Now that Barack Obama is embarked on his glitzy global tour, having already won the Nuri al-Maliki primary, the McCain people are quite unhappy with their predicament. During all those weeks when they were baiting Obama as a rookie with scant war-zone exposure, they apparently never figured out that, if Obama did go, he would surely garner an outsize share of public attention. So now, until Obama returns home, they're stuck with the onerous challenge of competing for the spotlight.

Thus far, they have been reduced to bitter fuming (aide Mark Salter said yesterday, "'The One' went to Europe, and homage must be paid"); ahistorical sputtering (McCain said yesterday that Obama has "no military experience whatsover," conveniently forgetting that Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson didn't have any, either); and fact-free huckstering (a new McCain TV ad blames Obama for "rising prices at the pump," even though, in the world of factual reality, gas prices have been on the rise for 10 years, sparked largely by competing consumer demand in countries such as China and India - and besides, even if one is to accept the erroneous premise that U.S. senators control gas prices, hasn't McCain been a senator 18 years longer than Obama?).

But perhaps their most tantalizing bid for the spotlight concerns the choice for running mate. Yesterday, the veteran Washington columnist Bob Novak wrote that he had been told, by McCain campaign contacts, that the veep nominee would be publicly unveiled by the end of this week. Novak is derided in some quarters as "the prince of darkness," and liberal readers don't like him, but he does have good sources in the GOP. On the other hand, McCain sources (presumably, different ones) have hinted elsewhere that this week might be a bad time for a veep launch, since Obama's media footprint might squash theirs anyway.

Taken together, however, it's clear that the McCain people have pondered the idea. How else would they get on the public radar this week? And a glance at the calendar shows there are few other opportune times. The summer Olympics will suck up media oxygen from Aug. 8 to Aug. 24, and then comes the Democratic convention, from Aug. 25 to Aug. 28. If McCain waits on the veep announcement until the Democrats are done, he'll have only a four-day window until his own convention begins - and that window coincides with Labor Day weekend. And since there's always the possibility Obama might want to announce his own choice during one of the few remaining weeks before the Olympics, that factor further narrows McCain's timing options.

Therefore, just in case McCain decides to spring a surprise this week, here's my own list of the top-five possibilities. Like every other observer who is outside the tight circle of veep vetters, I have absolutely no inside info. But you don't have to be Charlie Black (the longtime Washington lobbyist-fixer who serves as McCain's uber strategist) to conjure the ideal GOP running mate resume. It's merely someone who can galvanize the Christian right, turn on the swing voters, compensate for McCain's self-confessed weakness on economic issues, shake things up by putting a new face on the Republican party (either via gender, or as a reputed reformer), and perhaps even help tilt a blue state. Quite a tall order.

So, in alphabetical order:

Marsha Blackburn, a three-term congresswoman from Tennessee. Playing the gender card would create buzz. She's a conservative Southerner (a staunch opponent of taxes, spending, abortion) who would help galvanize the conservative base, and perhaps help McCain among women in general. Foreign policy is not her forte, but McCain figures he has that covered.

Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American governor of Louisiana. He'd be a racial breakthrough for the GOP, potentially a big help in the year of Obama. He's a pro-life Catholic, which could help McCain with the conservative base, and generally with Catholics, traditionally a swing electorate. A former congressman who was elected governor last year on a reform agenda, he can talk fluently about domestic issues that tend to bore McCain, such as health care. McCain is slated to meet with Jindal this week, for what that's worth.

Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska. As the first woman to run that state, she's another potential mold-breaker. Like Blackburn, she has conservative credentials for the base (she has signed a lot of budget cuts, and she's a lifetime NRA member). She's enormously popular at home, typically drawing support from 85 percent of the citizenry. She's colorful and young (42). She eats mooseburgers, rides snowmobiles, amd smoked pot when it was legal in Alaska. And not that this matters at all, but she's a former beauty queen; in the words of conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, she might help draw the voters of "visually unimpaired heterosexual men."

Mitt Romney. A safe pick, assuming that rascally flyboy McCain can find a comfort level with him. Romney can talk domestic economics far better than McCain. He's also popular with a lot of the evangelicals and Bush money donors who have yet to warm to McCain. Business leaders like him. He's also has family roots in Michigan, a traditionally blue state that McCain would dearly love to snatch from Obama. And he has never suffered a bad hair day.

John Thune. Again, if sex appeal on a McCain ticket is a necessity, then remember that this guy is as handsome as Romney. The reliably conservative senator from South Dakota sent Tom Daschle packing in 2004, and he reputedly has a better personal relationship with McCain than Romney does. And, at age 47, he's 14 years younger than Romney - a potential asset, if one assumes that McCain will put a premium on youth in a year when "change" is the predominant mantra.

All told, if McCain does choose one of my fave five, I want points for perspicacity.

