THE SPECTER OF JOE AND EILEEN. It wasn't until I saw Chuck Schumer repeat, at the end of a Meet the Press appearance yesterday, his bizarre assertion that Iraq won't be a central issue in the 2008 election that I realized a possible motive for saying such a thing (beyond the generic and still-pervasive wishful thinking common to Dem officials who are more comfortable discussing domestic issues): the guy's got this new and pretty bad-sounding book coming out, he needs to plug it, and by his own descriptions of it the book is much more concerned with making warmed-over critiques about cultural lib interest groups and issues than with discussing issues like Iraq.
I hesitate to bash the book preemptively, as I haven't yet read it, a certified smart person who has read it says it's better than he'd thought it would be, and Schumer is, at the end of the day, a force for good in the world. But his discussion of the book's themes at his Prospect breakfast event over the summer raised some serious red flags. Meanwhile, the second, programmatic part of his book, laid out today on TPMCafe, seems more harmless than anything else, though the 50% gimmick seems inordinately goofy.
But the bottom line remains: His insistence that Iraq will recede as an issue -- that, as he put it yesterday, "the president will have no choice but to begin a withdrawal come this summer or fall of 2007. And that's why I think the 2008 election, Tim, is going to turn on a positive platform � [n]ot Iraq" -- is dangerously wrong, and worth calling out every time it surfaces.
--Sam Rosenfeld
