Matt Yglesias

O’Hanlon for Obama

An endorsement from my favorite very serious person:

Although a lifelong Democrat who hasn’t wavered in his presidential vote since 1980, I have been unable to support Senator Barack Obama over the past two years. But after weighing the options in the closing months, I have decided to vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Political scientists tell us that VP choices don’t matter much, but for me, a tie among the heads of the two tickets means that the VP choice is determinative. And Senator Biden, whatever his flaws and limits, is clearly a much better choice than Governor Palin, at least at this point in their respective careers.

O’Hanlon seems to be saying here that he’s in the rare category of people who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and then flipped to Walter Mondale in 1984.

Meeting Mike O’Hanlon

Thursday evening I had the opportunity to appear on Al-Hurra, America’s government-funded Arabic-language television network (and, no, I don’t speak Arabic and, yes, the network might be more popular if it didn’t feature so many Americans-who-need-to-be-translated) to do some commentary on the Democratic Convention before Barack Obama’s big speech. To my surprise, my fellow guest was none other than Michael O’Hanlon (the photo’s not very good, my seat was pretty far from his):

Showing off his savvy TV veteran skills, O’Hanlon brought a pair of sunglasses to the studio that he could wear between our on-camera moments in order to avoid being blinded by prolonged exposure to TV lighting. I’d never met him before, and we only chatted extremely briefly once we were done because I wanted to hurry home and see Obama.

Go Means Go

Progressives think the United States should set a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Iraqi politicians uniformly want this. And the Iraqi public is overwhelmingly on board. But conservative analysts have been labeling this policy irresponsible forever. How do they react? If you’re Michael O’Hanlon, through mind-reading:

Clearly, it would be neither practical nor desirable for the entire U.S. military presence in Iraq to simply vanish on Friday. But nobody’s proposing that. Rather, the proposal on the table is to set an end-point for American withdrawal and then begin redeploying forces out in an organized, safe manner. But rather than concede the point that the progressive solution is in line with the desires of the Iraqi people and the main Iraqi political leaders, we get this weird dance of dismissing Iraq’s desire to be free of a foreign occupying army as “political,” assertions that O’Hanlon has secret mind-reading powers to know what people really think, and a kind of straw man focus on the extremely short-term. Ostensibly, however, since 2003 we’ve been looking to create a situation in Iraq where a new government will be stable enough to get along without us. The new government says they’re reaching that point, and want to set a schedule for our departure. Why not take “yes” for an answer?