On the other hand, you should know that, back in 2000, I never once imagined that George W. Bush would choose Dick Cheney. And when he did, I lauded Cheney as "a master of the S-word: sober, serious, solid, stable, steady, substantive and seasoned." How's that for full disclosure?

In normal election years, the news cycle typically spins slowly on midsummer weekends. Generally, there is time to kick back a bit, and suffer the effects of global warming. But since we live in abnormal times, it was not surprising to discover a delicious news nugget at roughly 7:45 last Friday night, when the McCain campaign quietly put out the word that chief economic adviser Phil Gramm was being dumped as campaign co-chair, as symbolic punishment for his recent dismissal of Americans as "whiners" whose economic woes are mere figments of their imagination. It was worth noting that the campaign sought to bury this embarrassing announcement on a Friday evening, after the major eastern newspaper and network broadcast deadlines had past, in the hopes of minimizing public attention.

And that might have been enough political news for one summer weekend, since that announcement raised all kinds of fresh questions. (Was McCain still retaining the basic economic blueprint that Gramm had drawn up for him? Yup. And hadn't McCain himself stated on various occasions that some of our economic woes were just "psychological"? Yup, repeatedly.) But wait...the Gramm news turned out to be mere foreplay. The best was yet to come.

Imagine my surprise, early Saturday morning, to discover, in my email in-box, a news bulletin from the White House, calling attention to an interview that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had just given to the German newspaper der Spiegel. In that interview, Maliki offered some strong opinions about the issue of U.S. troop withdrawals...and made it quite clear that he likes the concept of a 16-month withdrawal timetable - as proposed by the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

It was barely past dawn when I scanned that email, and, given the fact that it was already roughly 723 degrees outside my window, I at first thought that I must be suffering from heat exhaustion. Maliki was siding with Obama? And thereby dealing a major political blow to John McCain, who has been trying to paint Obama's Iraq proposals as naive and irresponsible? Not possible. This email had come from the White House. Surely the Bush team would never call attention to such a story. Therefore, I must have misread the email.

Well, as it turned out (and this tidbit would not be known for many hours), the Bush team screwed up. (Hardly the first time.) The White House had intended to circulate the der Spiegel story for internal use only; mistakenly, it had sent it out to the broader journalistic community. Thanks, guys!

And there was Maliki, in the story, implicitly doing quite a number on the McCain campaign. Some quote-worthy highlights: "Artifically prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months (for a withdrawal timetable). That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes....Whoever is thinking about the shorter term (for withdrawal) is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems...Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic...The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't."

While reading Malkiki's eye-opening remarks (here's the der Spiegel version), I could almost hear the grinding of the Bush spin machinery kicking into gear. Because there was no way that the White House would let those comments stand. Maliki is deemed by Bush, and by his compatriot McCain, to be the sovereign leader of a sovereign nascent democracy, but only when his statements are deemed to be in sync with Bush policy. Clearly, a stated preference for Obama's proposal would not be tolerated.

Meanwhile, the McCain camp had to react somehow. Here was Maliki cutting off McCain at the knees - what would his aides say? What could they possibly say? They've been hammering at Obama, claiming that the 16-month timetable reflects ignorance of the facts on the ground...and here was Maliki, sounding supportive for a 16-month timetable, based on his own reading of the facts on the ground. Turns out, it took the McCain people all day Saturday to come up with some kind of response. In the early evening, finally, they did. It was transparently weak: "John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today."

That spin wasn't very effective, given the fact that Maliki had essentially refuted almost every facet of McCain's Iraq policy. On Saturday, there were also some McCain-friendly attempts to dismiss Maliki's remarks by saying that, well, Maliki just has to say that kind of stuff to appease domestic Iraqi opinion. But that argument is weak as well, because, if true, it merely confirms what polls have long been saying - that most Iraqi people would prefer that we leave. And if Iraq is truly what Bush says it is - a "young democracy" - shouldn't Maliki be reflecting the prevailing democratic opinion?  

So clearly, the McCain camp needed more help. And the Bush war apparatus did their best to help, but not until the we hours of early Sunday morning. That's when U.S. military command headquarters put out a statement, quoting an Iraqi government official, saying that the der Spiegel newspaper had "misunderstood and mistranslated" the Maliki remarks. The problem was, the statement never pinpointed where the misunderstanding and mistranslations had occurred. It offered no actual examples; it didn't address how it was possible for a translator to have misinterpreted so many remarks (as highlighted above), all of which said roughly the same thing. And, most glaringly of all, the statement omitted the pertinent fact that the translator was employed not by der Spiegel, but by Maliki's office.

On Sunday, der Spiegel published a new story, saying that it "stands by its version of the conversation." It then forwarded audio of the interview to The New York Times, which did its own translation and, in today's paper, affirmed the der Spiegel version. It reported, too, that Maliki had brought up the Obama plan on his own, and it added this quote to the record: "Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq."

