hispanic vote in the Florida primary, for example, and often boasts that 70 percent of Hispanics supported him in the 2004 Arizona Senate race. Most importantly, he famously broke with the GOP to cosponsor comprehensive immigration reform in early 2007. But the problem for McCain is that he's spent the year or so since his bill failed trying to reassure the right wing that he's not "soft" on immigration, and will find it difficult in the coming months to reach out to Hispanics on the issue without offending the Republican base. (He's already in hot water for secretly meeting with Latino leaders in Chicago last week.) Still, Kiely is technically correct when she writes that "both candidates have strong selling points for Hispanic voters." It's just she forget to mention that, based on the current numbers, Obama looks much more likely to seal the deal.
 

Just as I was about to write an item exploring John McCain's effective maneuvering on energy this week--it's good to see him finally getting down to nuts-and-bolts specifics--my NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Hirsh beats me to the punch. Fact is, McCain's energy plan does represent a significant break with Republican orthodoxy, and while offshore drilling, nuclear innovation and greener car batteries won't lower gas prices anytime soon, it's probably wise to leave them on the table--despite Barack Obama's reflexive pooh-poohing. Here, then, is an excerpt from Mike's latest column, in which Mike praises McCain's power play and lifts the curtain on the political strategy that's underlying it. Very smart stuff.

John McCain, it is generally agreed, has something of an age problem. It's not just that he'd be the oldest president ever inaugurated for the first time. McCain's criticisms of Barack Obama sometimes draw on events and cultural references that many Americans only dimly recall—the movie "Dr. No" (the first James Bond flick, from 1962), or Jimmy Carter's windfall tax from 30 years ago. Every time McCain has a moment of forgetfulness, the skeptics start whispering again—reminding one that, as a Pew Research Survey showed last year, "ageism" may be a bigger factor in the election than racism.

But now, in a neat bit of campaign jiujitsu, the McCainiacs are trying to change a liability into a strength. McCain's 71 years have given him not only vastly more experience than Obama, the new thinking goes, they have ensured that America will have, once again, an "adult" president in the mold of an Eisenhower or a Truman. And there is no better evidence than McCain's energy plan, which the candidate has laid out in a very, er, energetic series of appearances and speeches over the last week. "We wanted it to be a grown-up vision," said Mark Salter, McCain's chief speechwriter and alter ego, who in a Newsweek interview reiterated several times that McCain's approach is that of an "adult." This evidence of mature judgment specifically includes McCain's decision to reverse himself—grown-ups adjust, after all, to changed circumstances—by calling for offshore oil drilling. "We wanted to show that McCain would view the presidency as a problem solver—a bipartisan problem solver," says Salter.

The McCain energy plan has left the Obama-ites sputtering that their candidate laid out a comprehensive energy plan last October. "You have it exactly backward!" Jason Furman, an advisor to Obama on energy, told me when I suggested that Obama was on the defensive. "John McCain is responding to Barack Obama, who has put forward a major and ambitious plan on energy.'' Frankly, however, no one really cares what Obama said last October. And there's no question that McCain's flurry of concrete proposals—including a call for 45 more nuclear power plants, a $300 million prize to the designer of a new electric car battery, overturning the 27-year ban on offshore drilling and a $5,000 tax credit for people who buy "zero-emissions" cars—prompted Obama to spend most of his own energy speech this week knocking those ideas down. That in turn generated a GOP Web video declaring that "Obama is Dr. No," complete with a Bond-like theme song.

Something of a role-reversal is going on here. Most pundits think Obama's had the advantage so far in offering a "vision" and in taking the offensive. Now it's McCain who has laid out a clear—if questionably feasible—energy vision for the future, while the Obama-ites are still rushing to put together a comprehensive paper gathering all his ideas on the current gas crisis and the long-term energy crisis. Compare: McCain, in a speech on Wednesday (his fifth), launched his so-called Lexington Project—"named for the town where Americans asserted their independence once before." "Let it begin today with this commitment: In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025," he said. What does "strategic independence" mean? It's not quite clear. But the phrase sounds pretty good, and rather more inspiring than Obama's narrower proposal to "reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce oil consumption overall by at least 35 percent, or 10 million barrels, by 2030," or to "reduce the energy intensity of our economy by 50 percent" by the same year. True, Obama has called for an investment of $150 billion over 10 years, dwarfing McCain's incentive plan, as Furman points out. But he hasn't spelled out how that would be used.

