My view on the surge debate is that both McCain and Obama are right. And both a little wrong.

McCain's claim is that he said the surge would be good, Obama didn't, the surge has accomplished good stuff, so he was right. I think that's a reasonable point, so I will say that he was right about the surge. There's a lot of stuff the surge was supposed to do that it didn't, but the Generals at the time were saying that they needed more troops (Bush is lying when he says he listens to the Generals on the ground, he never did before the surge), so sending more troops was a reasonable position and good things have happened because of it.

The problem with McCain's point is that he's going too far with it. He's saying that *everything* that's good has happened because of the surge. That puts Obama in the position where if he did concede the point, he'd look like he was also conceding on everything else. So every time someone asks about the surge he has to mention all the other things that reduced violence. He has to emphasize those things to the point that, yes, sometimes he doesn't emphasize the role of the surge as much as he could.

McCain says the surge helped. Obama says the other developments helped. The truth is that both things helped and they're both right. But nobody is going to get a political ad out of "we're both right to some degree," so they've gone to the extreme sides of the arguement, with McCain being more extreme.

All of this is complicated by the other thing that Rachel routinely mentions, that McCain is trying to act like the Surge is the only decision on the war that either candidate ever made, so he should not only win this point but win the entire debate about the war. Since that's the only thing he has to hold onto at this point, he's gone totally nutbar about trying to convince everyone that he's winning this round.