And today, in the wake of a meeting between Obama and Maliki, the Iraqi government has now jettisoned all the "mistranslation" nonsense and essentially sided with the Obama approach. A Maliki spokesman said today that the government endorses the concept of "a real timetable" for U.S. troop withdrawal. He then said that the targeted year for withdrawal is 2010. Which happens to be Obama's targeted year.

Well, what does McCain say now? In April 2004, at a Council of Foreign Relations event, McCain was asked what we should do if a sovereign Iraqi government made it clear that we should leave. He replied: "Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave, because - if it was an elected government of Iraq - and we've been asked to leave other places in the world."

So, in the wake of this Maliki episode, McCain basically has three choices: (1) He can flip-flop on what he said in 2004, and position himself even to the right of Bush, whose administration now speaks of "joint aspirational time horizons" for withdrawal; (2) he can ease his way toward Obama's position on Iraq, just as he has lately on Afghanistan, thereby demonstrating that the wisdom gap on national security is a lot smaller than he'd like it to be; or (3) he can try to ride out this whole embarrassment, and hope that relatively few swing voters take notice.

But, all told, the best assessment was probably offered on Saturday, when a Republican strategist spoke on background to Atlantic magazine blogger Mark Ambinder. Here's what he said about the Maliki remarks: "We're screwed."

Although I should note that the strategist's actual verb was far more sexually pungent. 

Three belly laughs at week's end:

The McCain campaign is whining about the media. That is not a misprint. John McCain, of all people, a politician who for years has been treated as a demigod by the Washington press corps - and who, in fact, has enjoyed yet another easy ride during the '08 campaign - is grousing, via his spokeswoman, about all the media attention that Barack Obama will receive during his impending overseas trip.

Jill Hazelbaker said the other day, "It certainly hasn't escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama's trip." The implication, of course, is that McCain won't get nearly the same attention while Obama is abroad.

Regarding that lament, I will now quote actor Steve Buscemi, who, in the role of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, rubbed his thumb against his index finger and said, "Do you know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin." It's tough to pluck the strings of sympathy for McCain, since, in the first place, he made such a big issue about Obama's lack of overseas travel. He made that a campaign issue, and banged away at it for weeks. But now that Obama is actually going - and drawing a huge media contingent, for solid newsworthy reasons that I will shortly explain - he doesn't like that, either. The line now is that Obama's trip is merely a "campaign rally" and "photo op." And since the McCain camp is now stuck with the prospect that Obama will draw enormous crowds at many of his stops - thereby telegraphing to many Americans how nice it might be to again have a president who is popular abroad - the pre-buttal strategy is to complain in advance that the media is acting as Obama's enabler.

And that's our first belly laugh today, because few Washington politicians have been coddled by the media as McCain has. I won't recite chapter and verse about why this is so, or catalogue how an ardent career conservative has somehow attained the journalistic shorthand of "maverick," since I have covered that ground before. (OK, just one example: When McCain started flip-flopping in 2006 by pandering to the GOP's right wing, a Washington Post columnist excused his actions by writing, "A successful campaign almost requires some fibbing.")

But, just to give you a flavor of the dominant Washington attitude, consider this recently-published dispatch from a Time magazine correspondent. You might need anti-nausea medicine by the time you finish reading: "Here's one thing you need to know about John McCain. He's always been the coolest kid in school....When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him....He is, to put it simply, cooler than us."

And lately the kids in the cafeteria have done an effective job protecting the quarterback. For instance, you may remember the incident last week, when McCain declared at an event that the 73-year-old structure of the popular Social Security program, whereby current young workers pay taxes to support the current generation of retirees, is actually, in his words, "an absolute disgrace." Seven newspapers, including The Washington Post, covered the event - and all failed to mention McCain's comment in their reports. The cable and network news shows barely ran the video of the comment. And even though McCain actually repeated his comments, albeit in softer language, in a CNN interview, the Washington press corps caught up with the story by making excuses for him. A Time magazine writer said that McCain had merely been "misspeaking," and a Washington Post reporter insisted in an online chat that McCain had probably  not intended to offer such a sweeping criticism of the program itself.

Nor have I seen heavy mainstream media scrutiny of McCain's repeated foreign affairs stumblings: his multiple confusions of the Sunni and the Shia; his confusion of Somalia and the Sudan; his multiple references to "Czechoslovokia," a country that ceased to exist in 1993; his delusional claim that the U.S. has "drawn down to pre-surge levels" in Iraq; his recent reference to Prime Minister Putin of Russia as "President Putin of Germany." Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing much Washington press corps discussion of whether McCain is perhaps not as sharp on the nuances of foreign affairs as he claims to be - or, at the very least, whether he is not as mentally sharp as a president ideally should be.

Anyway, with respect to the McCain camp's whine about all the press that Obama will generate while abroad: The journalistic judgment is easy to explain. It's Obama's first national security trip as a candidate, his first trip to a war zone. He's new to the national scene. And, more broadly, he's a new kind of candidate, an historic first. He garnered more spring coverage than McCain because his protracted contest with Hillary Clinton was also an historic first. The press does indeed have a bias. It favors what is new, and it favors firsts.