Like McCain's embrace of global warming as a national-security issue, his new stance on energy is a studied repudiation of the Bush administration. It is one of the ways he is seeking to neutralize Obama's relentless efforts to define a McCain presidency as a "third Bush term." "Some in Washington seem to think that we can still persuade OPEC to lower prices—as if reason or cajolery had never been tried before," McCain said mockingly in another speech this week. "But America is not going to meet this great challenge as a supplicant or a plaintiff." He was, of course, mocking Bush himself—who twice in the last six months has gone to Riyadh pleading for more oil production.

And, while no one's quite saying this, McCain's new "grown-up" theme may be a put-down of Bush as well. It is a way of reminding voters that, while the antic Prince Hal never quite matured into King Henry V—and could never control the infighting between ideologues and realists in his administration—John McCain is already a well-rounded man in full, with a set program.

READ THE REST HERE. 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

OBAMA: CHANGE AGENT GOES CONVENTIONAL
(Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico)
Barack Obama has crafted an image as an unconventional candidate, a change agent and a post-partisan politician who represents a dramatic break from the status quo. But since securing the Democratic presidential nomination, when confronted with a series of thorny issues the Illinois senator has pursued a conspicuously conventional path, one that falls far short of his soaring rhetoric. Faced with tough choices on fronts ranging from public financing and town hall meetings to warrantless surveillance and the Second Amendment, Obama passed up opportunities to take bold stands and make striking departures from customary politics. Instead, he has followed a familiar tack, straddling controversial issues and choosing politically advantageous routes that will ensure his campaign a cash edge and minimize damaging blowback on several highly sensitive issues. 

MORE: For Obama, a Pragmatist's Shift Toward the Center (Michael Powell, New York Times)
Barack Obama has taken a stroll this week away from traditional liberal political positions, his path toward the political center marked by artful leaps and turns. On Thursday, he seemed to embrace a Supreme Court decision, written by the court’s premiere conservative and upheld 5-to-4, striking down Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns. Mr. Obama seemed to voice support for the ban as recently as February... In the last week, Mr. Obama has taken calibrated positions on issues that include electronic surveillance, campaign finance and the death penalty for child rapists, suggesting a presidential candidate in hot pursuit of what Bill Clinton once lovingly described as “the vital center.” “A presidential candidate’s great desire is to be seen as pragmatic, and they hope their maneuvering and shifting will be seen in pursuit of some higher purpose,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “It doesn’t mean they are utterly insincere.”

OBAMA SMART AS A PISTOL WITH NEW TOUGH-GUY ACT
(Charles Hurt, New York Post)
The Democratic Party has long been mocked as the Mommy Party for its soft, nurturing governing style and its paralyzing patience for listening to dissent from every quarter, no matter how small or irrelevant. The Republican Party is the Daddy Party - always tough, determined and willing to do whatever dirty work is necessary to get the job done. Democrats want Oprah Winfrey. Republicans want Jack Bauer. But now that Barack Obama has taken over the Democratic Party, he's bending these "genderizations." He's taking Mommy out of the Mommy Party... If you're wondering who's in charge, don't. Within days of winning the nomination, Obama moved party headquarters to his home town of Chicago and started pushing party heads around, telling them they can't raise money from PACs and Washington lobbyists...  Obama may as well have strapped on his John Wayne chaps and holster yesterday to announce his support of the Supreme Court's decision that the Second Amendment guaranteeing gun rights actually means what it says... As Obama moves rightward and gets tougher, Republicans are desperately trying to portray him as some sort of arrogant flip-flopper. But these audacious moves by him are not signs of weakness; they're signs of a man who will win at any cost. Isn't that what they used to say about the Clintons?

MCCAIN, GOP UNLEASH ANTI-OBAMA PLAN
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Republicans might have a reason to smile: John McCain and his allies seem to have finally settled on a way to draw a stark contrast with Barack Obama. After weeks of criticism from Republicans about the leisurely pace at which they seemed to be preparing for the general election, McCain’s campaign has apparently settled on a highly personal campaign theme that aims to differentiate McCain and Obama on both character and issues. The strategy: Paint Obama as conventional politician who always takes the safe and easy political road, then amplify the distinction by framing McCain as a patriot, somebody who has put sacrifice above self. It’s seemingly an effort by McCain to remind voters of his Vietnam-era heroism and compelling life story while touching on key issues to avoid running purely on biography. The message also is designed to underline McCain’s unique record of service to his country without touching on subterranean questions about Obama’s patriotism. Whether it will work — or if the famously improvisational McCain will even stick to it — is an open question. 

