Ptx Elections

Index Index.................................................................................................................................... ...........1 1NC – Obama Good............................................................................................. ..........................3 1NC – Obama Good............................................................................................. ..........................4 1NC – Obama Good............................................................................................. ..........................5 ***2NC Impact Calc***....................................................................................................... ........6 Obama Solves Syria................................................................................................................. .......7 Obama Solves Iran.................................................................................................................... ......8 Obama Solves Afghanistan.............................................................................................. ...............9 Obama Solves Palestine..................................................................................................... ...........10 Obama Solves Palestine................................................................................................. ...............11 Obama Solves Lebanon......................................................................................... .......................12 Obama Solves Terrorism......................................................................................................... ......13 Obama Solves EU Relations.......................................................................................... ...............14 Obama Solves Russian Relations......................................................................................... .........15 ***Uniqueness***............................................................................................................. ..........16 2NC – Obama Wins.................................................................................................... ..................17 2NC – Obama Wins.................................................................................................... ..................18 Yes – Polls............................................................................................................ ........................19 Yes – Obama Over Clinton..................................................................................... ......................20 A2 – Obama/Clinton Contests Hurt Dems.................................................................... ................21 A2 – Wright/Pastor N/U.............................................................................................................. ..22 A2 – Vote Switching (Gallup Poll)............................................................................................... .23 ***Generic Link Debate***........................................................................................... ............24 A2 – Plan Not Key................................................................................................................. .......25 A2 – Plan Not Key................................................................................................................. .......26 A2 – Iraq Key......................................................................................................... ......................27 A2 – Economy Key...................................................................................................................... .28 A2 – Too Far Off......................................................................................................................... ..29 Internal – Engagement Key.......................................................................................................... .30 Internal – Mid East Key..................................................................................................... ...........31 Internal – FoPo Key........................................................................................................... ...........32 Internal – FoPo Key........................................................................................................... ...........33 Internal – Bush Key..................................................................................................... .................34 Internal – Bush Key..................................................................................................... .................35 Internal – Congressional Action............................................................................................ ........36 Internal – Terror Key........................................................................................ ............................37 Terror Link U..................................................................................................................... ...........38 A2 – Link Turn: Israel................................................................................................................... 39 A2 – Israel Lobby...................................................................................................... ...................40 A2 – Base Turn............................................................................................................. ................41 ***Iran Links***........................................................................................................ ................42 1NC – Iran Link.................................................................................................................... ........43 2NC – Iran Link Spew.................................................................................................. ................44 2NC – Iran Link Spew.................................................................................................. ................45 2NC – Iran Link Spew.................................................................................................. ................46 Link – Iran Popular......................................................................................................... ..............47 Internal – Iran Key.............................................................................................................. ..........48 Internal – Iran Important................................................................................................... ............49 Internal – Clinton & Obama Split on Engagement.................................................................... ....50

Afghan Links***............................................................................................................. ............51 1NC – Afghanistan Link.............................................................................................. .................52 2NC – Afghan Link Spew.................................................................................................... .........53 2NC – Afghan Link Spew.................................................................................................... .........54 2NC – Afghan Link Spew.................................................................................................... .........55 ***Syria Links***...................................................................................................................... .56 1NC – Syria Link................................................................................................................. .........57 2NC – Syria Link Spew............................................................................................... .................58 2NC – Syria Link Spew............................................................................................... .................59 2NC – Syria Link Spew............................................................................................... .................60 Syria Link – Popular....................................................................................................... ..............61 ***Israel/Palestine Links***................................................................................................ ......62 1NC – Israel Palestine Link...................................................................................... ....................63 2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew............................................................................. ...................64 2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew............................................................................. ...................65 2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew............................................................................. ...................66 A2 – Public Hates Palestine............................................................................................ ..............67 ***Lebanon Links***............................................................................................................. ....68 1NC – Lebanon Link............................................................................................ ........................69 2NC – Lebanon Link Spew....................................................................................................... ....70 2NC – Lebanon Link Spew....................................................................................................... ....71 ***Impact Debate***.......................................................................................... .......................72 ***Bush Doctrine***..................................................................................................... .............73 2NC – Bush Doctrine Impact............................................................................................... .........74 2NC – McCain = Every Scenario for War................................................................................. ....75 Internal – McCain = Bush Doctrine.............................................................................. ................76 ***Tax Cuts***........................................................................................................... ................77 2NC – Tax Cuts Scenario..................................................................................................... .........78 ***Iraq***............................................................................................................................... ....79 2NC – A2 Iraq Withdrawal.................................................................................... .......................80 No Withdrawal....................................................................................................................... .......81 ***Health Care***..................................................................................................................... .82 2NC – Health Care Impact..................................................................................................... .......83 ***Pakistan***................................................................................................ ...........................84 A2 – Pakistan Attack................................................................................................................... ..85 ***Free Trade/Protectionism***......................................................................... ......................86 2NC – A2 Protectionism Turn................................................................................................. ......87 ***Obama Better Than Clinton***.................................................................................... .......88 Obama Beats McCain................................................................................................ ...................89 Obama Beats McCain................................................................................................ ...................90 Clinton Won’t Solve Iran........................................................................................ ......................91 ***2NC CP Out Turns***......................................................................................... .................92 2NC CP..................................................................................................................................... ....93

1NC – Obama Good McCain will lose unless Bush adopts popular foreign policies. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. x-xi) Retrospectively, the Keys account for the results of every presidential election from 1860 through 1980, much longer than any other prediction system. Prospectively, the Keys predicted well ahead of time the popular-vote winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2004. They called Vice President George H.W. Bush's victory in the spring of 1988 when he trailed Mike Dukakis by nearly twenty points in the polls and was being written off by the pundits. The Vice President defied the polls and the pundits, not because he discovered negative ads or refurbished his image, but because voters ratified the performance of the Reagan administration--four years of prosperity, the defusing of the Cold War, and a scandal that faded away. In 1992, George H.W. Bush lost his chance for a second term, as the Keys predicted, when a sour economy and lack of domestic accomplishment tarnished his record as president. The Keys predicted George W. Bush's 2004 re-election in April of 2003, a year and a half before a contest that pollsters found too close to call right up to election eve. As a sitting president with no prospective challenger in his own party or a serious third-party competitor, Bush's mixed record of accomplishment at home and abroad was sufficient to anticipate in his victory in 2004. Likewise, although President Bush will not be on the ticket in 2008, the fate of his would-be successor in the Republican Party will depend upon the president's performance in his second term. If the Bush administration fails to meet the domestic and foreign policy challenges of the next four years, voters will dismiss the Republicans, regardless of the Democratic nominee. Moreover, according to the Keys, the Democrats will have structural advantages in 2008 that they lacked in 2004. The Republicans will not be fielding a sitting president, which results in the loss of Key 3 and will likely confront a bruising battle for their party's nomination which forfeits Key 2. Thus, two Keys that the GOP held in 2004 are in jeopardy for 2008, making a Democratic victory likely that year, despite the setbacks at the polls that Democrats have suffered thus far in the twentyfirst century. Democrats, moreover, need not worry about battling for their party's nomination; history shows that nomination struggles within the out-party do not subvert its chances to recapture the White House. A vigorous challenging party usually has multiple presidential contenders, each of whom professes to have the skills, personality, and policies needed to regain the White House. A spirited outparty contest for the presidential nomination might even signify the vulnerability of the party in power, as candidates compete for what appears to be a promising nomination. The greatest popular vote victory by a challenging party candidate in American history was achieved by Republican Warren Harding in 1920 after a deadlocked convention nominated him as a compromise candidate on the tenth ballot.

1NC – Obama Good (C) Impacts -Obama victory will solve multiple scenarios for global war. Muhammed, 3-11 (Assistant Editor -- Final Call, http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_4444.shtml) Professor Starks says there is still hope the country can be turned around. Sen. Obama and his campaign represents “that hope in the sense that he is positive and offering policy alternatives” to the last 8 years of the Bush administration, he said. With the world immersed in nearly global conflicts, Bob Stein, a professor of social sciences at Rice University, said establishing peace would be the greatest challenge for the next president. “I think the challenges that the next president of the United States will face in the pursuit of world peace is everything from the war in Iraq to the conflict in Afghanistan. The issue of instability in Darfur and Africa. There are worldwide conflicts that are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. There are no simple solutions because these challenges are quite complex and the next president will be taking on something that no one has had to handle their first day in office within the last 25 to 30 years,” Professor Stein told The Final Call. “Just trying to get out of Iraq alone poses the biggest challenge for the Democrats. Weapons of mass destruction may have gotten us into the war but how to get out is going to be difficult to execute. McCain has spoken on this. I think it will require more than just America to get out, but instead will take a world community effort. America needs help from its allies to get out of that war. She can’t do it alone. It’s an incredible complex situation the next president will face. World peace will be a great task to achieve.”

1NC – Obama Good Obama key to any effective US policy to solve global warming. Loeb, 3-3 (Scholar -- Center for Ethical Leadership, Huffington Post, http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080303/cm_huffpost/089406) If we ignore global warming much longer, we'll face a world of perpetual disaster, so there's no larger question for presidential candidates than who is more likely to tackle it successfully. Although Obama's and Clinton's positions are similar, he seems far more likely to. The key difference is their ability to mobilize a grassroots base to demand that the necessary changes get passed. If you look only at the candidate platforms, both Obama's and Clinton's are excellent. John Edwards was the first to come up with a comprehensive plan, but Obama soon did too, followed by Clinton. Both Obama and Clinton focus on renewable energy in their speeches and ads, pledging major incentives and R&D programs for renewables, increased portfolio standards for utilities, and cap-and-trade systems with decreasing limits where permits would be auctioned off, not just given away. Both support green jobs programs to benefit communities. Both talk of continuing to tighten efficiency standards for buildings, vehicles, and businesses. I wish both took firmer stands against nuclear power and liquid coal, but either would offer a strong alternative to our current inaction. Their programs are also both considerably better than that those John McCain suggests. While McCain talks a decent line, especially compared to his numerous climate change-denying Republican colleagues, he equivocates far more on the critical details, supports considerably more modest carbon reduction standards, and this past December abdicated the chance to cast the critical cloture vote and end a Republican filibuster that blocked the recent energy bill's most important provisions. Both Obama and Clinton get the urgency of the issue as much as any mainline American politician who isn't named Al Gore. But I think Obama is far more likely to pass anything close to the legislation we need, because of his ability to mobilize ordinary citizens. Clinton emphasizes her insider knowledge, her familiarity with process. But in a period when Republicans first prevented Democratic bills from coming to the floor, and then filibustered them if they did, she's mostly been unable to coalesce participants across the admittedly entrenched political divides, unless you count crossing the aisle to support a flag-burning bill or backing the Iraq war. Her track record's no worse than other Democratic Senators, and she did successfully co-sponsor bi-partisan legislation to protect bonuses for wounded veterans and extend family medical leave for wounded soldiers. But it's a record certainly matched by Obama. In his four-year-briefer tenure, he's secured major Republican support to pass a major transparency bill that publicly lists all organizations receiving Federal funds, how much they've received, and the purpose of their grant or contract. He's passed another that provides resources to seek out and destroy surplus and unguarded stocks of conventional arms -- like land mines and shoulder fired missiles -- in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. And together with Russ Feingold, he played a key role in developing and passing a law that eliminated gifts of travel on corporate jets from lobbyists to members of Congress and required disclosure of bundled campaign contributions. Even if you ignore his major achievements in the Illinois legislature -- like bringing police chiefs and civil liberties advocates together to craft and support a bill providing clear monitoring of police interrogations, and passing a bill extending health care to 150,000 state residents -- I'd say evidence of insider ability is a wash. The critical difference

between Obama and Clinton is their potential to encourage ordinary citizens to speak out on the changes that we need. And that will be essential. If you strip away the racial connotations, that's actually the core of the debate over Clinton's claim that LBJ was more critical to the passage of the Civil Rights Act than Martin Luther King. For all that I loathe Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, he did stake his entire political capital and massive skill to navigate the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through Congress -- even though he knew it would lose the Democrats the South for a long time to come. But without the massive citizen movement that put civil rights onto the nation's conscience and at the top of its political agenda, he'd never have taken these stands. When you read books like Taylor Branch's wonderful history of America in the King years, it's clear how much both LBJ and Kennedy viewed the civil rights movement as a politically loaded intrusion on their other agendas. Kennedy did all he could to pressure King and other civil rights leaders not to hold the 1963 March on Washington. But as the pressure kept building, they finally answered the movement's call and lent their moral support to it, just as Franklin Roosevelt played a critical role by lending his support to America's resurgent union movement. We'll need a similarly powerful massive movement now -- and ideally a president willing to

nurture it -- to overcome the massive dollars and entrenched political clout of companies like Exxon/Mobil, Peabody Coal, and General Motors. In that context, there's no comparison between the candidates. Obama evokes the power of citizen movements in every speech he gives. He explicitly challenges ordinary citizens to see themselves as part of a lineage of change, with their own political participation following in the footsteps of America's most fundamental movements for justice. Obama evokes those roots when he talks of slaves and abolitionists who "blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights," and of "workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot...and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land." Obama explicitly calls for citizens to act beyond the confines of electing him to office. His campaign echoes this call by relying on volunteers to organize themselves, take their own initiative, and find common strength in connecting with each other. The campaign provides materials, talking points, and video images, and is extraordinarily organized in ensuring that every critical precinct gets walked and every key household gets called. They learned the rules of the Texas caucus and Pennsylvania delegate systems, for instance, while the Clinton camp was reduced in the case of Texas to complaining and threatening lawsuits and failed to file a full slate of Pennsylvania delegates. Yet Obama's campaign has also sacrificed a significant amount of control over precisely how their volunteers reach out once they're engaged. In my home state of Washington, operations were run for months by an entirely volunteer group that included several former Bush and Ross Perot supporters in key roles who'd been disillusioned by disasters like Iraq, and then inspired by Obama's words. Their Ohio volunteer phone script, for instance, offers a standard summary of issues to raise, but also explicitly encourages volunteers to talk about their specific reasons for participating. The campaign has also continually helped connect ordinary citizens with each other, consistent with Obama's years as a community organizer and then as a lawyer representing these same grassroots organizations. Because these new connections are created in a way that's likely to

, they'll make these new participants part of an independent base for change that can both help Obama pass key legislation on issues like climate change, and press him to act more strongly last past the election

when he compromises unduly. Clinton's campaign, by contrast, has been top-down and controlled from the start, giving local campaigners far less latitude.