And when a campaign starts grousing about the press, it is a sign of political weakness. In the case of the McCain campaign, it reflects a basic fear that its candidate will lose.

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Bathroom humor from C-Span.

Our second belly laugh comes courtesy of Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho. Last time we saw him, he was taking a wide stance in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall, rubbing against the foot of an undercover cop. His subsequent guilty plea in a sex sting, and his insistence on staying in the U.S. Senate, have embarrassed the party of "family values," but at least he was keeping a low profile...

Until yesterday, apparently, when he showed up on the Senate floor to argue for U.S. energy independence. He did OK for awhile - until he declared that we shouldn't allow Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Iran to "jerk us around by the gas nozzle."

Sounds to me like he needs a few sessions with Dr. Freud.

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And if you can't muster a smile for those two items, try this one. And have a good weekend.

The liberal Democratic base is already feeling edgy about Barack Obama's various centrist moves, but the big test is yet to come. Will he choose a running mate who amplifies and underscores his message of change (thereby triggering exhalations of relief within the base) - or will he pick somebody for the sake of "balance," who appears to contradict his message of change (thereby triggering cries of betrayal, and even some vows to sit out the November election)?

In recent days, it's been clear that the base is on the case. After Obama appeared publicly this week with Evan Bayh, the U.S. senator who has won several landslides in red-state Indiana, the word went out that Bayh's closet skeletons render him unacceptable as a fellow change agent. The problem, apparently, is Iraq. He voted for war authorization in 2002. Worse yet, in February of 2003, while President Bush and minions were in the home stretch of dragging America into war, Bayh signed up as honorary co-chairman of a group called The Committee for the Liberation Iraq, thus sharing membership with two of his hawkish colleagues, Joe Lieberman and...John McCain.

Apparently, some time between 2003 and 2005, Bayh's name vanished from the group's masthead, but that's probably not enough to assuage the liberal base. He has never renounced his war vote, and his subsequent attacks on President Bush's execution of the war ("not enough troops, no plan for the aftermath," as I heard him say at an '06 fundraiser) haven't sounded all that different from the criticisms voiced by McCain.

On the other hand, Bayh arguably could help Obama expand the '08 political map. Even if it's a stretch to think that he can put Indiana in play, he does knows how to talk to red-state voters, and that could benefit Obama elsewhere. That's what "balance" can potentially bring to a ticket; the risk is that the base will assail Obama as too much the traditional politician for deciding that way.

The same is true for Sam Nunn, the former senator (and national security expert) from red-state Georgia. He too appeared with Obama this week, parrying all questions about his availability as a running mate. Obama is clearly interested in contesting Georgia, which has a large black population, and also is home to third-party Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, who might bleed some conservative votes away from McCain. Nunn, at least on paper, might aid Obama's efforts to put Georgia in play. The problem for many Obama fans, however, is that Nunn hardly seems like the kind of guy who should co-helm a grassroots political movement. For one thing, he sits on a lot of corporate boards, and liberal activists are reflexively wary of big corporations. And in general, as blogger/activist Chris Bowers wrote recently, "Putting a 70-year old, white, southern, corporate dude on the ticket would almost entirely wipe away any notion that Obama is a 'change' candidate."

For "change" candidates, there are two basic templates: John F. Kennedy went for balance in 1960, and picked Lyndon Johnson; furious liberals complained that choosing the Senate wheeler-dealer undercut the promise of the New Frontier. But 32 years later Bill Clinton chose to amplify his change message by picking a young fellow southerner, Al Gore. I'll leave it to the historians to debate whether Kennedy or Clinton would have won their races if they had embraced the opposite templates. The point is, Obama could go either way in the interests of winning.

I tend to think that a running-mate deemed unacceptable by the base will not ultimately damage Obama's prospects, if only because anger over a veep choice tends to dissipate quickly in the heat of late summer. Nevertheless, Obama's decision may well open a valuable window on how he thinks, on how he weighs idealism against pragmatism.

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And speaking of pragmatism, here's one more thought on the New Yorker cover flap:

All the public attention is being paid to the cartoon, and its caricature of Obama as an anti-establishment revolutionary. Virtually no public attention is being paid to the article that actually appears inside the magazine, a lengthy profile of Obama during his days as a fast-rising Chicago politician. At one point, Ryan Lizza writes this:

"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield (Illinois), rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them...In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war...He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right."

The millions of willfully ignorant Americans who are spooked by the notion of Obama-as-radical would probably feel better about the guy if they knew all that. But they're not likely to, not in a culture where the power of an image typically trumps the written word. Tragically so.

