The Gaffe Patrol

"But at the public forum at the Opera House here, Mr. McCain also displayed the bumpy and sometimes hapless nature of his own effort to prove that he is the candidate with the sterling foreign policy credentials. While he calmly fielded angry questions about his Iraq policy from a member of the audience -- and invited her twice to follow up as the audience booed her -- he also referred, for the third time this month, to Czechoslovakia, a country that has not existed since 1993 when it was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

"This time Mr. McCain caught himself, although he was a few seconds too late."

Jonah Goldberg says the surge argument is a political loser:

"The tragic Catch-22 for the Arizona senator is that the more the surge succeeds, the more politically advantageous it is for Obama. Voters don't care about the surge; they care about the war. Americans want it to be over -- and in a way they can be proud of.

"Richard Nixon didn't win in 1968 by second-guessing LBJ about the mess in Vietnam; he ran on getting us out with honor. McCain is great talking about honor, but the getting-us-out part is where he gets tongue-tied. Obama, meanwhile, talks about getting out of Iraq as though Americans don't care about honor. That may have worked for him in the early primaries, but it won't in the general election. Americans don't like to lose wars . . .

"If it were going worse, McCain's Churchillian rhetoric would match reality more. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, Al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Shiite Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama."

Was Obama negotiating in Iraq? The reports were that he didn't raise his withdrawal timetable with the PM in Baghdad. But Hot Air's Ed Morrissey sees that as a technicality:

"CNN political analyst David Gergen believes that Barack Obama made a political mistake in engaging Nouri al-Maliki on the question of the American presence in Iraq. He stepped over the line in explicitly admitting what amounts to negotiations with an American ally during wartime, a role that rightly belongs to the executive under all circumstances. Gergen calls this the first real political mistake of Obama's trip -- but will anyone notice? . . .

"In fact, Obama's intervention violates two principles of American politics. First, presidential candidates do not conduct foreign policy. They can, as Gergen notes, criticize it all they want, but they have no standing to enter negotiations."

Arianna, who hails from Greece, thinks being cheered in Europe is, yes, a good thing:

"I understand why John McCain's campaign is desperately looking for negatives in Obama's overseas trip. But why have so many in the media internalized the McCain campaign's claptrap?

"Here is the McCain line on Europe, delivered via Politico by a nameless campaign aide: 'I don't know that people in Missouri are going to like seeing tens of thousands of Europeans screaming for The One.'