***2NC Impact Calc***

Obama Solves Syria Obama will engage Syria – solving your Aff. Daily Star, February 27, 2008 Obama said that once elected, he would engage Syria. Some of his advisers have already gone to Damascus, most recently Zbigniew Brzezinski. Even though the Syrian regime may soon find itself accused of involvement in the Hariri murder, Obama and his team have not set any preconditions for easing the pressure on Damascus, post-Bush.

Obama Solves Iran -- DA solves you case: Functional delay cp. Middle East Interest, 1-29 (http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/category/israel/) Iran’s political position has got stronger. If the US quits Iraq prematurely, Persian hegemony in the Persian Gulf could become a reality, even without nukes. Iran will press ahead with its nuclear program until it masters the fuel cycle, and then will seek serious negotiations with the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. The US policy towards Iran has been sanctions and more sanctions. Further sanctions are very unlikely to deflect Tehran from its nuclear ambitions.

Iran’s pragmatist/reformist opposition is highly likely to triumph in the March 2008 parliamentary elections. This will lead to an opportunity for Mr. Bush’s successor to adopt a new policy of diplomatic engagement with Iran, offering a grand bargain to Tehran.

Bush can’t do the plan, only the next president can. Albright, 3-3 (President, Institute for Science and International Security, Interviewed by Bernard Gwertman, Consulting Editor -- CFR, http://www.cfr.org/publication/15634/) Do you get any sense from the Iranians that they might be more flexible if the United States and its allies dropped its demand that the Iranians suspend their enrichment for negotiations to take place, and instead, just opened negotiations without preconditions? I don’t think it would make a difference in the Bush administration. For one thing, I’m not sure the Bush administration could decide to make that offer. Two, I’m not sure the Iranians would view it as enough. We may have to wait for the next administration, which will have the advantage of approaching its relationship with Iran with a clean slate. I would say that the goal should remain suspension. From a nonproliferation perspective, it is difficult to live with three thousand centrifuges, even P1 centrifuges, in Iran. If it achieves a nuclear- weapons capability, Iran can decide to build nuclear weapons and may be able to do it relatively quickly. And there would be few options that could stop them short of war. So it’s critical that the goal remains suspension of the Iranian enrichment program until confidence is achieved that Iran isn’t going to try to build weapons. It’s not acceptable to say, “Ok, we’ll

. The United States is going to have to start to link the settlement of this nuclear issue to security assurances from the United States. A new administration will have the freedom to do that. permit a freeze,” where three thousand machines continue to operate and Iran continues to learn how to operate the machines better

Solves your reformers advantages. Derakhshan, 7 (10-12, www.hoder.com/weblog) Personally I don't think there is any disagreement between the American Republicans and the democrats on the necessity for radical change in Iran. What is different is only their methods and I believe the

Democrats, with their ties to Rafsanjanists in and out of Iran, and their better informed and more sophisticated style, are far more dangerous for the Islamic Republic than the Republicans with the naive, bold, and uninformed style. The real plans for radical changes in Iran only starts when Bush is replaced by a Democrat, and those of us who believe the today Iran is a legitimate, democratic, and sovereign state should prepare ourselves to counter the new plans that are being cooked by the Democrat-leaning exiled Iranians in 'liberal' thinktanks, and quasi-Academic research institutions.

Independently, a McCain victory terminates the solvency of case and ensures war – Only a Democratic victory can cause diplomacy. Falk, '8 (Princeton Ilaw Professor, http://www.todayszaman.com/tzweb/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=134564&bolum=109) But aside from Iraq there are no significant foreign policy differences between the approaches taken by the three candidates so far as the Middle East is concerned. McCain is the only likely contender to have explicitly embraced the Bush approach to the region, although his attitude toward Iran has not been clearly expressed to this point, and this is likely to be crucial. There are still rumors floating about that there will yet be during the final months of the Bush presidency a major air attack launched against Iran. There are reports now circulating of additional deployments of American aircraft carriers and minesweepers in the Persian Gulf. It is known that Cheney, along with some neoconservative advisors and Israeli officials, has been pressing hard behind the scenes to discount the mostly reassuring assessment of the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (a high-level report from the US intelligence

This pro-attack group seeks to revive a confrontational approach toward Iran that keeps the military option very much on the table. It still seems unlikely that such an attack on Iran will occur, because of its anticipated costs: skyrocketing oil prices, retaliatory missile strikes, blockage of the community) that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Straight of Hormuz, a further overstretching of the already overstretched American military, the likely hostile reaction of world public opinion and considerable opposition

. If such attack occurs, and it cannot be ruled out despite its irrationality, the impact on the American presidential campaign would be decisive, pitting a Democrat who deplores and repudiates such a bellicose approach to conflict against a Republican who seems fully comfortable with the kind of militarist foreign policy associated with the Bush presidency, resorting to preventive wars being an essential element in the "war on terror" and the accompanying struggle to keep America safe. within the US

Obama Solves Afghanistan -- Obama solves Afghani instability. Bainbridge, '8 (Law Prof -- UCLA, http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/punditry/comments/credit_where_due/ ) Obama intends to pour more troops and resources into defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. He told The Sunday Times he would expect European allies to contribute more to the fight. “You can’t have a situation where the United States and Britain are called on to do the dirty work and nobody else wants to engage in actual fire-fights with the Taliban.” He praised Prince Harry’s “commendable” service - “I’m sure the British people are very proud of him” - and said America would have a “special, special relationship” with Britain should he win the White House. “That’s inviolable,” he said. Europe, he added, would get something in return for an extra push in Afghanistan. “It’s important for us to send a signal that we’re going to be listening to them when it comes to policies they find objectionable, Iraq being top of the list.” All the way back in March 2004, I wrote that: People might also ask whether some of the troops tied down in Iraq couldn’t be better used in Afghanistan tracking down bin Laden and the rest of the al Qaeda leadership. I was always taught to finish one job before starting another. Granted, law school taught me to multi-task, but it does seem like we let al Qaeda slip in the priority list while taking out Saddam.

Obama Solves Palestine -- Obama solves your case. Kuttab, 2-23 (Palestinian Journalist, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daoud-kuttab/obama-andpalestine_b_92985.html) While the US presidential elections are being followed closely around the world, Palestinian appetite about the upcoming poll is insatiable. The feelings of Palestinians in the streets of Ramallah or the Gaza refugee camp is that the policies carried out by the resident of the White House will have a direct effect on their lives. Republican

McCain's foreign policy doesn't seem to be different from the current Bush administration's unilateral military action, the continuation so called war on terror and boycotting the leaders of Syria and Iran. Senator Hillary nominee John

Clinton who had the courage to call for a Palestinian state during her days as the first lady has become a pro Israeli hawk ever since she ran for the senate seat for the state

Barack Obama, however, is seen differently. Not that he has made any major deviation from the standard US policy that his background, candidacy, and his recent public discussion to members of the Jewish community in Cleveland Ohio, reveal a politically different kind of political candidate. It is clear that Barack Obama personal of New York in 2000. Senator

towards Israel, he hasn't. But many believe

narrative reflects a much more global candidate than the US presidential roster has ever experienced. At a time when the US world supremacy is uncontested, the world community feels shortchanged when only American issues dominate the elections of what in fact has become a global presidency. Unlike McCain's single dimensional

Obama is seen as a candidate who understands and empathizes with Muslims even while willing to militarily take on Bin Laden and his like with or without the ok of a US ally in Pakistan. Obama's approach to the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, Barack

willingness to go after al Qaeda without badmouthing Muslims (even as McCain and company repeatedly use the word radical Islam) reflects properly targeting America's

Obama's multilateralism is very refreshing. His call for talking with your enemies rather than boycotting them gives genuine priority to diplomacy to war, truly leaving the latter as a last resort. enemy for their actions and not for the religion that they belong to. As presented on his web site and in his talks,

Ironically the Obama campaign has avoided to apply their own concept to the issue of talking to the Islamic Hamas movement in Palestine. Their argument that Hamas is a movement and not a state doesn't hold water considering that Palestinians have been yearning for a state decades and pro Hamas leaders where elected in a free and fair elections. If Obama was running for president a decade ago he surely would not have made that justification regarding talking to Mandela and the ANC (who also were

, it is clear that his willingness to talk to the Syrian and Iranian leaders would provide a group like Hamas (whose leaders are supported by these countries) an opportunity to be heard, albeit, indirectly. More specifically on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Obama campaign has been very clear on supporting the two-state solution but has been vague on how to reach that. Ironically, Obama was the most forthcoming when speaking to 100 members of Cleveland's Jewish Community transcripts of which were published in the NY Sun on February 25, 2008. The junior senator from Illinois was not afraid of challenging hard line American Jewish leaders even while supporting Israeli security. "This is where I get to be honest and I hope I'm not out of school here. I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," he said. Obama listed his overall plans by stating: " My goal then would be to solicit as many practical opinions as possible in terms of how we're going to move forward on the improvement of [Palestinian-Israeli] relations and a sustainable peace. not a state). Obama supporters note that although he has refused to talk directly to Hamas

Obama solves Iran – McCain causes war. Falk, '8 (Princeton Ilaw Professor, http://www.todayszaman.com/tzweb/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=134564&bolum=109) But aside from Iraq there are no significant foreign policy differences between the approaches taken by the three candidates so far as the Middle East is concerned. McCain is the only likely contender to have explicitly embraced the Bush approach to the region, although his attitude toward Iran has not been clearly expressed to this point, and this is likely to be crucial. There are still rumors floating about that there will yet be during the final months of the Bush presidency a major air attack launched against Iran. There are reports now circulating of additional deployments of American aircraft carriers and minesweepers in the Persian Gulf. It is known that Cheney, along with some neoconservative advisors and Israeli officials, has been pressing hard behind the scenes to discount the mostly reassuring assessment of the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (a high-level report from the US intelligence community) that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This pro-attack group seeks to revive a confrontational approach toward Iran that keeps the military option very much on the table. It still seems unlikely that such an attack on Iran will occur, because of its anticipated costs: skyrocketing oil prices, retaliatory missile strikes, blockage of the

Straight of Hormuz, a further overstretching of the already overstretched American military, the likely hostile reaction of world public opinion and considerable opposition

. If such attack occurs, and it cannot be ruled out despite its irrationality, the impact on the American presidential campaign would be decisive, pitting a Democrat who deplores and repudiates such a bellicose approach to conflict against a Republican who seems fully comfortable with the kind of militarist foreign policy associated with the Bush presidency, resorting to preventive wars being an essential element in the "war on terror" and the accompanying struggle to keep America safe. within the US

Obama Solves Palestine War destroys the peace process. Crisis Action Group, 07 (Feb, http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/timetotalk.php) Iran has threatened direct attacks on Israel in the event of a military attack on Iranian territory,56 which it could effect using ballistic missiles, conventional weapons and asymmetric capabilities.57 It is possible that Iran could exert influence over Hamas to catalyse conflict in the West Bank and Gaza, undermining attempts, for example by the UK government, to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process.

Engaging Iran causes a regional security framework which solves the peace process. Levy, 12-20 (CEIP, http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/2007122020071220iranoped.html) America’s consistent exclusion of Iran has not been beneficial. Middle East peace conferences in Madrid in 1991 and at Annapolis, Md., last month both intentionally excluded the Islamic Republic. Yet when the peace process is framed as an exercise in isolating Iran, its sponsors should expect nothing less than for Iran to try to play the spoiler. It wasn’t always this way. Trita Parsi, in his unique book, “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States,” describes how Israel reluctantly shifted away from a strategy of building alliances with the Middle East periphery -- Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia -- against the Arab center, to one of cautious flirtation with the Arab center against the Iranian periphery, as witnessed in Annapolis. Neither approach delivered. It’s now time to pursue an inclusive strategy that attempts to bring both the Arab center and Iranian periphery into a comprehensive peace arrangement and a framework for regional security. Rather than resigning ourselves to the unnecessary conclusion that Israel’s fate is one of perpetual conflict, we ought to be more ambitious in our diplomatic reach. Israel and the pro-Israel community should be encouraging comprehensive U.S.-led engagement with Iran, not the opposite, and should help shape that dialogue, not lag behind it.

Obama Solves Lebanon Obama solves Iran – McCain causes war. Falk, '8 (Princeton Ilaw Professor, http://www.todayszaman.com/tzweb/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=134564&bolum=109) But aside from Iraq there are no significant foreign policy differences between the approaches taken by the three candidates so far as the Middle East is concerned. McCain is the only likely contender to have explicitly embraced the Bush approach to the region, although his attitude toward Iran has not been clearly expressed to this point, and this is likely to be crucial. There are still rumors floating about that there will yet be during the final months of the Bush presidency a major air attack launched against Iran. There are reports now circulating of additional deployments of American aircraft carriers and minesweepers in the Persian Gulf. It is known that Cheney, along with some neoconservative advisors and Israeli officials, has been pressing hard behind the scenes to discount the mostly reassuring assessment of the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (a high-level report from the US intelligence community) that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This pro-attack group seeks to revive a confrontational approach toward Iran that keeps the military option very much on the table. It still seems unlikely that such an attack on Iran will occur, because of its anticipated costs: skyrocketing oil prices, retaliatory missile strikes, blockage of the Straight of Hormuz, a further overstretching of the already overstretched American military, the likely hostile reaction of world public opinion and considerable opposition

. If such attack occurs, and it cannot be ruled out despite its irrationality, the impact on the American presidential campaign would be decisive, pitting a Democrat who deplores and repudiates such a bellicose approach to conflict against a Republican who seems fully comfortable with the kind of militarist foreign policy associated with the Bush presidency, resorting to preventive wars being an essential element in the "war on terror" and the accompanying struggle to keep America safe. within the US

That solves your case. Takeyh, 07 (Senior Fellow – CFR, March/April, Foreign Affairs) Washington should apply those lessons now. As the United States and Iran attempt to resolve their differences, a natural momentum is likely to push Tehran away from its opposition to the Middle East peace process and its reliance on terrorism. That shift should be helped along with diplomatic and economic inducements. The point would be not to persuade Tehran to abandon Hezbollah, for example, but to pressure Tehran so that it, in turn, can persuade Hezbollah to play a constructive role in Lebanese politics and stop attacking Israel.

