McCain and the Draft

Here's the exchange from Senator McCain's "town hall" in New Mexico that's gotten a lot of attention in the media.




I think this is an exploitable quote, but only to a point. The woman's comment can be interpreted plausibly as a proposition, in effect: "As long as the conditions I'm complaining about prevail, we'll reach the point where we'll need the draft to pursue bin Laden to the gates of hell, because when people see the way we're treating veterans, they won't want to volunteer." Unfortunately for McCain, while we can infer this meaning from the woman's comments, what she said literally was that we won't have troops to chase bin Laden unless we have a draft, and with this he declined to disagree. We could also excuse this as a sort of senior moment, or, to be more fair, we could suggest that McCain was already anticipating his answer, as we hear it, in the middle of the woman's remarks, and spoke before he had a chance to absorb the import of her last comment. Unfortunately again for McCain, this is purely speculative, while the fact is that he did not disagree with anything she said. Neither the Democrats nor any other anti-war candidate should refuse to use this quote, and the friends of Senator Obama especially, besieged by liars every day, should say at every opportunity that McCain supports a draft