John McCain's Hamas Problem

by Jonathan Singer [courtesy of MyDD]

Unforced errors tend to do in campaigns...

Two years ago, in an interview with James Rubin for Sky News, Sen. John McCain expressed a willingness to negotiate with the terrorist group Hamas -- the very group that McCain has been relentlessly using to smear Sen. Barack Obama over the last several weeks.

Rubin has written an op-ed in Friday's Washington Post about his exchange with McCain, and The Huffington Post has obtained exclusive video. Here's the key excerpt:

RUBIN: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCAIN: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

You can watch the video of the exchange over at HuffPo. Suffice it to say that this one stings for the McCain campaign, both because of the nature of the major flub and because it's not the first time that the candidate's words have come back to bite him. In fact, it has become quite common with McCain to act like he is holier than now, whether on Iraq or campaign finance or some other issue, only to be outed not only as fallible, like any other human (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but also as cynical, hypocritical, conniving, and overly ambitious -- in other words as just the kind of power-hungry career politician willing to say anything in the hopes of winning an election that Americans hate (which is not such a good thing).

On the issue of Hamas, in particular, because this exchange between Rubin and McCain was caught on tape and it isn't ancient history (just three years ago), this line of attack is now off the table for McCain and the hard right. They simply have no credibility on the issue. What's more, by harping on Hamas from here on out, those on the right would only serve to remind Americans a) that McCain will flip-flop his positions for political convenience, and b) that McCain was recently in favor of reaching out to Hamas. To this end, it's hard for me to think of anything else that could have emerged on this topic that could have been more detrimental to McCain.