Obama Solves Terrorism -- Obama wins the war on terror – the alternative ensures terrorism. Katulis, 1-18 (Senior Fellow -- Center for American Progress, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-opdustup18jan18,0,4177150.story?coll=la-home-commentary) Barack Obama was right: The United States should be prepared to do what it takes to capture key Al Qaeda figures such as Osama bin Laden. For far too long, these figures have been on the loose — it is a national embarrassment every time the leaders of an organization responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans taunt the United States in tapes released to the media. Continues This failure is in large part a consequence of the Bush administration's strategic error to shift resources to an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq and away from completing the mission in Afghanistan. By taking the United States into Iraq, President Bush diverted precious national security assets from dismantling Al Qaeda's leadership. A 2006 2006 National Intelligence Estimate from the top U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Iraq war gave a boost to global terrorist networks by providing them with a rallying cry and recruitment tool. A separate NIE released last year detailed how Al Qaeda had reestablished its central organization, training infrastructure and lines of global communication — with key parts of the ungoverned areas of northwestern Pakistan becoming a major terrorist haven.

Obama Solves EU Relations Democrat win boosts US-EU relations. Kupchan, '8 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Current History, March) This year’s election in the United States has the potential to advance further the repair of the Atlantic link. President Bush, despite the conciliatory overtures of his second term, remains a singularly unpopular figure in Europe. The bitter legacy of the Iraq War, Bush’s stingy approach to fighting climate change, his refusal to negotiate with Iran, his policies on treatment of detainees—all these continue to generate ire. Should the Democrats prevail in the presidential contest, transatlantic relations are poised to receive a new boost. Indeed, Europe awaits with bated breath the arrival of a Democrat in the White House.

Obama Solves Russian Relations -- McCain crushes US-Russian relations and risks war – Obama saves them. Christensen and Partlett 3-6-08 (co-editor Stanford Law Rev; PhD Soviet history) Erik & William, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5043 Senator McCain seems to support the deterioration in the U.S.-Russian relationship. "I know Mr. Putin,” he has said. “I've looked into his eyes, and I saw three letters -- KGB." Senator Clinton, in a possible attempt to outdo her colleague from Arizona, stated: "This is the president that looked into the soul of Putin, I could have told him, he was a KGB agent, by definition he doesn't have a soul, I mean this is a waste of time, right, this is nonsense." Senator Clinton appears to have willfully ignored the advice of Madeleine Albright, one of her top foreign policy advisers, who has said that you must be careful how you choose your words because of how they will be interpreted abroad. Indeed, when President Putin was recently questioned about Senator Clinton's assertion that he lacks a soul, he responded: "At a minimum, a head of state should have a head." Senator Obama came dangerously close to repeating the same mistake during the debate in Cleveland last week when he began to answer a question about Russia by also invoking President Bush's statement on Putin's soul. Senator Obama adroitly proceeded, however, by pointing out that Bush's failure was not in looking into Mr. Putin's soul but in refusing to do the diplomatic legwork to establish a meaningful dialogue. According to Senator Obama, this refusal led to our current difficulties: "And so we did not send a signal to Mr. Putin that, in fact, we were going to be serious about issues like human rights, issues like international cooperation that were critical to us." An Obama Alternative? Encouraging dialogue is a hallmark of Senator Obama's perspective on American foreign policy. Accordingly, he has been the most outspoken candidate on working together with Russia to drastically reduce the two powers' nuclear stockpiles. This vision of nuclear abolition, which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev nearly negotiated at Reykjavik in 1986, has more recently been supported by luminaries of both parties including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and Sam Nunn. Senator Obama has traveled to Russia with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) to advance the goals of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program and authored legislation with Lugar subsequent to their visit to control the spread of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. Senator Obama has also suggested a full evaluation of the benefits of a missile defense system before rushing toward deployment. Although he has not stated opposition to the program in principle, he appears sensitive to concerns about this program among our Western European allies. Senator Obama's top Russian adviser, Michael McFaul, is well respected for his scholarship on democratization, and U.S.-Russian relations, in particular. True, McFaul was excessively optimistic in his assessment of Putin in 2000 and more recently has come under criticism for attacking Putin with too much vigor while sparing Yeltsin. Nevertheless, the bulk of McFaul's work exhibits a deep and nuanced insight into the complicated nature of Russian politics and society. Senator Clinton has also expressed a desire to achieve a joint reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia. But she has supported the missile shield program. Senator McCain has been vocal concerning proliferation to non-nuclear states, but has not discussed cooperation with Russia. Senator McCain voted against ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1999, a treaty that was ratified by Russia and all of our European allies. McCain’s support for missile defense is unequivocal. He has said, “I don’t care what [Putin’s] objections are to it.” The time is ripe for a renewal of U.S.-Russian relations. The tone of President Putin's handpicked successor – Dmitry Medvedev - is much less confrontational than his mentor. And, despite genuine differences, there are many areas of intersection. Russia stands to lose as much from terrorism and geopolitical instability in the Middle East as America does. Both Medvedev and Obama are young, former law professors. If elected, perhaps they can move past the Cold War rhetoric and build a constructive relationship around shared principles.

***Uniqueness***

2NC – Obama Wins -- State familiarity and organization WASHINGTON POST.COM 3/26/08 [“FLIP SIDE OF DEMOCRATS’ SPAT: HIGHER TURNOUT”, HTTP://WWW.WASHINGTONPOST.COM/WPDYN/CONTENT/ARTICLE/2008/03/25/AR2008032502428.HTML?HPID=TOPNEWS] When the general election arrives, Democrats will have voter lists far larger than they ever imagined and will have to spend far less money than in past years identifying these voters. That will affect every candidate up and down the ballot. Some Democratic strategists worry that a protracted nomination battle will put the nominee months behind in putting state organizations into place for the general election. That's a real issue, given that in recent cycles, Democratic and Republican nominees could name their state teams in the late spring and get them moving by early summer. But the Democratic race may be producing an even more valuable asset for the fall, particularly when compared with Republican John McCain's campaign. By the time this race is over, Clinton and Obama will have competed in almost every state (Michigan and Florida being two potentially costly exceptions). The Democratic candidates have been forced to organize these states in the winter and spring. They have identified and trained legions of organizers. They will know which of their state coordinators are the best, and many of those staffers will already be familiar with some battleground states for the fall. That, too, is a contrast with past races. When nomination battles end quickly, candidates begin the general-election campaign having had little direct experience with many states critical to winning the presidency. They have spent little time campaigning in those states, and their teams have to start almost from scratch. That is the problem McCain faces. His campaign, strapped for cash and struggling to stay alive, is far behind both Obama and Clinton in developing state-by-state operations. He certainly has the luxury of time now to get that process going, and Republicans have done an exceptional job in recent elections in finding, wooing and turning out their voters. But there is no question that he starts in a deep hole, given what seems to be a more demoralized GOP electorate. Unless the Obama-Clinton contest turns far nastier than it has already, or ends in a way that seems demonstrably unfair to a portion of the Democratic electorate, the Democrats should benefit from this competition.

-- Shifting identifications. WASHINGTON POST.COM 3/26/08 [“FLIP SIDE OF DEMOCRATS’ SPAT: HIGHER TURNOUT”, HTTP://WWW.WASHINGTONPOST.COM/WPDYN/CONTENT/ARTICLE/2008/03/25/AR2008032502428.HTML?HPID=TOPNEWS] The Pew Research Center offered fresh evidence of this last week with a report that aggregated interviews with 5,566 voters during the first two months of the year. It found that 36 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats and 27 percent called themselves Republicans, a drop of 6 percentage points since the 2004 election. The report noted that, on an annualized basis, this is the lowest GOP identification in 16 years of surveys. It's not that Democratic identification is up so much as Republican registration is down. But among independents, Pew reported, there is now a decided advantage for Democrats. Far more of these independents say they tilt toward the Democratic Party than toward the GOP. When all the figures are put together -- hard-core party identifiers and "leaners" -- Democrats have an edge of 51 percent to 37 percent, and that's up three points just in the last year. What all this means is that the combination of dissatisfaction with President Bush, a diminished Republican brand and a compelling contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has created a

huge pool of voters for the eventual nominee -- and other Democratic candidates -- to go after in the fall.

2NC – Obama Wins -- Unity. DALLAS NEWS, 3/3/08 [http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/columnists/wslater/stories/0304 08dnpolessay.39fa7be.html] One of two Democrats will win the party's nomination, and then the task will be to bring supporters of the loser back into the fold. And some are confident that can happen. Democratic consultant Ed Martin predicted the party's disparate parts will unite to reverse the rise of the Republican Party even in George W. Bush's home state. "We already have a sense of urgency about winning elections in 2008 and 2010," he said. "Now we'll have the lists of voters and the ability to bring them back in the fall."

Yes – Polls -- Polls. CQ, 3-27 (http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000002692939) In the general election match-ups, Obama is ahead of McCain 44 percent to 42 percent, and McCain is ahead of Clinton 46 percent to 44 percent. The margin of error is 3.7 percent. Forty-five percent of voters have a favorable view of McCain while 25 percent had a negative view.

-- More ev. Calmes, 3-27 (WSJ) Beyond the nomination race, in hypothetical matchups for November's election Sen. Obama still edges Sen. McCain 44% to 42%. That is nearly the same result as in the early March poll, before videos of Mr. Wright's most fiery sermons spread over the Internet. But Sen. Clinton, who likewise had a narrow advantage over Sen. McCain in the earlier survey, trails in this one by two points, 44% to his 46%.

Yes – Obama Over Clinton -- Obama will defeat Clinton now -- Only several miracles in a row will save her. Nagourney, 3-20 (New York Times) Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers. She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states. She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June. And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses. For Mrs. Clinton, all this has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February. But that shot seems to have grown a little longer. Despite Mrs. Clinton’s last-minute trip to Michigan on Wednesday, Democrats there signaled that they are unlikely to hold a new primary. That apparently dashed Mrs. Clinton’s hopes of a new showdown in a state she feels she could win, and it left the state’s delegates in limbo. The inaction in Michigan followed a similar collapse of her effort to seek another matchup with Mr. Obama in Florida, where, as in Michigan, she won an earlier primary held in violation of party rules. Without new votes in Florida and Michigan, it will be that much more difficult for Mrs. Clinton to achieve a majority in the total popular vote in the primary season, narrow Mr. Obama’s lead among pledged delegates or build a new wave of momentum. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had hoped that the uproar over inflammatory remarks made by Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor that has rocked his campaign for a week might lead voters and superdelegates to question whether they really know enough about Mr. Obama to back him. Although it is still early to judge his success, the speech Mr. Obama delivered on race in Philadelphia to address the controversy was well received and praised even by some Clinton supporters. Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant who is not supporting a candidate, said Mrs. Clinton faced a challenge that although hardly insurmountable was growing tougher almost by the day.

A2 – Obama/Clinton Contests Hurt Dems -- Won’t spillover, heal by the convention. AP 3/25/08 [http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-gKPO1-kP1pHZWccohc4DyVtZYwD8VKQ5401] Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are "basically the same" on every issue, so any political wounds inflicted by their competitive presidential contest should heal well before the Democrats' national convention, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday. With either Democrat in the White House, Reid said the first 100 days of the next Congress would bring a new energy policy, put the U.S. military well on a path out of Iraq and begin steps toward providing health care for uninsured Americans. "Every issue, even though they talk, they are basically the same on every issue," Reid told The Associated Press in dismissing concerns about party infighting stemming from the candidates' criticism of each other.

A2 – Wright/Pastor N/U -- Polls show no impact to Wright. CQ, 3-27 (http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000002692939) The controversy over the racially-charged statements of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama ’s ex-pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have not hurt him in his match-ups against New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Arizona Sen. John McCain , according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted March 24-25.

-- The Wright affair won’t hurt Obama and bringing it up will only hurt McCain. Beckel, 3-19 (Former Campaign Manager -- Mondale '84 & Senior Political Analyst at Fox, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/superdelegates_whiners_or_deci.html) Obama's other electability issue depends on the outcome of the controversy surrounding his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. This story broke at an especially bad time for Obama given the five week news hiatus before the Pennsylvania primary and intensified press scrutiny from reporters who felt an obligation to be tough after the Clinton campaign's endless complaints about soft coverage for Obama. Obama's speech in Philly yesterday on race, and specifically the Wright issue, was one of the most compelling I have heard in over 30 years in politics. It was direct with no attempt at evasion. It was emotional yet straight forward. Where most politicians would have abandoned a supporter like Jeremiah Wright and the community he served, Obama, while strongly criticizing him, but did not throw his friend overboard. It was, in my view, one of the best, if not the best, transformative speech on race and politics ever given. Unless it is proven that Obama lied about not being in the pew when Wright delivered the controversial statements in question then, for the vast majority of Democrats at least, he is likely to put this crisis behind him. But the Republican right wing has seized on the Wright story and is unlikely to let it go. For John McCain this has serious downside potential. Anger in the black community towards Republicans is established and immutable. But if conservatives are perceived as exploiting yet another race story, anger could spread to moderate Republican and Independent voters, many in the suburbs, where the Republicans have been bleeding support the last decade.

