That Ain't Winning

Well, it appears the NYTimes editorial folks read this blog--they pulled a shorter NTodd with Plan: We Win.  They skewer Bush and his strategery, too:

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.
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A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

I think he doesn't pay attention to the news or the polls because they would make him feel bad. Gallup:

Wednesday morning, President George W. Bush outlined what he called his plan for victory in Iraq, but by late Wednesday evening, only a third of Americans had been exposed to the speech. Ten percent say they watched or listened to it live, and another 24% say they learned about it from news reports. Sixty-six percent had not heard of it.

That picture emerged from the results of a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted entirely on Wednesday evening, which found that 54% of Americans believe Bush is doing a poor job handling the situation in Iraq, while just 44% believe he is doing a good job.

The poll also shows that a majority of Americans, 55%, believe Bush does not have a plan that will achieve victory in Iraq, while 41% believe he does. Among people who saw or listened to Bush give the speech, two-thirds say he has a plan and a third say he does not. But among people who learned of the speech in the news, only 42% say he has a plan, while 56% disagree -- similar to the 37%-to-57% ratio among Americans who did not see or hear about the speech.

These results suggest the speech has had little immediate effect.

No shit, Sherlock.  The poll also shows that Americans are rather divided about withdrawal--also not surprising.  As the NYTimes said, we need a C-in-C who clearly understands the reality on the ground, talks frankly with us, and is willing to have an honest debate about what to do next.  We don't have that.

Instead, we have an administration whose definition of winning is scoring cheap political points, and that tactic is now working as well at home as it has in Iraq.  We have an administration that would rather attack a hawkish Democrat and former Marine than to actually consider the merits of his plan.  We have an administration that offers warmed over crapoganda™ at every critical juncture in lieu of real ideas.

Plan: We Lose.

ntodd