Author: Mathew Mikuni
As I watched Obama squirm out of his position to meet, without preconditions, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and watched McCain dodge the question about the initial decision to invade Iraq, I started thinking. Why can’t the candidates just admit when they’re wrong?! When politicians refuse to reconsider their past decisions, it only makes them look inflexible and stubborn. It’s frustrating to watch them refuse to own up to their choices while they try to weasel their way out of tense situations. In 2004, we had a president who couldn’t think of a single mistake he made after four years in office.
One would think that the candidates would realize that the country is tired of politicians that refuse to acknowledge their mistakes. McCain was attacked for his refusal to admit that he was wrong when he misstated how many troops there were remaining in Iraq. Left-leaning blogs asserted that this was evidence that McCain was cut from the “same cloth” as President Bush.
However, Obama still refuses to admit that he was wrong regarding the surge strategy in Iraq. His continued opposition is particularly confusing since he is advocating the exact same strategy to beat back the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s not like he regards the surge to be a failure. He admitted in early September of this year that the surge “succeed beyond our wildest dreams” in reducing violence. He also said that “[the] surge has succeeded in ways that nobody has anticipated”.
Both the candidates have changed for the worse ever since the campaign officially started. McCain had to veer right to secure the Republican Party nomination, and the fact that his campaign is under the control of Bush’s ex-spokesman makes me wonder if the Straight Talk Express blew a tire somewhere. Obama, for his part, has dropped his talk of bridging the political divide and has replaced this sentiment with the bitter partisan attacks of the ‘old’ politics he claims to detest. While criticizing Obama’s timetable for withdrawal in my Middle East politics class, I got responses from my classmates that simply said Obama wasn’t really serious about taking out one to two brigades a month. When I then accused Obama of knowingly misleading the American people on the central promise of his campaign, I got near universal excuses: “he’s just a politician!” I guess my main attraction to Obama was that he could be more than that.
The protesters on the corner of Eagle Rock and Colorado aren’t going to suddenly switch their votes to McCain if Obama admits that he was wrong on the surge or re-evaluates his strict withdrawal timeline. But he would prove to me that maybe, just maybe, he’s not simply another politician. The best leaders openly admit their mistakes and learn from them. In running for the highest office in the land, this isn’t something the candidates should forget. And neither should we.
Mathew Mikuni is a senior DWA and Asian Studies major. He can be reached at mmikuni@oxy.edu.
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