A2 – Vote Switching (Gallup Poll) -- Clinton supporters won't switch to McCain -- recent polls reflect now, not 7 months from now. LA Times 3-26 McCain would welcome any of them, though the working class demographics of Clinton's fans suggest the old Reagan Democrats might be more susceptible to the GOP argument. And Tuesday, that late president's widow Nancy did, indeed, endorse McCain. Of course, that’s what they say now -– in the heat of a Democratic campaign that has only increased in intensity as the two have entered a virtual deadlock that may only be broken by the intervention of the party’s unelected “superdelegates. This is what voters were telling Gallup’s pollsters in telephone samples compiled from March 7 to March 22 –- with responses drawn from a huge sample of 6,657 Democrats, providing a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points. Come November, with Democrats motivated to reclaim the White House and Democrats theoretically turning out in the same record numbers as in this year’s primaries, the numbers may tell a different story. “As would be expected," said Gallup's editor in chief, Frank Newport, "almost all Democratic voters who say they support Obama for their party's nomination also say they would vote for him in a general election match-up against McCain. But only 59% of Democratic voters who support Clinton say they would vote for Obama against McCain, while 28 % say they would vote for the Republican McCain. “This suggests that some Clinton supporters are so strongly opposed to Obama (or so loyal to Clinton) that they would go so far as to vote for the 'other' party's candidate next November if Obama is the Democratic nominee,’’ Newport notes. “The results follow the same pattern, but not to quite the same extent, when the relationship between Democratic support and a general election match up between Clinton and McCain is examined." Newport adds: “It is worth noting that in Gallup's historical final preelection polls from 1992 to 2004, 10% or less of Republicans and Democrats typically vote for the other party's presidential candidate.’’

***Generic Link Debate***

A2 – Plan Not Key -- Bush’s Middle East policy will have a major impact on the elections. Gawenda, 1--11 (Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Journalism at Melbourne University, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/bush-still-king-in-race-for-whitehouse/2008/01/11/1199988589354.html?page=2) George Bush is the elephant in the room in the US presidential race. His approval ratings are in the toilet, the polls claim Americans are overwhelmingly convinced the country is heading in the wrong direction and most observers have decided his presidency will be judged by historians as one of the worst in US history. Yet Bush remains the most powerful politician in the world. For all of Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric about a new beginning for America, for all of Hillary Clinton's promise of competence after the incompetence and disasters of the Bush years, for all of John McCain's appeal as the un-Bush Republican, Bush remains, in his words, The Decider. What Bush decides and the consequences of his decisions on the big challenges facing the US will have a profound effect on the presidential race - not to mention the rest of the world. America is on the brink of a recession, one which some economists reckon could turn out to be the most severe downturn in decades. Bush is proposing another round of tax cuts which he says will boost consumer and business confidence. Tax cuts are Bush's answer to every economic challenge but it's doubtful that tax cuts will do anything much to ameliorate the increasingly widespread economic consequences of the subprime loans disaster which has led to a full-blown credit squeeze in the US. An America in recession would affect the prospects of all the leading presidential candidates - of both parties. The so-called surge in US troops in Iraq has clearly worked. Civilian deaths from terrorist bombings have decreased dramatically, as have US casualties. There is evidence that Sunni and Shiite leaders are working together to combat al-Qaeda in Iraq with some success. But the Iraqi government remains dysfunctional and paralysed by sectarian divisions. While that remains the case, the threat of civil war cannot be discounted. But if the country does not descend into civil war, if the political stalemate is broken and Iraq

in the wider Middle East, what happens in US-Iran relations and whether or not Bush can manage to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians will have a big impact on the presidential race. While the US appears to be on the road to something approaching a political settlement, such a settlement, no matter how imperfect, would change the dynamics of the election campaign. And

media - and most of the world's media - were focused on the New Hampshire primaries and the race between Clinton and Obama, Bush was arriving in Israel on the first leg of an eight-day tour of the region that will take in Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf states. While the media were obsessed with whether or not Clinton's almost tearful sign of emotion a day before the vote was responsible for her New Hampshire win, the fact that The Decider was urging Israel to freeze all settlement building and warning that Iran remained a big threat to the US and world peace received little more than perfunctory coverage. The media hung on every soaring sentence of Obama's concession speech (and if that's a concession speech what would a victory speech have sounded like?) but the fact that Bush was doing what he vowed he would

never do - follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who in the last year of his presidency, devoted a lot of time and energy into a failed effort to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians - was virtually ignored. This is understandable. Hillary Clinton cracking up - more or less authentically - and then scoring an improbable win; Obama vowing to continue his quest to change America and the world despite his loss; and McCain coming back from the dead in New Hampshire to become the oldest comeback kid in history. All of that is far sexier than The Decider's efforts to bring peace to the Middle East or, for that matter, his rather mundane tax cut plan to head-off a US recession. In America, there is always what the writer Leon Wieseltier described as "the enduring American fantasy about the politics of transcendence." If the US economy tanks despite Bush's best efforts, the beneficiaries are likely to be Clinton and McCain. Americans may love new beginnings, but when economic times are bad, they are more likely to support candidates they believe are best equipped to deal with tough times. Obama's appeal is that he promises a new politics, indeed, a sort of transcendental politics that transcends race, class and party affiliations. This is not necessarily the sort of politics best suited to economically troubled times. Already McCain and, to a lesser extent, Clinton have benefited politically from the success of the surge in Iraq. McCain because he supported it from the start and because its success has made his steadfast support for the Iraq war far less of a political liability and Clinton because there is less of a focus on her vote in 2002 in the Senate to give Bush the go ahead to wage a war against Saddam Hussein's regime. Clinton has never repudiated that vote, despite the fact it cost her big time among young Democrats in particular. And if, improbably, there is a political settlement in Iraq, Clinton and McCain will be the main beneficiaries. Most Americans are

even a discredited president like Bush, at a time when the US faces critical challenges, remains singularly powerful and able to play a major role in the process which will decide who will succeed him. sick and tired of Bush and, for some time now, a clear majority wanted to see the back of him. Increasingly, he will come to be seen as a sideshow to this year's main event, but the fact is that

-- Foreign policy is a key area for a McCain rebound and it’s a weak point for Democrats. Boot, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) I disagree a little bit about kind of the premise of the discussion, which is that foreign policy is not all that important in the context of the campaign. I think it's actually been surprisingly important. When you look, for example, at John McCain's remarkable rebound from the political graveyard, I think that's really been driven in large part by foreign policy. That's been the signature issue for John McCain for a long time, and especially in the last year, where he was so closely associated with pushing the surge, and the success of the surge on the ground in Iraq has been matched by the success of the McCain campaign on the ground in New Hampshire and South Carolina and Florida and

elsewhere. I think clearly that's been a major issue and one where he was out front. Continues I think that's also an issue where there is a vulnerability on the Democratic side, although it's not obvious right now because neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has that much experience with foreign policy issues -- Hillary a little bit more than Obama; but neither one has that much of a background, and I think that's going to become more of an issue in the general election. It wouldn't have been an issue if, you know, Romney were the Republican candidate or Huckabee or somebody like that, but with McCain it's going to be an issue. It's going to be one of the major issues.

A2 – Plan Not Key -- The biggest issue for Republicans will be the unpopularity of Bush’s foreign policy – it is a key campaign issue for the Dem’s. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) The Bush administration’s shadow looms large over every corner of this campaign’s foreign policy debate. The Democratic contenders’ critiques of the administration and its policies are now well refined. Republicans, meanwhile, have tended to treat the Bush administration as if they are carrying a particularly virulent disease with a very high rate of political mortality. “For any Republican to have any chance in the general,” one Republican strategist said recently, “the race has to be about the next four years, not the last eight. Each of the Republican candidates is trying to figure out how to do that.”6 As former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued, “The average Republican is sitting out there saying, ‘This ain’t working.’”7 For a measure of the impact that Bush will have on the campaign, consider how much more often Democrats refer to him than the Republicans do. The GOP contenders would prefer to skip a generation in political memory, harkening back to the halcyon days of the Reagan administration and avoiding public reflection about the more recent Bush years. In one of the primary debates, the Republican contenders mentioned President Ronald Reagan 19 times and Bush just once.8 The ultimate general-campaign war plan is not very secret after all. Democrats will attempt to link the Republican candidate clearly to the outgoing Bush administration. Republicans will strive to make sure that their contender is seen in his own right and not simply as a continuation of the current, relatively unpopular regime in Washington.

A2 – Iraq Key -- Iraq isn’t impacting the election. Beinart, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) The issue of Iraq is down because of the decline of U.S. deaths. And I think particularly in the Republican Party, Iraq is a dog that didn't bark in that -- I mean, I agree with Max that had the -that Romney was not as committed to the surge as McCain was. And had the surge really gone south, I think there's a possibility that Romney might have jumped off that position, and then you could have seen a real debate about Iraq inside the Republican Party in particular. We forget that Brownback, who was at one point a pretty serious candidate, was against the surge. There was a time when, I think, Republicans were looking pretty seriously at not going along with the surge, and that would have opened up a debate in the Republican Party that instead we hadn't seen because of the success or I would have probably argued perceived success of the surge.

-- Iraq will be a wash and won’t help either side. Johnson, 3-14 (Cold Hearted Truth Writer, http://www.coldheartedtruth.com/) This really isn't much of a question for the Republicans or for the Democrats. I suspect that both sides would look at this as sort of a wash. John McCain might lose a few Republicans over the war while Barack Obama might lose a few Democrats.

A2 – Economy Key -- Foreign policy concerns poll higher than economy issues. Boot, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) Well, I think -- as I was saying earlier, I think it's a little bit of a misnomer to say that the campaign is only going to -- or has been or will be only about the economy. Actually, if you look at the concerns of voters in surveys, yeah, I think, you know, the economy is the number-one concern. But if you add up the numbers on the war in Iraq plus the war on terrorism, it actually is -- together that's the number-one concern. That's -- over 50 percent of the people have that as their number-one issue. And to me, that's the same issue. Sorry, Peter. I don't mean to be simplistic and reductionist here, but to me, that's the same issue. Continues But nevertheless, I think that the security issues are pretty important, and you know, one of the -- just -- I mean, very quickly, on the economy, I mean, also, you know, the economy tends to be seen as a referendum on the governing party. But again, it's not clear to what extent that'll actually be the case this year, since, you know, McCain clearly would not be running as a representative of the Bush administration. And I -- you know, I think his positions and policies on economic policy are pretty credible as well, but -- so I think, you know, the security aspect is going to be -- is, I think going to be -- continue to be very important, even if we don't see more major terrorist attacks, although, you know, in fact, you probably will around the world sometime between now and November. But I think, you know, the issue of Iraq, the issue of Afghanistan, the issue of al Qaeda, I think those are going to loom very very large. And I think, especially given McCain's background, that's going to be a major subject of debate between now and November.

A2 – Too Far Off -- Fundraising – (a) Early lead in the polls key to it. Adkins & Dowle, '2 (UNO -- Poli Sci, Fayetteville State -- Poli Sci, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, Issue 2) Second, changes in viability as measured by differences in national polling results from the third quarter of the year prior to the election to the beginning of the primary and caucus season also impact pre-primary fundraising. Although measured differently, the results are generally consistent with previous research assessing the influence of the candidate viability on presidential nomination outcomes (Gurian and Haynes 1993; Guerrant and Gurian 1996; Damore 1997; Haynes, Gurian, and Nichols 1997).More specifically, the results of the combined model demonstrate that overall changes in viability significantly affect the outcome of the money primary. As expected, increases in candidate poll standings positively affect fundraising receipts. However, the results of the partisan models demonstrate that changes in viability significantly affect the fundraising of leading Democrats, but not that of Republicans, who coalesce behind their front-runner much sooner. Again, these findings confirm Newport’s (1999) analysis of pre-primary polling data and are generally consistent with Mayer’s (1996b) discovery thatDemocrats in general are much more divided than Republicans. Thus, for Democrats, the strategic choices made by campaign contributors in early months of the presidential campaign are linked to polling volatility created by changing assessments of viability in public opinion, the media, and party elites.

(b) That’s key to the Democrat’s edge. Rubin, '7 (HumanEvents.com columnist, 7-5, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21408) As all the presidential candidates proved this week, money matters. Even better than polls --which provoke endless arguments about methodology and bias -- campaign fundraising totals and debt, number of donors and spending figures can be objectively tallied. Cold hard cash provides a story line in an endless campaign and confirmation of pundits’ subjective hunches about how candidates are faring and where the race is headed. For Obama the sheer size of the haul and the number of donors is staggering. 258,000 donors for Obama confirm that the Democrats have an interesting dilemma. One candidate “wins” debates, leads polls, commands an impressive campaign machine but another has captured the excitement and hearts of the base (and perhaps expanded the base) and has not yet turned off half the voters. Just when pundits were ready to pronounce Hillary Clinton unbeatable, Obama and his legions of supporters beg to differ. Perhaps the accountants found something the pundits didn’t: proof that the Democratic Party is not ready for a coronation just yet and the “change the page” message of Obama is penetrating. If he uses his millions wisely, defines himself and develops credibly policy prescriptions the pundits will need a new storyline.

It also should serve as a warning sign to the GOP as a whole. No candidate on the Republican side approaches either Obama or Clinton’s money total or remotely approaches the number of Obama donors. The Democrats are well funded, enthusiastic and internet savvy. Republicans should be concerned and focus relentless on the issues like the economy, immigration and national security which offer the opportunity to unify and expand their base of support.

-- Vital internal link won’t change -- Bush’s popularity ratings are likely to stay low – hurting the GOP in the general election. Oxford Analytica, '7 (5-22, http://thehill.com/op-eds/despite-gops-pessimism-party-may-yet-field-a-winner-in-08-whitehouse-race-2007-05-22.html) Unpopular president. The president’s approval ratings have been unusually poor for almost two years. Since mid-2005, they have moved within a comparatively narrow 29-36 percent band in mainstream surveys. There are few parallels for such an abysmal rating during a second presidential term, when

(with the obvious exception of former President Richard Nixon) the occupant of the White House tends to become more personally popular at the same time that he becomes less politically effective. Furthermore, even Bush’s personal pollsters seem to expect that his ratings will remain at this low ebb for the rest of the year and into 2008. If he cannot achieve at least a 45 percent approval rating by next year, then the president will remain a liability for his party’s electoral prospects.

