Barack Obama was appropriately forceful this evening in his visit to Buchanan Park when refuting the caustic rhetoric coming out of Minnesota this week. He was humorous to a slight degree when he said he’s been called worse on the basketball court and tough when portraying John McCain as out of touch with middle class Americans.
What’s stood out to me, though, is something Obama said at the end of the speech when he shifted the focus temporarily off the economy - the top issue of this election - and onto Iraq. I say temporarily, and here’s why. Obama knows voters see him as better able to handle the economy than McCain, but due to his military background and lengthly experience in the U.S. Senate, conventional wisdom says McCain is the top choice for those who consider Iraq and foreign policy as their top issue. It would seem politically risky for Obama, a war opponent since 2002 and someone who’s been lashing out at the Bush adminstration’s handling of the war ever since, to raise the issue to this evening’s crowd because violence has ebbed in the war-torn country. Obama even credited the surge of troops sent to Iraq last year with turning the tide, almost as if he’s conceding the issue.
As college football analyst Lee Corso would say: “Not so fast, my friends.” Obama talked about the $10 billion per month spent by America to fund the military occupation of Iraq, and then denounced the trillions of dollars of debt shouldered by the federal government. He pointed to his as a reason why American confidence in the economy is shaky, and today the dollar is weak. In his own version of fear politics, Obama said this today:
“There’s never been a nation on Earth who saw its economy decline and saw its military prospects improve.”
There’s a compelling message from the Obama camp: If you can’t fix the economy, you can’t protect the country. If the economy coughs, suffers and ends up truly sick, so too does our military might, which could prevent following through on the Iraq mission and fighting al Qaeda.
The question now is whether Obama can link the economy to Iraq in voter’s minds.
