TNR: The Nixon-Obama Debates - Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Oh, wait-- actually, you are.

[Pirate Smile]

The Nixon-Obama Debates
Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Oh, wait-- actually, you are.

by Jonathan Chait
Post Date Wednesday, November 05, 2008

In 1960, John F. Kennedy attacked the incumbent Republican administration for allowing the Soviet Union to open up a "missile gap" over the United States. The gap turned out not to exist. But it put the young, inexperienced Massachusetts senator on the political offensive and positioned him to the right of his more experienced Republican foe on the central foreign policy question of the day.

Barack Obama has pulled off the same feat in this election, with an unintentional assist from John McCain. Since September 11, 2001, the threat of Al Qaeda and Islamic radicalism has dominated the foreign policy debate, and, on this question, Republicans have dominated Democrats, just as they did through much of the cold war. Obama may be winning primarily due to the economy and the unpopularity of President Bush, but the more surprising and historically significant thing about this election is that he has managed to stake out the more hawkish ground on fighting Al Qaeda.

How did the GOP lose its most potent and unassailable political asset? It goes back to July 2007, when The New York Times reported that, in 2005, the Bush administration had aborted a mission to capture senior Al Qaeda members in Pakistan, to the frustration of many intelligence officials and members of the Special Operations Forces. A month later, Obama gave a foreign policy speech in which he lambasted the administration for a "terrible mistake to fail to act." Obama warned, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

-snip-
The issue would barely have made a ripple in the campaign had not one audience member at the second presidential debate asked the candidates if they would violate Pakistani sovereignty to pursue Al Qaeda. Obama replied, "If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden, we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."
McCain could have agreed with Obama. But he seemed determined to play the part of the foreign policy graybeard correcting the arrogant young upstart. So McCain, while noting parenthetically that he, too, would use troops "where necessary," insisted that the key thing was to work with Pakistan. McCain fairly sneered, "He said he wants to announce that he's going to attack Pakistan. Remarkable."

While there's no precise way to measure how this specific exchange went over with the public, some things are clear. Opinion polls showed that debate viewers deemed Obama the winner. Thirty-four percent told a USA Today/Gallup poll that the debate made them view Obama more favorably, while only 12 percent said they viewed him less favorably. The reaction to McCain was diametrical: Twelve percent saw him more favorably, 33 percent less favorably. What's more, a ABC News/Washington Post poll following the debate found that McCain's advantage on handling terrorism, once 20 points, had dwindled to six.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c802a2d0-fc5e-4d81-865a-a558030f391e