Internal – Engagement Key -- Engagement will be an issue in the election Morning Call 1--2 One day later, two other messages concerning Syria's international status complicated the picture. French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that he had "reached the end of the road" with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and said he would not negotiate with the Bashar government any further. Mr. Sarkozy's primary concern is different from that of the U.S. legislators. The main issue for the French is Syria's continued involvement in Lebanon's internal politics. Lebanon has been without a president since November, and its political factions have not been able to agree on a new government. Pressure from outside Lebanon's borders is a major obstacle to stabilizing its government. In the view of the Syrians, however, the United States is as involved in Beirut as they are. Also on Monday, President Bush declared that he will not talk to the Assad government. He cited yet a different line of reasoning -- Syria's support for Hezbollah and Hamas and its role as a staging ground for insurgents moving into Iraq. Israel and Syria have not talked about the Golan Heights since 2000, the year before President Bush took office. At that time, he ended most of the diplomatic efforts begun under the Clinton administration. We believe the record shows, however, that the more the United States is engaged in the Middle East, the more likely the prospects for peacemaking there. Where and when the United States should engage with any unfriendly nations will be an issue in this year's presidential contests. Candidates in both parties discussed talking to, for instance, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.

Internal – Mid East Key -- Mid East will be a key issue for the election. Sullivan, 3-3 (Foreign Affairs Correspondent -- Plain Dealer, Star Ledger) Yet it also hints at a big opening for McCain, not just among Jewish voters but also among the many conservatives in the electorate for whom Iran is the next big test case for American muscle. Indyk's most sobering comments in Cleveland were less about Clinton - for whose campaign he is the chief Middle East adviser - than about the dangerous Middle East landscape that awaits the next president. Those dangers include an Iran on track to get nuclear weapons, an Iraq from which it will be extremely difficult to disengage, a rearmed Hezbollah in politically unstable Lebanon and a Middle East peace process that is going nowhere fast, with a newly assertive Hamas toying with Iranian sponsorship of its own. They also include two stalwart U.S. allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, looking at possible succession crises after current leaders die, and the reality, for the foreseeable future, that Middle East oil supplies will determine whether the world economy rises or falls. How this translates into votes on Nov. 4 remains the key question. Depending on how Iran plays out in the campaign, an Obama-McCain matchup could open prospects for the Republicans to make inroads among not just Jewish votes but also more conservative Democrats unseen since 1988, when the senior George Bush got an estimated 35 percent of the Jewish vote. Yet it's also a roll of the dice, since emphasizing McCain's hawkish stance on Iraq and Iran - the hundred years' war, as it were - gives Obama or Clinton the chance to dwell on pocketbook issues tied to the war. The crucial policy questions leading up to November and beyond may become how radically to move beyond current stasis in the Middle East to try to change the tenor and approach of U.S. policies - including with Iran.

Internal – FoPo Key -- National security issues are perceived and will dominant the election. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) Perhaps more than any presidential contest since 1980 or even as far back as 1968, 2008 will be a national security election. In the three national elections after the collapse of communism, foreign policy took a back seat as domestic issues played the dominant role in public debates. Being perceived as a “foreign policy president” was seen as a liability in 1992, and the 1996 contest was waged around gauzy themes such as “building bridges to the twenty- first century.” In the 2000 election, the United States’ role in the world was barely discussed, which is ironic given how global affairs now defines the careers of the two candidates: global climate change for Al Gore, the “global war on terror” for President George W. Bush. In the last campaign, the first election after the September 11 attacks, the foreign policy debate was fierce but not dominant, as the debate centered more on character than substance. By contrast, the 2008 election feels more like a Cold War–era election, when the Soviets were still a strategic rival. The next president of the United States, no matter his or her political party or particular worldview, will confront a stark set of global challenges that defy easy characterization or remedy, with much of the country feeling somewhat weakened and vulnerable, worried about failure in Iraq, and anxiously bracing themselves for another terrorist attack at home. As former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage often notes, “[S]ince 9/11, our principal export to the world has been our fear.” The totality of this global inheritance—coping with an unfriendly environment of international frictions, waging hot wars in two countries, and facing financial limits due to previous flights of fiscal foolhardiness—is nearly overwhelming. In part, this emphasis on national security can be measured by the time and attention that the candidates are giving to the topic. Already, with still nearly a year to go until Election Day, the major contenders in each party have attempted to outline distinct visions, although some offer few concrete specifics, of how they see the critical security issues and the role they play in a larger American purpose in the world. National security themes play prominently in all of their stump speeches, and a flurry of major policy addresses and policy articles have displayed some of the key contenders’ respective foreign policy visions.2 During the seemingly countless debates and candidate joint appearances, questions about foreign policy and national security have received ample attention.

-- International issues are key to the election. Clark Community Network, '7 (http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/10109 ) Americans generally do not vote on the basis of international issues except in times of crisis. If so, the likes of Bob Graham and Richard Lugar would have done much better in the presidential primaries and George Bush patria may have won re-election due to his handling of the first Gulf War and the breakdown of the Soviet Union, its satellites and the unification of Germany. But at a time when the operations in Iraq remain the leading concern of the American people, another trend seems to be building. An argument can be made that international concerns were the chief factor in the 2002 elections when Republicans were triumphant; in 2004 when Bush’s leadership after 9/11 prevailed over John Kerry’s incoherent position on Iraq; and in 2006 when the American people, disgusted over the way Iraq has been managed, vanquished Bush’s majorities in the House and the Senate.

Internal – FoPo Key -- Foreign policy threats are still a key election issue. Kurtz, 2-7 (Senior Fellow -- Ethics & Public Policy Center, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0MjMyMGZlMWQwNjg3OTUxMjA1YTRjODdiZGUwM TI=) The biggest story of the 2008 campaign so far may not be the fall or rise of any candidate, but the quick and quiet decline of the war on terror as a bone of political contention. Supposedly, the terror war is yesterday’s news, and in any case a losing issue for the Republicans in 2008. Yet this newly congealing conventional wisdom is mistaken. Republicans can win this election on national security. In fact, with its cover story this week, The Economist has dropped the winning argument into Republican laps, if only we have the guts and smarts to use it. The success of the surge and the media’s aversion to that success have driven Iraq from the front pages. Putting aside the question of media bias, the fact is, Americans are weary of Iraq, and tired as well of our internal battles over the war. The public may be relieved at Iraq’s comparative turnaround, yet there’s still a feeling that the war was a mistake — or at least enough of a problem to cast doubt on hawkish solutions. Still, the public worries about the perilous state of the world. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the vision of a chaotic, nuclear-armed Pakistan falling into Islamist hands electrified Americans and reminded them of the stakes in the overall war against terror. The public understands that Islamist extremism in a world of nuclear proliferation is still the greatest threat to our safety. Even so, Americans remain weary of what seem like ill-chosen battles, and eager for a break from having to think about war at all. That is the reality of our current mood — which doesn’t mean the war can’t return as an issue, only that there has to be a good reason.

-- National security issues and foreign policy are key to the election. China View, 2-29 (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-02/29/content_7689591.htm) Most key issues of the race are related to foreign policy, such as Iraq, national security, immigration. ·McCain has been touting his years of foreign policy experience as a reason to choose him. ·Both Clinton and Obama would not rule out the use of force to protect national security interests. WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- Various opinion polls have shown that U.S. voters in this year's presidential elections clearly place economic concerns ahead of foreign policy. However, most key issues of the race are related to foreign policy, such as Iraq, national security and immigration, which in fact tie-in with the economy in many ways. As the presidential contest becomes more intense, a number of foreign policy issues are now under spotlight. The Feb. 26 debate featuring Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in Cleveland, Ohio, covered a fair amount of foreign policy issues. Iraq, Afghanistan, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Russia along with other foreign affairs topics accounted for about half of the debate. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is building his policy platform largely on national security, which he hopes to have an edge over his Democratic opponent in the general election. When either of the trio, Clinton, Obama and McCain, takes office in January 2009, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism and the nuclear issues of Iran and the Korean Peninsula will be weighing heavy in the new president's in-tray. Adding to that is the all-time low image of the United States around the world. McCain has been touting his years of foreign policy experience as a reason to choose him over Clinton or Obama in November. He voted for military force in Iraq and supported President George W. Bush when he vetoed the war spending bill that would have withdrawn most U.S. troops by March 2008. McCain said he expects a smaller but long-term U.S. presence in Iraq similar to those in South Korea or Kuwait.

Internal – Bush Key -- Bush will cause McCain to lose now. Gregory, 3-15 (NBC News Chief White House Correspondent, NBC News Transcripts, Lexis) It really is striking, and I think it, it says something about the strength of the brand of John McCain as a public figure and his popularity and his, his reputation as a maverick. But it doesn't change the fact that he is still going to be tarred as a George Bush Republican. And the proverbial and literal hug that he gave him in 2004 when John McCain was trying to court the conservative wing of the party is going to hurt, his proximity to Bush on the issue of the surge and the war generally. I mean, McCain's got a difficult argument to make, which is, "Don't just listen to me supporting the surge and being the most stalwart defender of the war and talking about troops being there for 100 years. Remember back to when I was opposed to Rumsfeld, and I opposed the management of the war." He's asking a lot of the voters, a majority of whom are against this war.

-- Bush's popularity is tied to McCain's election chances. Smithson, 2-19 (Pundit, http://politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2008/02/19/what-will-this-pic-do-for-mccainswhite-house-hopes/) In recent weeks we have tended to focus on the battle for the Democratic nomination now that John McCain appears a near certainty to win the GOP race. But the real battle, of course, is the election in November and, at stake, is whether the Republicans can continue to occupy the White House. Whenever Democratic front-runner, Barack Obama, has the chance he uses the term “BushMcCain” to describe his party’s likely opponent in November. As the New York Times reports the idea is “to define Mr. McCain’s candidacy” as part of a ticket that they say “will essentially give the president another term.” So the 71 year old Arizona senator was on pretty tricky ground when he received Bush’s endorsement for the campaign. For Bush is experiencing some of the poorest ever ratings for a President and McCain does not want to fuel the campaign from the Democrats.

-- Bush's popularity key to the election. MSNBC, 2-29 (http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/29/715540.aspx) NBC political analyst Charlie Cook writes in his latest National Journal column about the advantages the Democrats have going into the general election -- once their nominee becomes obvious. “My hunch is that the general election will be a very competitive race. However, it’s important not to minimize the Democrats’ inherent advantages. First, it’s extremely difficult for a party to win the White House three elections in a row. Indeed, consider the past 60 years: In four of the five elections in which one party had held the White House for two consecutive terms, that party failed to win a third one. This ‘time for a change’ dynamic has predominated each time. The only exception was in 1988, when Vice President George H.W. Bush was elected at the end of President Reagan’s eight years in office.” More: “Going into 2008, George W. Bush’s approval ratings hover around 30 percent, 25 percentage points below Reagan’s 20 years ago. Bush’s presidency has been marred by scandals, an unpopular war, and an economy that is just barely skating above recession—hardly ideal for any party wanting to hold onto the White House.”

Internal – Bush Key -- McCain tied to Bush. Washington Post 3-5, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/ content/blog/2008/03/05/BL2008030501742.html?hpid=topnews Peter Baker wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month about how McCain has sometimes kept his distance from Bush. "When McCain describes his inspirations, he chooses Ronald Reagan, repeatedly calling himself a 'foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.' "But whether he likes it or not, he is now also a foot soldier following Bush, and the two will have to figure out how to fight the next battle together."

-- Can’t distance himself – doing so jacks him. Bromwich 3-8-08 David http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080308/cm_huffpost/090538 An open run against John McCain, starting now, will also be a referendum on the presidency of George W. Bush. Because, to repeat, McCain has pinned himself to Bush just as Clinton has pinned herself to McCain. Every honest accusation against George W. Bush, as things now stand, becomes a challenge to McCain to diverge from Bush in some particular; but if McCain budges an inch to criticize Bush, he exposes himself as a hypocrite for having warmly defended Bush's policies, and for a great many superfluous favors on both sides: the "hug" that helped to re-elect Bush in 2004; the endorsement of "the surge" that baited a bigger trap for the U.S. in Iraq; the acceptance of Bush's political, moral, and financial support, on which McCain's campaign in

Internal – Congressional Action -- Congressional action is linked to the election. Litvan, 3-5 (Bloomberg News, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=akSFoWmjN2mU&refer=home_ Everything Congress does this year, from the bills it considers, to how often it meets, to which lawmakers get the spotlight, is linked to one date: Nov. 4, 2008. With a lame-duck president and an election year that may enable them to expand their Senate and House majorities, Democrats are playing to their party's base. In the Senate, they recently pushed another vote on the Iraq War and advanced foreclosure-prevention legislation, even though Republicans vowed to block the measures. Last week, the House approved new taxes on oil companies to pay for incentives for renewable energy. Similar legislation was blocked in the Senate in December. Although the House measure has little chance of becoming law, it allowed Democrats to show support for alternative energy. ``It's disappointing, but we have got to be realistic about it: The presidential campaign is going to overwhelm pretty much everything now from here on out,'' said Senator Judd Gregg, 60, a New Hampshire Republican. ``It will be very hard to do anything on the floor that doesn't have presidential-campaign overtones.''

Internal – Terror Key -- Terrorism key to the election. Chin, 3-7 (Contributor -- Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20080307&articleId=8262) Amply demonstrated by the rhetoric of each of the prospective US presidential candidates, the “terrorism” lie is also the key to the election. The candidates know that the ill-informed US population remains petrified, and still thoroughly manipulated by fear of “another 9/11."

