Soccer Dad

The luck of mccain

I think that Fred Barnes is selling John McCain short in the Luckiest Man in the Race.

John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That's what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful.

In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight. Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival. Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney's strategy by beating him in Iowa. And Rudy Giuliani helped by pulling out of New Hampshire and fading in Florida, allowing McCain to sneak ahead and win primaries in both states.

Now Democrats are boosting McCain's chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. "They are eating their own," says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons. The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"[N]o thanks to his own fortitude or foresight?"

How about that he stayed in the race when others might have bailed. The very fact that he's around is a testament to his fortitude if not foresight? (Maybe it wasn't foresight, maybe it was desperation seeing that would be his last chance to become President. Still it took fortitude to stick it out while the obituaries of his presidential hopes were being written.)

I'm not going to deny the luck. In a great column a few weeks ago, Michael Barone catalogued how every candidate failed. (Well every candidate not named Barack Obama, so far.) Someone noted (maybe Barone, but I can't find the quote anywhere) that McCain had the good fortune to fail first. Still Barone writes that luck wasn't something that McCain could count on.

McCain's success was due not just to the failure of his opponents' strategies (something he could never count on, but which happened) but also to what the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan referred to as "events, dear boy, events." Notably the success of the surge in Iraq. When McCain's strategy imploded in late June, it was not at all clear that the surge would succeed. Democrats assumed that it wouldn't, as if it were beyond the capacity of the U.S. military to beat gangs of terrorists; Republicans hoped it would but were very nervous indeed. McCain, who had urged a surge of troops and change in tactics since the summer of 2003, in effect bet his candidacy on the surge and won. In November and December, he was able to argue that he was the only candidate who had urged a surge long before George W. Bush ordered one in January 2007, and his Republican opponents had to agree. (The Democratic candidates are still pretending that the surge didn't work, which is an article of faith to left-wing Democratic voters. I wonder why they relish American failure so much.) Over the last week he has criticized Mitt Romney for not supporting the surge; for that he has been criticized by some conservatives and defended by others. In any case, the success of the surge has provided McCain with a strong argument for his candidacy in the Republican contest and will do so, I think, in the general election as well.

McCain also benefited from a surge in his support during the Christmastime period during which pollsters weren't operating, as I have argued before in this blog. My explanation: The assassination of Benazir Bhutto pointed to uncertainty and chaos in Pakistan and made vivid the perils we face in the world. Republican voters, for whatever reasons, rallied not to Rudy Giuliani (who stressed his opposition to terrorism) but to John McCain (who stressed his support of the surge and his national security experience). Without this movement of opinion, McCain would not have been the contender that he has been this month. That shift of opinion over Christmastime, whether prompted by the Bhutto assassination or other factors, was one of the tumblers that had to fall into place to put John McCain on his current clear flight path to the Republican presidential nomination.

I'm not arguing with Barnes that McCain has been lucky. He has been. I just don't think that McCain hasn't made some of his own luck too. He may not be able to count on a Democratic meltdown, but when opportunities have been handed to him, he's made the most of them.

john mccain.