The NYT reports on "the fight for McCain's" foreign policy soul:

Still, as prominent pragmatists and neoconservatives have started to part company over the war, they appear to be jockeying for influence in Mr. McCain’s campaign and, should he be elected, in his administration.

One of the chief concerns of the pragmatists is that Mr. McCain is susceptible to influence from the neoconservatives because he is not as fully formed on foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.

In a trip to the Middle East last month, Mr. McCain made an embarrassing mistake when he said several times that he was concerned that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. (The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, a Sunni insurgent group.) He repeated the mistake on Tuesday at hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Isn't it clear that those who have McCain's ear don't believe such an analysis is a mistake at all? The pragmatists overestimated their influence on this president when he came into office and have shown few recent signs of having McCain's foreign policy ear or influencing his foreign policy education. Save for the odd boilerplate about working with others, which sounds as deeply felt as Bush's pre-presidency 'US should be more humble' rhetoric, and which means nothing (of course nice if the rest of the world wants to go along, and too bad when it doesn't, true of Clinton to some degree as well as Bush), the preponderance of national security advisors in McCain's inner and outer circles would seem to make clear he leans heavily to the hawk camp. Which makes all this talk of Rice as his Veep just silly. Never going to happen. Why? Because it would alienate the strongest base of support McCain has among conservatives, national security conservatives, who deeply resent the strain of pragmatism she has brought to Bush's second term foreign policy.

Update: CNN: new poll says McCain-Rice ticket would beat Dems in New York.

Posted by Laura at April 10, 2008 12:23 AM