-- Voters lean Republican on every issue when the theme of terrorism is raised. Judis & Teixeira, '7 (Senior Editor -- New Republic & Senior Fellow -- Century Foundation, July-August, American Prospect) Bush's initial success in waging the war on terror disrupted these trends toward the Democratic majority. American politics became dominated by concerns over national security, an issue on which Republicans had enjoyed voters' confidence since 1980. Some voters who might have supported Democrats were distracted from economic or social concerns that had favored Democrats. They ignored Republicans' religious intolerance and indifference to environmental pollution, rewarding Republicans instead for their presumed success in the war on terror. In 2004 George W. Bush won victories in swing states like Ohio, Iowa, and Florida largely because of these voters' defection. Chief among the defectors were white working-class women voters. In 2000 Bush had won these voters by 7 percent. In 2004 he won them by 18 percent. That year a plurality of these voters identified terrorism and security over the economy and jobs or the war in Iraq as their most important issue. But there was also evidence of another psychological process, which might be called "dearrangement." The focus on the war on terror not only distracted erstwhile Democrats and independents but appeared to transform, or de-arrange, their political worldview. They temporarily became more sympathetic to a whole range of conservative assumptions and approaches. In the past, voters had trusted Democrats to manage the economy, and in 2002 that preference should have been strongly reinforced by a recession that occurred on Bush's watch. Instead, voters in that election believed by 41 percent to 37 percent that Republicans were "more likely to make sure the country is prosperous." Recessions could also be expected to reinforce populist perceptions of the economy, but in 2002 the percentage of voters who believed that "the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer" hit its lowest level in 15 years. Most interestingly, opposition to abortion also followed the same curve. The percentage of voters who believed that abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" (based on Gallup Poll annual averages) rose from 17 percent, in 2000, to 20 percent, in 2002, and was still at 19 percent in 2004.

Terror Link U -- Dem's have an edge on terror and it's a vital internal link to the election. Moore, '7 (Comment from the Left, 9-25, http://commentsfromleftfield.com/2007/09/democrats-seen-as-betteragainst-terrorism) This used to play to the favor of the Republicans. But according to a recent Gallup poll, this advantage may very well have eroded away. Through this period of decline in the Republicans’ overall favorability, one enduring strength for the GOP has been the perception that it is the better party for handling international terrorism and national defense. One year after the 9/11 attacks, the Republicans had a 19-point lead over the Democrats in this area. That lead gradually sank to a statistically non-significant 2-point lead in 2006. This year, for the first time since Gallup started asking this question in 2002, more Americans say the Democratic Party will do a better job than the Republican Party of protecting the country from security threats, 47% vs. 42%. These results mirror those Gallup obtained last October when it found a 46%-41% advantage for “the Democrats in Congress” over “the Republicans in Congress” when Americans were asked which representatives do the better job handling terrorism. Thus, Democrats likely gained the upper hand on the terrorism issue last fall just before the elections, and have been able to maintain that slim advantage since then. This alone should give many Republicans cause for alarm. The reason for this is that for some time now, Democrats have consistantly polled better than Republicans in a lot of venues; economy, domestic issues, etc. But the one thing that Republicans could always count on for better polling numbers has remained the fight against terrorists. This single item alone has proven to hold more weight than the rest of the issues combined, and again I believe much of that has to do with the effects of Terror Management Theory. So while people would agree that life in various ways would be better under Democratic governance, they would still vote Republican for this one single thing. And if this poll holds up, that one single thing could very well be gone.

A2 – Link Turn: Israel -- Support for Israel is waning. DiMaggio, '7 (July 20, http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio07202007.html) While it is true that the American public has often shown strong sympathy for Israel, such sympathy is nowhere near as supportive of Israel as American propagandists would have us believe. At best, American support for Israeli actions (such as the attack against Lebanon) has been split; at worst, it has been seriously critical. According to one poll, not more than one half (50%) of Americans questioned in mid 2006 supported the Israeli attack on Lebanon (www.pipa.org), and most blamed Israel (as well as Hezbollah) for provoking further violence. A majority felt "Israel's military campaign" had "gone too far." A poll printed by the Los Angeles Times also showed an even split in public attitudes, as 43% saw Israel's invasion and bombing as "justified," as opposed to 44% who felt it was either "justified but excessively harsh" or "unjustified." Even the New York Times piece mentioned above claiming strong U.S. support for Israel after 9/11 found that just 50% of Americans sympathized with Israel (and that number had previously stood at only 45%). Such numbers are evidence of a strong schism in American public opinion toward Israel, rather than proof of "strong" or "majority" support. Other surveys have found similar divisions and uncertainty. A Pew Research Center poll found that US sympathy for Israel ranged between 37% and 48% from late 1997 through mid 2005. A more recent study in 2006 found a divide amongst those who considered themselves either "supporters" or "strong supporters" of Israel (45%) and those who supported neither Israelis or Palestinians (40%).

A2 – Israel Lobby -- AIPAC doesn’t influence politics now. Brownfeld 7 [Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, AIPAC’s Influence Continues to Wane, July 2k7] Not only is AIPAC not representative of the constituency in whose name it professes to speak, but its former foreign policy chief, Steve Rosen, and its former Iran analyst, Keith Weissman, are now being prosecuted by the U.S. government for allegedly sharing classified U.S. information about Iran with Israeli diplomats, journalists and others. By any standard, AIPAC appears, more and more, to be a rogue organization speaking only for a narrow extremist constituency both in Israel and the U.S. As this reality becomes increasingly clear, its influence is likely

to recede dramatically.

-- Turn -- Americans for Peace Now want the plan Brownfeld 7 [Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, AIPAC’s Influence Continues to Wane, July 2k7] Americans for Peace Now called on the Bush administration to change course and adopt a policy of “limited, constructive engagement” with Tehran. In a statement, the group recommended that the U.S. develop “a basket of meaningful diplomatic and economic carrots and sticks sufficient to persuade Iran to halt further development of its nuclear program.” Another group, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, urged its supporters to call their senators and tell them not to sign a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sponsored by Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and John Ensign (R-NV), calling for “no direct aid and no contacts” with any members of the Palestinian Authority “that does not explicitly and unequivocally recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce terror and accept previous agreements.” In an e-mail to supporters, Brit Tzedek declared: “At a time when the U.S. should be supporting forces of moderation among the Palestinians, this letter weakens those forces and demonstrates to the Palestinian people that moderation brings them nothing.”

And, their influence outweighs your links. Tobin 99 (Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, October 4, 1999, Jewishworldreview.com) Though once ostracized itself as outside of the American Jewish mainstream on Israel, Americans for Peace Now is lately the toast of the Jewish political world. Its supporters - such as President Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger - have enormous influence on American foreign policy. And its friends in Israel - in Prime Minister Ehud Barak's Labor Party, as well as its left-wing Meretz allies - won the May 1999 elections. But such success has not deterred Americans for Peace Now from indulging in what the world of politics calls "opposition research." In fact, it has been emboldened by Barak's elections to embark on a campaign whose purpose seems to be to marginalize and destroy American Jews who disagree with their position. The fruit of the group's research was press releases seeking to paint the National Unity Coalition as extremists who were inciting violence. What is the proof of this charge? The coalition's Web site posted one article by a far-right-wing Israeli, who wrote that Israel should "ruthlessly destroy" Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his followers.

A2 – Base Turn -- No base support now -(a) Grassroots conservatives oppose and they are key. Bozell, 3-15 (Wash Post) The conservative talk-show community? Don't mind them — they're irrelevant. This message from John McCain surrogates and other members of the political class is filling the airwaves and op-ed pages. In the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes recently wrote that McCain needn't worry that conservatives are uncomfortable with his candidacy, because "while they love to grumble and grouse, conservatives tend to be loyal Republicans who wind up voting for their party's candidate." In the same pages, novelist Mark Helprin, a former adviser to Bob Dole's presidential campaign, savaged conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin for daring to speak out against McCain. "Rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party," he wrote, "each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less selfrighteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man." I know the conservative movement. I've been in the trenches fighting for an alphabet soup of conservative causes for 30 years. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for it. And I earnestly hope that McCain isn't listening to the advice he's getting from these folks. Their thinking betrays a fundamental misreading of the conservative pulse in America today. Conservative leaders, particularly those in talk radio, cannot and will not be silent. They will not betray their principles and their audiences. Tens of millions of activists turn to them for guidance. These activists could be, and need to be, McCain's ground troops, but unless and until conservatives believe him — and believe in him — they will not work for his election. McCain may have the Beltway crowd in his corner, but grass-roots conservatives aren't sold. Yet through his surrogates, McCain is attacking these leaders. This is beyond folly. It is political suicide.

(B) Exit polls & evangelicals. Sheinn, 3-2 (Atlanta Journal Constitution) Some conservatives' anger toward McCain lingers. A recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 78 percent of white, bornagain Protestants voted for George W. Bush over Democrat John Kerry in 2004. But, wrote John Green, Pew's senior fellow in religion and American politics, McCain "may have some trouble achieving that level of support from white evangelicals given that a majority of them preferred other candidates in the primaries." If the race is close, a drop in support from such a key component of the Republican base could be damaging. Exit polls taken from the Georgia primary give McCain reason for concern. He lost badly to Huckabee, and in some cases to third-place finisher Romney, among those who identified themselves as either somewhat conservative or very conservative. Among Republican voters who said they chose a candidate who shares their values, McCain got 15 percent, compared with 51 percent for Huckabee and 31 percent for Romney.

-- Swing voters more important. MSNBC, 3-5 The president has already said that McCain is a true conservative and pledged to campaign for him.

White House political officials acknowledge that Bush's unpopularity with moderates and independents -- the swing voters McCain would need to win in November -- makes the embrace tricky. Better to do it early and get it over with. And Bush remains popular with the Republican base, so the president can help with party unity and raise money.

***Iran Links***

1NC – Iran Link (B) Link – Engaging Iran boosts the Republicans. Dumbrell, '7 (Professor -- Durham University, June, http://eprints.dur.ac.uk/archive/00000235/01/51832.pdf) Let me proceed with a few observations on the picture painted by Hersh, followed by some concluding comments on US public diplomacy towards Iran. The Bush administration is deep into its second term blues. Presidential second terms are usually fairly miserable times, as the political clock winds down (36). Bush’s, despite the 2004 post-election talk of spending vast amounts of political capital, has been more miserable than most . A weakened administration, even one faced – against all the predictions of 2004 – by a Democratic Congress can take controversial military action. To some extent a presidency in the period following the second term mid-term elections is free of the threat of democratic retribution. Yet controversial military action in Iran would be unlikely to help any Republican candidate in 2008. If Bush’s public popularity is low, Cheney’s is almost non-existent. Pew Research Center data still indicate widespread public support for the Baker-Hamilton strategy of talking to Syria and Iran.

-- Iran’s a key issue in the election. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) The other issue garnering a lot of attention is the future of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Part of this is a function of breaking events. With each new round of speculation about a possible U.S. military strike against Iran, candidates are forced to respond. Yet, this discussion also reflects a reality that the would-be presidents understand: the question about what to do about Iran’s goals and about the regime in Tehran will be one of the toughest they would face in the Oval Office.

2NC – Iran Link Spew We have 2 independent internal links – (a) Popularity – That’s the Lichtman evidence. The only way for McCain to win is if Bush get a popular foreign policy initiative implemented. Prefer its methodology – it is preferable to abstract formulas and political punditry – it has predicted all of the elections since 1948. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. 12-13) The Keys to the White House differ from the abstract formulas of the election modelers as well as the lively but anarchic approach of the commentators. Like the horse-race approach, the keys are dynamic--they recognize politics is a matter of real people and events that unfold over time. Like the academic models, the keys are conceptual--they provide a systematic guide to the electoral process. Also like these models, the Keys to the White House are diagnostic--they do not tell us explicitly why people vote the way they do. Unlike models, however the keys identify the concrete circumstances in which the electorate retains or rejects the party in power. The keys are driven by a dominant idea: that the American electorate is pragmatic: it responds to the broad-based performance of the party in power, not just the condition of the economy. Seven of the keys (5 through 11) gauge performance directly, and four more (political keys 1 through 4) reflect executive performance indirectly. Not a single key directly measures ideology, issue positions, voters' party identification, or campaign strategy or tactics. Although these and other factors may have some influence on the decisions of individuals voters, none of them improves the ability of the keys to discriminate between winning and losing candidates, and the inclusion of several--ideology (centrism) and party identification, for example--diminishes the predictive power of the system. In picking winners and losers, the keys differ from conventional models that try to estimate each candidate's share of the popular vote. Although there is a roguh correlation between the number of keys turned against the party in power and its percentage of the popular vote, the final verdict depends only on the simple, unweighted total of negative keys (the use of weighted keys does not improve the ability of the system to distinguish between incumbent and challenging-party victories). A threshold of six negative keys separates the losers from the winners of the popular vote without regard to their percentages. Although this either/or approach involves some loss of information, it achieves a stability of results that eludes more detailed analyses. The keys are able to predict the outcomes of close elections that the percentage models miss because the differences between the candidates' shares of the vote are well within the average error margins. The winners of all five elections decided by six or fewer points since 1948 (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1992) are missed by one or more of the percentage models published to date. Unlike the percentage models, which can be "right" -- within an arbitrary margin of error--even when they forecast a plurality for the second-place finisher, predictions made by the keys are always either right or wrong.

(b) Syria Key – That’s Campbell – It’s being used to criticize Bush now and it’s a major campaign issue. Winning these internal links also mean there is only risk of a link – Our link evidence is uni-directional. Only BROADLY popular policies help McCain and our evidence doesn’t say unpopular foreign policies hurt him. Also – we have a shit-ton of links: -- Popularity – That’s the 1NC Link -- The public overwhelming supports the plan,

that’s Dumbrell.

2NC – Iran Link Spew -- NIE helping Democrat’s pro-engagement election spin now. Kurtz, 2-7 (Senior Fellow -- Ethics & Public Policy Center, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0MjMyMGZlMWQwNjg3OTUxMjA1YTRjODdiZGUwM TI=) The emerging diplomatic disaster spawned by the NIE report, which is increasingly recognized as misleading, raises the prospect of flipping the current political dynamic. The NIE had seemed to confirm the dovish Democratic line: Fears of Iran are greatly exaggerated. So let’s drop our guns, hand the problem back to the diplomats (especially those helpful Europeans), and concentrate on domestic issues instead.