The New Yorker magazine never used to traffic in provocative cover art. Quite the contrary, in fact. For most of its eight-decade history, the cover was blissfully unplugged from the news. The Great Depression was nearly 10 years old when finally, on March 11, 1939, the editors deigned to approve a cartoon depicting a street-corner salesman trying to sneak his apples into a rich guy's limousine. More typically - and these are actual examples - the covers depicted a bird perched on a whale, geese aflight over a marsh, a barn with a tree, a dog on a beach, a train on a bridge, a clown on a horse.

Such was the standard until Tina Brown swooped in during the '80s and brought the venerable magazine into the era of heat and buzz, where it remains today. Shocking covers, while still relatively rare, are great devices for provoking discussion and raising the magazine's profile. There was such a moment back in 1993, when the cover depicted a Hassidic Jewish man kissing a black woman, at a time when black-Jewish relations were tense in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. And this week, of course, we have the cartoon of the Obamas in Muslim garb, showing some black militant 'tude as they bump fists and burn the American flag beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

As The New Yorker itself might put it, this cartoon is now The Talk of the Town. And I am probably the last commentator in America to weigh in. In our instant analysis culture, it is probably a misdemeanor crime to take several days to sort out one's conflicting thoughts, but I have willfully done so at the risk of arrest, if only in the interests of sounding more coherent in the end. And so, here's my take on it:

Good idea. Bad execution.

I have no problem whatsoever with satire as a literary tool; quite often, I myself like to dabble in it. Satire by nature is supposed to be provocative. Good satire takes the kernel of something real and exaggerates it for comic -and even educational - effect. Good satire ideally attracts a broad appreciative audience that can share the laugh and maybe learn something besides. Good satire, inevitably, will also tick off a lot of people, and that's an acceptable collateral.

The estimable editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has sought this week to defend the magazine along those lines. In his words, "Satire is offensive sometimes, otherwise it's not very effective." I would put it differently. Just because a piece of satire is offensive, that doesn't necessarily mean it is effective.

And the Obama cartoon is not effective. It is a misfire, because, as executed, it does not identify the target it seeks to satirize. For the liberal cognisenti that subscribes to The New Yorker, the cartoon surely has sufficient implicit context; the lies and smears about Obama are self-evidently preposterous, and deserve to be smugly dismissed. But for the millions of Americans who are still prone to believe the worst about Obama, irrespective of factual reality, this cartoon image may well prevail, stripped of all context.

Granted, that might sound condescending, akin to my saying, "Smart people will get the joke, but the stupid masses won't." The best response is to cite the latest nonpartisan Pew poll, which reports that 12 percent of voters - that translates into roughly 10,000,000 people - still persist in believing that Obama is Muslim. And that is actually two points higher than the percentage Pew reported in March. So let us simply stipulate that, while it is wrong to imply that most Americans are stupid about Obama, it is factually accurate to state that a large and perhaps pivotal segment of the population is stupid about Obama. And the ignorant are likely to view the New Yorker visual (widely circulated, thanks to the outcry) as mere affirmation of their ignorance.

Just yesterday, I received a letter (the snail mail old-fashioned variety) from a guy in Ohio who told me that Obama had been a big topic of discussion at his "weekly afternoon gathering at the Club." As a guide to this recent discussion, he helpfully included a page of the talking points. One excerpt: "Obama takes great care to conceal that he is a Muslim....(He) will not show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over the hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches." (That latter lie is a new one.) I am comfortable suggesting that this gentleman from Ohio is not viewing the New Yorker cartoon in the same spirit as the magazine's subscribers.

The cartoon would have been far more effective if executed differently, although I confess that I am uncomfortable second-guessing an artist. I am reminded of the scene in the film Amadeus, when the dim-witted emperor rebukes Mozart by suggesting that the composer's famed piece of music entitled "Abduction from the Seraglio" had "too many notes" and would sound a lot better if he simply took some of them out....But still. At the very least, the tiny title of the cartoon, which appears only on the table of contents page (where only regular readers would spy it), might have worked better if it had appeared with the cartoon itself. "The Politics of Fear" at least indicates the intended context.

Even better, the cartoon could have been more effective if the intended target had been visually depicted. Perhaps a generic talk-radio loudmouth, in a thought bubble, could have conjured this apparent nightmare image of Obama in the White House. Or perhaps the entire image could have been conveyed on a television screen, with a Fox News crawl along the bottom; that, after all, would have addressed the kernel-of-reality element, since it was a Fox host who jokingly floated the notion of a "terrorist fist jab."

As Nick Anderson, president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, was quoted as saying the other day, satirists must be clear in order to be truly effective: "If the satirist fails to make the point clearly enough, the whole enterprise backfires in unintended misinterpretation." That sums up this episode quite nicely. Such are the pitfalls of provocative art in the era of heat and buzz.

I don't buy the notion, advanced by the McCain campaign, that Barack Obama has been flip-flopping on Iraq, that he has been cutting and running from his long-held antiwar convictions. And I will shortly demonstrate how he has remained broadly consistent. Having said that, however, there's no doubt that Obama is currently doing some nuancing.

