There’s something that continues to bother me about the national polls, especially the most recent ones: the National Security credibility gap. In all of the polls so far, McCain is always favored by large majorities as the person most qualified to be Commander-in-Chief, or has a better handle on national security issues. Here’s an example, from the most recent CBS/NYT poll:

The reason this bothers me is that, from my viewpoint, the events of the last 2 months couldn’t have made it any clearer that Barack Obama would be more effective than John McCain as Commander-in-Chief.  Remember when this was a gaffe?

Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, said he would order strikes on Al Qaeda targets and withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid if the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, did not blunt a resurging Taliban presence in the country’s tribal areas. This, he said, is the “right battlefield” to make the United States safer.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act,” Mr. Obama said, “we will.”

John McCain even jumped in at the time to comment:

McCain “said Sen. Barack Obama’s threat to use military force to get rid of terrorists in Pakistan shows he does not understand the complexities of the region. McCain said the situation in Pakistan is ‘very delicate,’ since the country’s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is an American ally with a tenuous hold on power. The Arizona senator said a direct American attack on the country could cause a backlash that might topple Musharraf.”

And what did we learn today?

President George W Bush secretly ordered US special forces to conduct ground assaults in Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistan government.

Obama led. Bush followed. McCain was wrong.

And this isn’t the only event that fits this mold.  Sullivan sums them up nicely:

On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

The Bush administration – when guided by the saner forces within it such as Gates and Rice – eventually follows Obama’s advice. In that sense, Obama has been president for quite a while already. And proving he could be a shrewd, pragmatic and prescient one.

Obama led.  Bush followed.  McCain was wrong.  This needs to get blasted out with a megaphone, because until people know this, they fall back on the conventional wisdom that Republican’s are stronger on defense because they say stuff like “Islamofascists” and thump their chests when they talk about Russia.  Basically, we need more of this:

The Obama Campaign cannot do what so many Democrats have failed to do in the past: try to out-macho the Macho Party.  They need to challenge the judgment of McCain with sharp, tough, and dismissive comments, empahasizing who was wrong, and who was right.  This is the only way to cut through the bluster effectively.  Remember the last time the Dems tried to out-macho the GOP?

Yeah.  Let’s not do that again.