Both John McCain and Barack Obama are now framing the discussion in Iraq around the idea of withdrawal. That’s not new for Obama, but it is a shift for McCain, who spent much of last year dodging conversations about an end game in favor of focusing on the surge. The differences in strategy, however, are still striking. McCain says he will only withdraw when conditions on the ground allow, though he hopes to have most troops out by 2013. Obama says he will pre-set a date for withdrawal, 16 months after taking office, and then make adjustments based on conditions on the ground. I have a new Time.com story about this here, along with a quote from Grover Norquist, in June of 2007, who was one of several to predict the eventual shift in rhetoric.
Republican political strategists have long said privately what Republican candidates for President only hinted at publicly. No one can win the White House in 2008 by campaigning to continue an unending war in Iraq. “The sentence has to have the word ‘leaving’ in it,” said Grover Norquist, the influential Republican operative, at a breakfast meeting in June of 2007. “Doesn’t mean you have to leave tomorrow, doesn’t mean you have to surrender, doesn’t mean you have to cut and run, but the articulation of the policy needs to be clear to the American people that we are not staying there indefinitely, and that there is a ‘doing something’ and a ‘leaving.'”