Indeed, the facts on the ground in Iraq require that he do so. Domestic political realities also require that he do so.

For instance, there has been a noteworthy change on Obama's official website. Whereas, as recently as 12 days ago, the text stated that "Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq," there is no explicit mention anymore of immediacy. The language has been tweaked; a shift in emphasis has occurred.

The old language, as excerpted above, signaled that Obama's 16-month withdrawal clock would start the moment he took office. The new language, by contrast, provides a little more wiggle room: "The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely deploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010..."

In other words, the new passage suggests that, while it would be desirable to pull out the troops on a 16-month timetable that begins on Day One of an Obama administration, the withdrawal clock might not actually start until there is general agreement among the "commanders on the ground," the "military experts" and "the Iraqi government." (It's also worth mentioning that the newly-revised website is not nearly as critical of the troop surge as it was previously. The new language cites an "improved security situation.")

It can certainly be argued that Obama's old language was aimed at the liberal Democratic base, which he needed to win the nomination; and that his new language is aimed at the centrist swing electorate that he needs to win in November. He needs to reassure those swing voters that he would not yank the U.S. out of Iraq in a precipitous fashion, irrespective of ground conditions; in fact, a new national poll reports that only 50 percent of Americans are comfortable with his 16-month timetable stance - a remarkably small percentage, given the ongoing landslide sentiment that the war itself was a mistake.

One can easily recognize this fundamental challenge to Obama's political skills. He has to stick with his basic call for a 16-month timetable (in order to secure his liberal flank), yet, at the same time, signal enough wiggle for the swings.

He sought to do both in his Iraq speech earlier today: "I will give our military a new mission on my first day in office, ending this war. Let me be clear: we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010...After this redeployment, we'll keep a residual force to perform specific missions in Iraq: targeting any remnants of al Qaeda; protecting our service members and diplomats; and training and supporting Iraq's Security Forces, so long as the Iraqis make political progress. We will make tactical adjustments as we implement this strategy - that is what any responsible Commander-in-Chief must do. As I have consistently said, I will consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government."

Again, while stating a strict 16-month timetable as a goal, he adds the caveat that any "responsible" president might need to make "tactical adjustments" along the way.

Does all this constitute a flip-flop? A lurch to the center, at the expense of previous left-leaning convictions?

Hardly. There are shifts in emphases, absolutely. But most striking is that what Obama said today, in his Washington speech, and what he said yesterday, in a New York Times op-ed column, remains broadly consistent with what he has been saying over the past several years.

Consider this speech, in November 2006: "I am not suggesting this timetable be overly rigid....The redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in Iraq...offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining troop levels."

Or these remarks, at a Democratic debate last September, when asked whether all troops should be pulled out, or whether some might need to stay: "I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don't know what contingency will be out there. I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities."

Meanwhile, consider what Obama said today about how the money and manpower drain in Iraq is hurting our fight against the terrorists where it counts most, in Afghanistan and Pakistan: "The Taliban controls parts of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia. If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned. And yet today, we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan. Senator McCain said - just months ago - that 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I could not disagree more....we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That's what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that's why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be."

And that's precisely what Obama said in a Democratic debate five months ago: "It's important for us not to be held hostage by the Iraqi government in a policy that has not made us more safe, that's distracting us from Afghanistan...I think we have to have more troops there...(The Bush war planners) are hampered now in doing what we need to do in Afghanistan in part because of what's happened in Iraq."

It's true that most Americans now cite the economy, not Iraq, as the top issue of 2008. It's also true that Obama, and Democrats in general, are viewed far more favorably than McCain and the Republicans as potential economic stewards. But it's nevertheless doubtful that Obama can win this election unless he passes the commander-in-chief test - by managing to hold his base on the war and reassure the center, all while parrying the GOP's predictable weakness/flip-flop attacks. His speech today was a recognition of this reality. 

As a classic illustration of how liberals so often seem drawn to the rituals of political hari-kari, consider the comments of one Martha Slade, an Oregon artist, who declared in the press yesterday that Barack Obama has flunked her purity test, thus rendering him totally unacceptable: "I'm disgusted with him. I can't even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this 'audacity of hope' stuff, it's blah, blah, blah. For all the independents he's going to gain, he's going to lose a lot of progressives."

The liberal blogosphere has been crying betrayal in the wake of Obama's gravitation to the center - his vote for the compromise eavesdropping law, which protects the telecoms from lawsuits; his support for the death penalty; his aversion to gun control; his stated desire to "refine" his antiwar stance - and no doubt there will be debate later this week, at the liberal Netroots Nation conference in Austin, over whether liberals should walk away from the guy, or, at best, hold their noses while pulling the Democratic lever in November.

But this kind of attitude is one big reason why Democrats tend to come up short in presidential elections. This is one big reason why liberals so often are losers.

