Can Obama Take the 'High Road' to the White House?

Newsweek

As John McCain and his Republican allies have ratcheted up their attacks on Barack Obama's foreign-policy record in recent days, they've repeated one criticism in particular: that Obama once voted "against our troops."

The swipe first appeared last Friday in a McCain spot called, appropriately enough, "Troop Funding"; it resurfaced today in the RNC's new "Obama Chooses Washington Over Our Military" ad (above), which, as we reported earlier, is set to air tomorrow in Berlin, N.H., Berlin, Penn. and Berlin, Wisc.

"There are few votes as important as funding our men and women in uniform," says the announcer. "But when our military needed necessary resources, Barack Obama failed to stand up."

The attack itself--which has been a staple of the Republican playbook since the Iraq war began in 2003--isn't particularly noteworthy. What's intriguing, however, is how much Obama's response to it has changed over the past five days.

As we wrote last week, portraying Obama's 2007 vote against a war-funding bill is misleading--especially because McCain himself voted against H.R. 1591, an emergency spending bill designed to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and provide more than $1 billion to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The truth is, McCain was opposing a bill that included a timetable for withdrawal and Obama was opposing one that didn't. Neither candidate was actually voting "against the troops."