-- Bush's unpopular foreign policy over Iran is fueling the Democrats in the election. Hopkins & Grudgings, '7 (10-13, Gulf Times) AS US presidential candidates descend on New Hampshire before the 2008 election, some voters say they want someone who can restore America’s image abroad after years of unpopular foreign policy under President George W Bush. With this pretty, rural town hosting Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton for a campaign speech, residents said on Thursday that it would take a skilled diplomat to reverse the perception abroad that the US cared little about working with them to solve international problems. “It’s going to take a long time, a really long time,” said Democrat John Scarponi, 37, an insurance salesman. Scarponi said he had yet to decide whom to support in the New Hampshire primary expected in January that kicks off the race for the November 2008 presidential election, but he thought former first lady Clinton might be right for the job. “She’s got more experience in the White House than anyone running. She knows international diplomacy,” Scarponi said. Playing to what many perceive as a strength, New York Senator Clinton listed foreign policy as her first priority in a speech to supporters gathered in a barn at a village orchard. “President Bush’s policies have alienated our friends and emboldened our enemies,” said Clinton, who leads her rivals in national polls and in New Hampshire. “I want to restore American leadership around the world ... The era of cowboy diplomacy is over,” Clinton told the 200-strong crowd to applause. Analysts said foreign policy and diplomacy may be an area where Democrats can peel off Republican voters or independents unhappy with Bush’s policies as the US struggles with war in Iraq, the nuclear aspirations of Iran and the rise of anti-US leaders in Latin America. “From a political point of view, the Democrats can criticise the Republicans on the decline in the image of America,” said Andrew Kohut, president of Washington-based Pew Research Centre.

2NC – Iran Link Spew -- Primaries: Obama’s anti-Bush credentials are key to distinguishing himself from Hillary. AP Online, 11-27-7 Democrat Barack Obama, confronting claims that he's light on foreign policy, surrounded himself Tuesday with heavyweights who said his differences with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and others are just what the country needs: A new leader willing to talk with America's enemies and become a better friend to struggling nations. Obama, closing the three-hour policy forum, said a president should be unafraid to meet with tyrants, and must restore the nation's moral authority by ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay's military prison and helping fight global poverty and AIDS. "Our ability to lead has been set back by our bluster and our refusal to talk to nations we don't like," the Illinois senator said. "Our security and standing have suffered because of the misguided war in Iraq that should have never been authorized." Obama, who was elected to the Senate in 2004, never mentioned Clinton, a New York senator and the Democratic front-runner in national polls. But Obama underscored some of his main criticisms of her, recalling how he opposed from the outset a war that she voted to authorize and repeatedly calling for greater openness in setting policy. In perhaps another veiled reference to Clinton's claims of deep experience in Washington, Obama said of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "Their experience has not led to good judgment." Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, another top Democratic contender, also voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. For months, Obama has portrayed himself as more willing than Clinton to veer sharply from Bush administration policies on many fronts. Foreign affairs may pose his biggest challenge, however, as the New York senator and former first lady has called him naive and irresponsible. Obama has fired back, saying Clinton is too secretive and too wedded to existing or familiar ways of handling domestic and diplomatic matters. In this seaport town Tuesday, he was embraced by several foreign policy advisers, including three appointees from President Bill Clinton's administration: former national security adviser Tony Lake, former Navy secretary Richard Danzig and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.

Key difference between Hillary and Obama is engagement. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) Not surprisingly, some of the most interesting tensions are playing out inside the political parties rather than between them. The essential drama playing out in Democratic circles is a struggle between change and experience, and much of this debate is being fought on national security terrain, if not always amplified by specifics. Democratic contenders agree that the United States has to reengage with the world but sometimes differ on how to do so. For example, Clinton and Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) recently agreed that the United States should seek discussions with the leaders of countries such as Iran and North Korea. Yet, Obama stated that he would be willing to meet them without precondition, whereas Clinton argued that she would first use envoys to test the waters. The disagreement quickly escalated into bitter exchanges between the campaigns, with Obama being charged with naïveté and Clinton being accused of remaining trapped in the past. The dispute over these details masked their fundamental agreement, that if either became president in January 2009, either would seek ways to engage in dialogue with such countries (the same can be said of the other major Democratic candidates).9

Only Obama can beat McCain. Wexler, '8

(Congressmen -- Florida, http://www.pjvoice.com/v33/33303wexler.aspx) No question: it is Sen. Obama who will be our strongest candidate. He is very attractive to independent voters and to moderate Republicans. He will get a crossover vote. While he disagrees with conservatives, he does so civilly. He will unite the Democrats and he’s going to create a bigger tent for us, including independents and Republicans, and he’s going to take that big tent into office, and that’s how we’re going to do things like universal health care and improve education and address global climate change – with a consensus of people that the Democratic Party has not been able to create in a very long time. That’s why I’m so excited about his candidacy. And, of course, the last half-dozen polls have shown that Sen. Obama runs anywhere from five to eight points better than does Sen. Clinton in a race again Sen. McCain.

Link – Iran Popular -- Plan is popular. Murphy, '7 (Staff Writer, CSM, March 28) After all, the Democrats took control of Congress last year in large part because of voter anger over the Iraq war. If they were saying that Bush doesn't need their permission to take action against Iran, then his "all options are on the table" rhetoric looks stronger, and raises the possibility of expanded conflict in the Middle East. But war with Iran, or even targeted air strikes at presumed nuclear facilities, is looking less and less likely. Despite tough rhetoric from both sides and increased tension over Iran's move to detain 15 British sailors last week, a variety of influential thinkers who championed the US-led invasion of Iraq are now saying that containment, not confrontation, is the best approach to Iran. "I think the discussion has really shifted," says M. J. Rosenberg, the director of analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, a pressure group in Washington that favors diplomatic efforts to resolve the Middle East's problems and worries that the Iraq war has made Israel and America less safe. "The conventional wisdom in Washington has changed," says Mr. Rosenberg. There were influential people who thought that thought military action could be possible this year, he says. "Now, hardly anyone does." Mr. Rosbenberg says continued tough talk - and the Democrat climbdown over the spending bill - largely serve two functions: To hopefully soften up Iran in ongoing diplomatic negotiations over inspections of its nuclear facilities; and as a sop to hard-line groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which says it favors attacking Iran if diplomacy doesn't yield results soon, and whose lobbying was largely seen as leading Ms. Pelosi to take her action. Polls show attacking Iran is unpopular But it's not just doves like Rosenberg. The more hawkish forces in Washington - from neoconservatives who believe the Middle East should be remade by force to pro-Israel lobby groups that say military strikes would prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear ambitions - have taken a step back. The logistics of a strike, with an expanded US military role in Iraq and the fact that the two US carrier groups in the Gulf can't stay there indefinitely, are growing ever more difficult. And polls show a large majority of Americans prefer diplomacy, at least for now.

-- Public prefers diplomacy. Nagourney, 7 (NYT, 11-4) Republicans frequently raise the specter of Iran on the campaign trail, and are quick to point to the Democrats' stance in favor of diplomacy as a sign of weakness. Because the Iran question is still largely theoretical, it is also easier to talk about than the realities of Iraq. Unlike in 2004, however, when President Bush won re-election largely because of his popularity on national security issues, most Americans now favor an end to the war in Iraq and are leery of a military confrontation in Iran, according to the most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll. Democrats are hoping that a war-weary nation will appreciate a tone of caution.

-- Engagement is popular – public doesn’t want another war. Murphy, 07 (Staff Writer – CSM, March 28, CSM) And polls show a large majority of Americans prefer diplomacy, at least for now. "If Bush attacked Iran tomorrow, the great majority of Americans would think he was nuts,'' Patrick Clawson, deputy director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week at a conference in Washington on America's options with Iran.

Internal – Iran Key -- Iran is the key issue for the Election. Cole, '7 (10-17, Salon.com) Future historians may conclude that the key issue in the 2008 presidential campaign was not Iraq, but whether the United States should go to war with Iran. Sparring over Iran dominated the Republican debate in Dearborn, Mich., last week, while a Senate resolution condemning Iran's Revolutionary Guards as terrorists divided the Democrats, some of whom (including Sen. Barack Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) feared that it might give Bush a pretext to launch another war. Unexpectedly, Tehran has emerged as a preoccupation of candidates -- as a litmus test for attitudes toward war and domestic security.

-- Iran is a vital issue in the elections. Steinhauser & Johnson, 7 (CNN Washington Bureau, Oct 25, Cnn) While it hasn't pushed aside the war in Iraq, the debate over sanctions against Iran and the possibility of military action against Tehran is gathering steam on the campaign trail. Democratic candidates expressed concern Thursday about the Bush administration's extensive sanctions against Iran, arguing that the measures were likely precursors to war.

Internal – Iran Important -- Public cares about Iran. Gallup Poll News Service, '7 Feb 21 A majority of Americans view five countries unfavorably and say what happens in those countries is vitally important to the United States. These five world hot spots are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, and China. Americans remain most favorable toward countries that share the English language with the United States -- Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. Surveying the geopolitical landscape of the world, Americans identify five countries as world hot spots. These are nations that a majority of Americans view unfavorably and deem what happens in each "vitally important" to U.S. interests. These five world hot spots are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, and China. A majority of Americans also view Venezuela, Pakistan, Cuba, and Syria unfavorably, but do not consider what happens in these countries to be of vital importance to the United States. Americans remain most favorable toward countries that share the English language with the United States -- Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. Other countries that a majority of Americans view favorably include India, Mexico, Israel, and Russia. Continues Gallup's Feb. 1-4 World Affairs poll included the annual update on Americans' ratings of various countries around the world, and asked Americans to rate the overall importance to the United States of what happens in most of these nations. The results of these two questions have been plotted on the accompanying graph. The public's perception of the importance to the United States of what happens in each nation is displayed along the horizontal axis, and the public's favorable rating of each country is displayed on the vertical axis. (Detailed data on both dimensions represented on the graph are shown and discussed later in this story.) The intersection of these two dimensions allows the creation of four quadrants, based on dividing each dimension along the 50% line. Quadrant IV: This is arguably the most important quadrant, containing what can be called world hot spots: countries that most Americans rate negatively, but that a majority of Americans see as important to the United States. This quadrant contains five countries: Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. These are the countries that presumably worry the American public most. The United States is currently involved in armed conflict in two of the countries.

Internal – Clinton & Obama Split on Engagement Obama is pro-engagement and Clinton is anti-engagement. Rice, 12-26-7 (Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-rice/ready-to-lead-on-dayone_b_78339.html) On Iraq, until the week before Christmas, Senator Clinton declined to specify a timeline for withdrawal of US forces. Then, finally, she embraced Obama's timeline of one to two combat brigades a month. However, she remains ambiguous about permanent bases, signaling in Foreign Affairs there may be a need for some in Kurdistan. She has said on the one hand that she would not act to stop a potential genocide in Iraq but on the other that she would leave behind a presumably larger residual that would have broad responsibilities, including going after other terrorist organizations elsewhere in the region. It is not clear if she means Hezbollah or Hamas, but Senator Clinton leaves the door open to doing more than going after al

Qaeda. On Iran, we know Senator Clinton supported Kyl-Lieberman and condemns Obama's readiness to conduct direct and unconditional diplomacy with Iran, obviously after due preparation, at the Presidential level. Beyond saying she opposes a "rush to war" (the same language she used on Iraq) and favors robust diplomacy, we don't know what precisely Senator Clinton would do about Iran on Day One or thereafter.

Afghan Links***

1NC – Afghanistan Link (B) Links – Plan’s popular and the public cares. Gallup Poll News Service, '7 Feb 21 Gallup's Feb. 1-4 World Affairs poll included the annual update on Americans' ratings of various countries around the world, and asked Americans to rate the overall importance to the United States of what happens in most of these nations. The results of these two questions have been plotted on the accompanying graph. The public's perception of the importance to the United States of what happens in each nation is displayed along the horizontal axis, and the public's favorable rating of each country is displayed on the vertical axis. (Detailed data on both dimensions represented on the graph are shown and discussed later in this story.) The intersection of these two dimensions allows the creation of four quadrants, based on dividing each dimension along the 50% line. Quadrant IV: This is arguably the most important quadrant, containing what can be called world hot spots: countries that most Americans rate negatively, but that a majority of Americans see as important to the United States. This quadrant contains five countries: Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. These are the countries that presumably worry the American public most. The United States is currently involved in armed conflict in two of the countries.

2NC – Afghan Link Spew Extern our popularity internal link – That’s the Lichtman evidence. The only way for McCain to win is if Bush get a popular foreign policy initiative implemented. Prefer its methodology – it is preferable to abstract formulas and political punditry – it has predicted all of the elections since 1948. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. 12-13) The Keys to the White House differ from the abstract formulas of the election modelers as well as the lively but anarchic approach of the commentators. Like the horse-race approach, the keys are dynamic--they recognize politics is a matter of real people and events that unfold over time. Like the academic models, the keys are conceptual--they provide a systematic guide to the electoral process. Also like these models, the Keys to the White House are diagnostic--they do not tell us explicitly why people vote the way they do. Unlike models, however the keys identify the concrete circumstances in which the electorate retains or rejects the party in power. The keys are driven by a dominant idea: that the American electorate is pragmatic: it responds to the broad-based performance of the party in power, not just the condition of the economy. Seven of the keys (5 through 11) gauge performance directly, and four more (political keys 1 through 4) reflect executive performance indirectly. Not a single key directly measures ideology, issue positions, voters' party identification, or campaign strategy or tactics. Although these and other factors may have some influence on the decisions of individuals voters, none of them improves the ability of the keys to discriminate between winning and losing candidates, and the inclusion of several--ideology (centrism) and party identification, for example--diminishes the predictive power of the system. In picking winners and losers, the keys differ from conventional models that try to estimate each candidate's share of the popular vote. Although there is a roguh correlation between the number of keys turned against the party in power and its percentage of the popular vote, the final verdict depends only on the simple, unweighted total of negative keys (the use of weighted keys does not improve the ability of the system to distinguish between incumbent and challenging-party victories). A threshold of six negative keys separates the losers from the winners of the popular vote without regard to their percentages. Although this either/or approach involves some loss of information, it achieves a stability of results that eludes more detailed analyses. The keys are able to predict the outcomes of close elections that the percentage models miss because the differences between the candidates' shares of the vote are well within the average error margins. The winners of all five elections decided by six or fewer points since 1948 (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1992) are missed by one or more of the percentage models published to date. Unlike the percentage models, which can be "right" -- within an arbitrary margin of error--even when they forecast a plurality for the second-place finisher, predictions made by the keys are always either right or wrong.