This happened in 2000, when Al Gore was judged in some liberal quarters to be insufficiently pure (and that was indeed true, he did have a lot of ties to the corporate sector, among other perceived infractions); as a result, a pivotal number of purists gravitated to Ralph Nader, and the result of the past eight years speak for themselves. Just last Friday, for example, President Bush's regime decreed that it would not seek to develop any rules to curb global warming, or even to weigh the idea - in direct defiance of a Supreme Court ruling issued 15 months ago. It's fair to suggest that a President Gore would have reacted differently to that ruling.

The liberal loser mentality was also apparent back in 1980, when President Jimmy carter was judged to be insufficiently liberal (true again); as a result, liberals in search of the true faith gravitated to Senator Ted Kennedy, who tried to get Carter dumped at his own convention. Result: a liberal flameout, the spectacle of the governing party torn asunder on national TV, and a Ronald Reagan landslide in November.

Memo to the purists, especially those who are clueless about American history: A Democratic nominee always tries to move to the center. It is a precurser for success.

John F. Kennedy did it in 1960, to the point of moving to Richard Nixon's right, by claiming (falsely) that we were suffering from a "missile gap" in our competition with the Soviet Union. Liberal Democrats were not happy about that - their hearts were still with Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser in 1952 and 1956 - but they suppressed their qualms long enough to secure the narrow victory.

And let us recall Bill Clinton. Flawed though he was, as both candidate and president, there's a big reason why he was the only two-term Democrat since FDR. He staked out centrist positions, even at the risk of ticking off the liberal base. Indeed, liberals spent much of the '90s fuming to each other, and to journalists such as myself. I heard it all many times: Clinton was too conservative, he signed the bill that ended six decades of federal welfare guarantees, he didn't right hard enough for reforms that would help labor fight the union-busting corporations, he did squat to narrow the income gap between rich and poor.

But, in the end, the liberals played ball. As labor activist Don Sweitzer told me in 1996, during Clinton's second national convention, "Fighting over purity (in the past) wound up costing us the whole bushel of apples."

Perhaps, with Clinton, liberals only got two-thirds of a loaf. I'd be curious to know what ratio they could realistically expect to get from John McCain.

Messiahs don't win presidential elections. Smart politicians do. One noteworthy blogger, Denver criminal attorney Jeralyn Merritt, wrote this weekend that disgruntled Obama acolytes should quit "star gazing" and simply "recognize that a Democratic president is preferable to a Republican." Her implicit challenge to the purists is a self-evident no-brainer:

Do you want to win, or not?

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A great moment in the hall of mirrors:

On Meet the Press yesterday, John McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina - the ex-Hewlett Packard CEO who, for some reason, has been billed by the McCain camp as a drawing card for female voters - sought to spin away the damaging remarks uttered last week by chief McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm. As you may recall, Gramm the international investment banker had stated publicly that Americans are whiners, that they are suffering a "mental recession," and that the housing and gasoline crises are mere figments of their imagination.

Anyway, when asked about this Fiorina sought to shrug off the controversy by saying, "I think most Americans are not really focused on what a bunch of surrogates are saying."

Uh, well...if that's the case, then why did the McCain camp bother to put this surrogate on national TV to knock down the Gramm remarks?

Indeed, the McCain camp had better hope that nobody pays attention to Fiorina. Because there's something a tad amiss about seeing McCain and Gramm defended on the economy by a fired CEO who presided over massive layoffs and landed safely with a golden parachute worth $42 million.

Three gifts this week for Barack Obama:

Jesse and the genitalia. The folks at Obama headquarters should be turning cartwheels. Jesse Jackson, by running his mouth on Fox News, has done Obama a tremendous political service.

Fairly or not, there are millions of white voters who need to feel more comfortable with Obama before they can commit to supporting him. If they somehow perceive that Obama is in thrall to Jesse and the old-guard civil rights leaders, they will not support him. They have never been comfortable with Jesse's style, or his victimhood ethos. And they weren't fans of Jesse when he ran for president; back in the 1988 primaries, Jesse drew only 12 percent of all the white voters.

This is why Jesse's off-camera outburst ("See, Barack's been talking down to black people...I wanna cut his nuts off") is such a gift to Obama. It's vivid evidence that Jesse has been politically marginalized, that time has passed him by, that his large and tender ego has been bruised, and that all he can do is lash out from the sidelines. Heck, even his own son publicly repudiated him. And wary white voters can now say to themselves, "If Jesse is this ticked off at Obama, that's a big compliment to Obama."

McCain without a clue (again). The other day, McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina tried to rally women voters to the Republican candidate by assailing the health insurance companies that cover Viagra for men but refuse to cover birth control for women. But when reporters caught up with McCain on his magic bus, and asked him whether he agreed with Fiorina's remarks, he didn't have the faintest idea what to say. (Don't take my word for it. Just watch.) Amidst all the writhing and grimacing, he also had no idea how he had voted on the issue in the past. But he did come up with this: "I certainly do not want to discuss that issue...I don't know enough about it to give you an informed answer."