LET MCCAIN BE MCCAIN
(Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)
What can Mr. McCain do? It's still early, a lot of history has yet to unspool, we've entered summer and the shallow part of the campaign, the doldrums, there's a little space. He should take advantage of it and have some fun. This would be a good time for him to get interesting again. And he'll find it easy because he is interesting. That's why the boys on the bus loved him in 2000. That's why the Republican base rejected him in 2000. He was hot and George W. Bush was—well, let's call it mellow. Mr. McCain attacked Christian conservative leaders while Mr. Bush played them. Republicans were trying to recover from eight years of interesting. They didn't want more. I used to think what Mr. McCain's aides thought after he started winning: He has to change now, be more formal, more constrained. That was exactly wrong. Let McCain be McCain. Get him in the papers being who he is, get people looking at his real nature. Maybe then they'll start taking him seriously when he talks policy. Maybe he'll start taking himself seriously when he talks policy. The most interesting thing about Mr. McCain has always been the delight he takes in a certain unblinkered candor. There is also the antic part of his nature, his natural wit, his tropism toward comedy.

As a rule, we here at Stumper headquarters--which, for the record, is not located in a massive underground lair or on a space station--are big fans of all things Bond. James Bond. So we were excited to see John McCain reinforce his latest talking point--that "Barack Obama is the Dr. No of energy policy"--with a Bond-themed web video boasting authentic theme music and groovy 60s-style title sequences. Unfortunately, the rest of the ad is not quite as accurate. Our qualms:

1) One panel portrays Obama as saying "no" to energy "innovation" and "the electric car," but as we've already pointed out, Obama has said that he would invest $150 billion in green technology since last October--long before McCain proposed his $300 million prize for a greener car battery. 

2) Another panel claims that Obama has said "no" to "clean, safe nuclear energy." In fact, Obama has said, "I have not ruled out nuclear... but only [would support it] so far as it is clean and safe." So he's more like Dr. Maybe.

3) Actually, comparing Obama to Dr. No on nuclear energy at all is kind of confusing. In the 1962 Bond film, the handless villain Dr. Julius No was a nuclear innovator who managed to build a reactor on the isolated Jamaican island of Crab Key before Bond foiled his plan to divert American rocket launchers from nearby Cape Canaveral, Fla. So instead of dissing the doc, McCain might want to hire him to help out with those 45 new nuclear plants he's always talking about.

4) At no point in the ad does Honey Ryder emerge from the ocean in white bikini with two large conch shells.

That said, we enjoy the implication that McCain is the worldly Bond to Obama's nefarious No, and hope the campaign releases more ads in this mold. If so, we humbly suggest that they cast Mrs. McCain as a Bond girl. We even have a name picked out: Cindy Licious.

We'll stop now.
 

Ultimately, the presidential race is zero-sum contest. One person wins. The other loses. But the constant clashes, quarrels and scraps that lead up to Election Day aren't quite as black and white--despite what the MSM might have us believe.

Take today, for example. The big news is the U.S. Supreme Court's unsurprising 5-4 decision to overturn a 32-year-old District of Columbia law limiting private gun ownership, for the first time expressly extending the Constitution's Second Amendment to private citizens (rather than just militias). The press has portrayed this as a victory for John McCain. The ban--which prohibited residents from keeping handguns at home and required that lawfully registered guns, such as shotguns, be locked and unloaded when stored in the house--has long angered gun-right activists, who said that it infringed on an individual's Constitutional right to keep a firearm in the nightstand for self-defense. Given that these activists are largely Republican--and have clashed with McCain over gun-show restrictions in the past--no one was surprised this morning when the Arizona senator seized on the ruling to slam Obama as a typical gun-grabbing liberal. "Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness," he said in a statement, "today's ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right--sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly." Wonder who that "bitter" barb is aimed at.

Meanwhile, the chatterati quickly declared Obama loser of the day. The decision makes a certain kind of sense. As Obama has transitioned over the past five years from liberal Chicago lawmaker to more centrist Democratic presidential nominee, he has struggled to downplay his long record of support for gun-control measures and emphasize his sympathy for gun rights instead. That has created some awkward moments. In 1996, for example, Obama indicated on a pair of Independent Voters of Illinois questionnaires that he supported banning the "manufacture, sale and possession of handguns." Asked late last year about the surveys, Obama's aides said that they were completed by his then-campaign manager, who “unintentionally mischaracterize[d] his position,” and that the candidate himself “never saw or approved” the forms--even though reporters later discovered his handwriting on one of them.

His stance on the D.C. gun ban has been similarly slippery. In 2004, Obama "opposed letting people use a self-defense argument if charged with violating local handgun bans by using weapons in their homes," and in late 2007 his campaign put out a statement saying that "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional" (a position he didn't dispute in a later interview). But in February, Obama began to walk back that unambiguous remark, declining at least four times over the following months