To refresh McCain's memory: In the Senate he has twice opposed measures that would have required insurance companies to cover birth control prescriptions. These votes occurred in 2003 and 2005. (Granted, McCain has cast thousands of votes, and cannot be expected to remember them all. But I bet he has far less trouble recounting his votes on obscure defense appropriation measures. Because that's the stuff that most interests him.)

Hence, another gift to Obama. His Republican opponent just demonstrated that he is out of touch with many of the female voters he badly needs to woo. He twice voted against their interests, he can't remember doing it, and he'd prefer not to discuss the subject at all. Apparently, joking about bombing Iran is so much easier.

And lastly: McCain and his headshrinker. Did you know that the sharp economic downturn, the loss of jobs, the housing foreclosure crisis, and $4-a-gallon gasoline, are all mere figments of your imagination? So says John McCain's chief economic adviser.

Can there be a more effective way for a Republican campaign to convey the impression that it is out of touch with the lives of average Americans, than to have Phil Gramm (the ex-conservative senator, currently vice president of the giant Swiss bank UBS) declare in a newspaper interview that we are "a nation of whiners" suffering from "a mental recession?"

McCain naturally felt compelled yesterday to distance himself from his own economic guru, and insist that he disagreed with Gramm about the current state of affairs. But that merely prompts a new question, to wit:

If McCain doesn't buy Gramm's fundamental diagnosis of our (supposedly alleged) economic ills, then why is Gramm still serving as his chief economic adviser? 

The Obama people surely hope that Phil Gramm stays on the job.

It's always worth taking a break from vacation to behold the spectacle of a politician blowing off his own foot.

John McCain this week has uttered a couple whoppers that are so egregious, it prompts one to wonder whether he is subconsciously trying to sabotage his own campaign, or whether he is as verbally inept as the president he seeks to replace, or whether he simply lacks the most fundamental knowledge that is required of any Oval Office denizen.

The topic was Social Security. During a Monday town hall event (and bear in mind that he thinks he excels best in town hall events), the presumptive Republican nominee stated: "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace..."

One day later, on CNN, McCain said virtually the thing while railing against the Social Security program: "Let's describe it for what it is. (Today's workers) pay their taxes, and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken..."

We all know that McCain would prefer to spend his time talking about national security and about how Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. We're all aware by now of his public admission that he is a tad knowledge-challenged about the biggest domestic issue of all, the economy. But we might arguably expect that the presidential nominee of a major party would at least have a working knowledge of the most popular domestic program since the New Deal.

Because here's the thing: What McCain describes as "an absolute disgrace" and "broken" are the rules that have governed the Social Security program since its inception 73 years ago. Current workers are always taxed, via the payroll levy, to support the retirement security of current seniors. That's how the pay-as-you-go policy has always worked. That's not a "disgrace," that's the law.

There are several possible ways to interpret McCain's remarks, none of them very flattering:

1. He's truly ignorant of how Social Security works, which, among other things, is not the best way to attract senior voters, or any voters who'd like to believe that a guy auditioning to run the country is at least minimally in touch with reality.

2. He does know how Social Security works (it's hard to imagine he doesn't, not after two decades in Washington), but somehow failed to articulate whatever he really intended to say - just as he has done on other recent occasions, such as when he twice confused the Sunnis and the Shiites (which Brit Hume of Fox News defended as a possible "senior moment").

3. He actually does believe that the fundamental precepts of Social Security are an "absolute disgrace," and wants to overhaul them.

It has long been an axiom that any Republican seeking to overhaul Social Security is doomed to suffer political damage; witness President Bush, who drained his '05 capital while stumping in vain for partial privatization. And it has long been an axiom that any Republican who verbally disses the program (inadvertently or intentionally) is doomed to suffer political damage; witness Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential nominee who was slaughtered on election day in part because he was on record as having stated, "I think Social Security ought to be voluntary. This is the only definite position I have on it."

Yesterday, a McCain spokesman tried to cover the candidate's tracks (they've been mopping up a lot lately) by stating after the fact what McCain might have been intending to convey: "The disgrace is our failure to fix the long-run imbalance in Social Security - a failure of leadership evidenced by our willingness to kick the problem to the next generation of leaders. He's also describing the looming and increasing demographic pressures confronting the Social Security system and Washington's utter failure to address it."

But that's not what McCain described as a "disgrace." Instead, he targeted the underlying premise of the program itself. Either he did this because he is inarticulate; or because he really doesn't know how it works; or because he's an idealogue who wants to undo the best of the New Deal. Whatever the reason, the Demcrats and the senior groups now have him on video. As Barry Goldwater discovered, while trying unsuccessfully to distance himself from his own words, that kind of talk can kill a presidential candidacy.