Winning these internal links also mean there is only risk of a link – Our link evidence is uni-directional. Only BROADLY popular policies help McCain and our evidence doesn’t say unpopular foreign policies hurt him. Also – we have a shit-ton of links: -- Popularity – That’s the 1NC Link -- The public overwhelming supports the plan, that’s Gallup Polls. Afghanistan is the region they care the most about.

2NC – Afghan Link Spew -- Criticism Shield: Republicans can use Afghanistan to cut into the Democrat’s criticism of Bush. Boot, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) Well, I mean, I do think that Afghanistan is obviously a secondary issue politically. I don't think it's completely inconsequential, and I think that, unlike in Pakistan, that there are some things that we could do. I mean, for example, our colleagues over at the American Enterprise Institute have suggested -- are suggesting a surge of perhaps three more U.S. brigades into Afghanistan. I think that's a very good idea. I think that's something that we need to do. I suspect that even the Democrats can probably get behind that because one of their big talking points for years has been that we're too focused on Iraq and, in fact, we need to be paying more attention to Afghanistan. I think we have to pay a lot of attention to both. And I think one of the other things -- this is not going to be a huge issue, but I think one of the other issues that Afghanistan raises is the future of NATO and this whole multilateralist world view, which has been one of the big Democratic attacks on the Bush administration. And basically, Democrats have been saying for years that Bush has been too unilateral, gone in alone, didn't utilize our allies. Well, in the case of Afghanistan, this is an area where we are utilizing our allies. We have turned it over to NATO, and they're basically screwing it up.

-- Anti-terror: Public views the plan as a crackdown on Bin Laden. Turkish Daily News, '6 12-12 What about the changes in the makeup of the Bush Administration? Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense, as did John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the UN. Can these changes affect Washington policies? Jacobs disagrees: "Most democrats and republicans are clearly on board this ship of eternal war. If you look at funding proposals, they will see that no funding requests for this endeavor will face much opposition. Indeed, there is a possibility these requests may even increase." Thus, the departure of Rumsfeld and Bolton does not mean anything more than "putting another face on the same old policy," he says.Civil war debate: There is a view emanating from the White House that "if US troops withdraw too soon from Iraq, the civil war will worsen and the fragmentation of the country will hasten". Jacobs considers this view to be "mostly nonsense," and notes that the current strife in the country is fueled by "the invasion and occupation." And what do the American people think of the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Jacobs observes that "most Americans want the US troops in Iraq to come home very soon," but when it comes to Afghanistan, the feeling is a bit different: "Many still think that that the battle is against Osama bin Laden, even though it never really was. The fact that the conflict there is not in the media nearly as much as the one in Iraq makes it more difficult to get people to even think about it." According to polls, Americans are less optimistic that bin Laden will be captured or killed, but most think that this aim is important. The USA Today/Gallup poll taken on September 2005, for example, showed that nearly 7 of 8 Americans thought it remains important to the United States for bin Laden to be captured or killed

Policies that play on the terror theme salvage Bush's image and court swing voters back to the GOP. Joseph, '6 (8-10, http://fallingpanda.blogspot.com/2006/08/big-win-for-good-guys.html) Finally, I feel sorry for the Democratic party as a whole, as well as the liberals who have taken over that party since Bill Clinton left office. They were so close to convincing voters that they were better suited to lead congress, not because of their ideas and competence, but rather because they were not

Republicans. Now that convincing will take a lot more effort. You see, every time American’s are reminded that terrorism is the most important issue of our time and that the threat from Islamic-fascism is real and still very much alive within this small world which we live in, many of them realize that the aggressive anti-terror policies of the Bush administration are not as awful as the administrations detractors claim. When they actually see these policies work, swing voters understand and appreciate George W. Bush a bit more, warts and all. I hope that goes for Tony Blair in England as well.

2NC – Afghan Link Spew Swing voters key to the election. Fourneir, '7 (AP Online, July 26) During the 2004 presidential campaign, political operatives convinced themselves that there were a dwindling few of these so-called swing voters, and that the only way to win elections was playing to "the base" the most dedicated Republicans and Democrats. They were wrong. The political middle is as significant as ever, with voters in a mood to swing due to their frustration with both major parties. That raises a challenge for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates: How do they win their parties' nomination without appearing hostage to the kind of base politics that turns off swing voters?

-- Strong anti-terror perception key to the young vote which is vital for Republicans overcoming Democrats. Schwab, 3-13 (http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/2008/03/13/young-voters-could-put-obama-orclinton-in-the-white-house.html?PageNr=3) Maybe it's because of the compelling candidates. Maybe it's because it's easy to register online, and they've been following the election on Facebook for months now anyway. Or maybe it's just cool. But young people are actually voting. Counter to the conventional wisdom that the youngest demographic of voters are among the most apathetic, progress has been made among the "millennials," and voter turnout has solidly increased this primary season. More than 5.7 million voters under the age of 30 have participated in the primaries and caucuses held thus far. That's a 109 percent increase from the last set of presidential primaries, according to Rock the Vote. And these are the primaries, where voter turnout is usually abysmal. Looking toward the general election, 80 percent of young people surveyed in a post-Super Tuesday Rock the Vote poll said they were likely to cast votes in November, and 69 percent said they were excited, yes excited, to vote. In reality, turnout will probably more closely resemble the 49 percent who voted in 2004, up from 40 percent who voted in 2000. At a time when voter turnout has been on the rise nationally, if young voters turn out this year, it would continue the trend of increased voter turnout among young people since 2004, when young voters were the only demographic that Democrat John Kerry won. Youth voter turnout had spiraled downward since 1972, the year after the voting age changed to 18, though it spiked in 1992 and marginally increased in 2000. In 2004, while voter turnout among the young saw the biggest increase, turnout overall among older voters was still better. Young voters went to the polls in increased numbers for the 2006 midterm election, helping Democrats regain control of Congress. While the youth vote trended toward the Republicans in the 1980s, today it leans Democratic. As recently as 2002, Republicans were on equal footing with the Democrats in youth partisan identification. But then in 2006, the youth vote gave the Democrats a 21-point advantage, a gain surely wide enough to tip some close races in the Democrats' favor. This time around, young people are again voting lopsidedly for the Democrats. On Super Tuesday, more than 3 million voters under 30 headed to the polls. Of those, more than 2 million voted in Democratic contests, and about 900,000 voted in GOP contests, according to CIRCLE. And the number of young voters participating in Democratic contests in 2008 outnumbers those participating in Republican contests in all states except Michigan, which lost its Democratic delegates, Utah, and

Oklahoma. All the support for the Democrats doesn't necessarily spell demise in this demographic for Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee. "Young voters have done a lot for Republicans in recent years; Kerry won the young vote but it wasn't by that big of a margin," says Levine. "I think they are trending Democratic, but they are in play." In this year's primaries, McCain wrestled for the youth vote, losing it often in the South to Mike Huckabee. However, in 2000, he won it over George W. Bush in states like New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which allow independents to vote in their primaries. His known appeal among independent voters could help come general election time. "I think he has an incredible number of strengths that he brings to the table," says Ethan Eilon, executive director of the College Republican National Committee. While young people identifying with both parties are concerned about the war in Iraq, other top issues for Republican youth are the economy and terrorism, according to a Rock the Vote poll taken in October 2007. For the Democrats, it's college affordability and healthcare. Focusing on fiscal responsibility and a strong national policy on defense, Eilon says, can help McCain win younger GOP voters and perhaps some vital independent voters too.

***Syria Links***

1NC – Syria Link (B) Link – Engaging Iran boosts the Republicans. Dumbrell, '7 (Professor -- Durham University, June, http://eprints.dur.ac.uk/archive/00000235/01/51832.pdf) Let me proceed with a few observations on the picture painted by Hersh, followed by some concluding comments on US public diplomacy towards Iran. The Bush administration is deep into its second term blues. Presidential second terms are usually fairly miserable times, as the political clock winds down (36). Bush’s, despite the 2004 post-election talk of spending vast amounts of political capital, has been more miserable than most . A weakened administration, even one faced – against all the predictions of 2004 – by a Democratic Congress can take controversial military action. To some extent a presidency in the period following the second term mid-term elections is free of the threat of democratic retribution. Yet controversial military action in Iran would be unlikely to help any Republican candidate in 2008. If Bush’s public popularity is low, Cheney’s is almost non-existent. Pew Research Center data still indicate widespread public support for the Baker-Hamilton strategy of talking to Syria and Iran.

Engagement will be an issue in the election Morning Call 1--2 One day later, two other messages concerning Syria's international status complicated the picture. French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that he had "reached the end of the road" with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and said he would not negotiate with the Bashar government any further. Mr. Sarkozy's primary concern is different from that of the U.S. legislators. The main issue for the French is Syria's continued involvement in Lebanon's internal politics. Lebanon has been without a president since November, and its political factions have not been able to agree on a new government. Pressure from outside Lebanon's borders is a major obstacle to stabilizing its government. In the view of the Syrians, however, the United States is as involved in Beirut as they are. Also on Monday, President Bush declared that he will not talk to the Assad government. He cited yet a different line of reasoning -- Syria's support for Hezbollah and Hamas and its role as a staging ground for insurgents moving into Iraq. Israel and Syria have not talked about the Golan Heights since 2000, the year before President Bush took office. At that time, he ended most of the diplomatic efforts begun under the Clinton administration. We believe the record shows, however, that the more the United States is engaged in the Middle East, the more likely the prospects for peacemaking there. Where and when the United States should engage with any unfriendly nations will be an issue in this year's presidential contests. Candidates in both parties discussed talking to, for instance, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.

2NC – Syria Link Spew We have 2 independent internal links – (a) Popularity – That’s the Lichtman evidence. The only way for McCain to win is if Bush get a popular foreign policy initiative implemented. Prefer its methodology – it is preferable to abstract formulas and political punditry – it has predicted all of the elections since 1948. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. 12-13) The Keys to the White House differ from the abstract formulas of the election modelers as well as the lively but anarchic approach of the commentators. Like the horse-race approach, the keys are dynamic--they recognize politics is a matter of real people and events that unfold over time. Like the academic models, the keys are conceptual--they provide a systematic guide to the electoral process. Also like these models, the Keys to the White House are diagnostic--they do not tell us explicitly why people vote the way they do. Unlike models, however the keys identify the concrete circumstances in which the electorate retains or rejects the party in power. The keys are driven by a dominant idea: that the American electorate is pragmatic: it responds to the broad-based performance of the party in power, not just the condition of the economy. Seven of the keys (5 through 11) gauge performance directly, and four more (political keys 1 through 4) reflect executive performance indirectly. Not a single key directly measures ideology, issue positions, voters' party identification, or campaign strategy or tactics. Although these and other factors may have some influence on the decisions of individuals voters, none of them improves the ability of the keys to discriminate between winning and losing candidates, and the inclusion of several--ideology (centrism) and party identification, for example--diminishes the predictive power of the system. In picking winners and losers, the keys differ from conventional models that try to estimate each candidate's share of the popular vote. Although there is a roguh correlation between the number of keys turned against the party in power and its percentage of the popular vote, the final verdict depends only on the simple, unweighted total of negative keys (the use of weighted keys does not improve the ability of the system to distinguish between incumbent and challenging-party victories). A threshold of six negative keys separates the losers from the winners of the popular vote without regard to their percentages. Although this either/or approach involves some loss of information, it achieves a stability of results that eludes more detailed analyses. The keys are able to predict the outcomes of close elections that the percentage models miss because the differences between the candidates' shares of the vote are well within the average error margins. The winners of all five elections decided by six or fewer points since 1948 (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1992) are missed by one or more of the percentage models published to date. Unlike the percentage models, which can be "right" -- within an arbitrary margin of error--even when they forecast a plurality for the second-place finisher, predictions made by the keys are always either right or wrong.

(b) Syria Key – That’s Morning Call – It’s being used to criticize Bush now and it’s a major campaign issue. Also – we have a shit-ton of links: -- Popularity – That’s the 1NC Link -- The public overwhelming supports the plan, that’s Dumbrell.

2NC – Syria Link Spew -- Terror Spin: Reps will spin the plan as a way of winning the War on Terror. Beinart, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) The biggest one is that when Republicans talk about foreign policy -- particularly true for McCain and Giuliani, but even for Romney -- the war on terror virtually is American foreign policy. I mean, for them, the war on terror is the defining prism for American foreign policy, in a similar way that the Cold War was for American foreign policy from the late '40s through the '80s. And they define the war on terror very broadly, so the war on terror does not just refer to kind of Sunni jihadists of the al Qaeda variety, but it is a prism for understanding how we should deal with Iran, Syria, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, Iraq; it's all bundled under this kind of broad war on terror. And there's much, much less discussion of nonmilitary threats to American security.

That’s key to the election. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) As it is often said that military strategists always fight the last war, political consultants often plan to execute campaign strategies based on the experiences of the last election. So far, this campaign is no exception. For Democrats, the 2004 election served as a searing and painful reminder of how Republicans have effectively capitalized on their long-standing advantages in terms of public trust when it comes to national security and keeping the nation safe from looming threats. Republicans aggressively castigated Democrats for having a “pre-9/11 worldview” insufficiently vigilant to the onerous task of protecting the nation from terrorist threats and rogue nations. This line of attack turned out to be devastatingly successful. According to exit polls, 86 percent of voters who cited terrorism as the top issue facing the country in 2004 voted for Bush.3 Throughout the last campaign, it sometimes seemed that the Democratic Party had still not recovered from the awkward image of Michael Dukakis getting into that tank in 1988. Continues In gearing up for 2008, Republicans are also talking a lot about foreign policy in speeches and on the campaign stump. They seem to be sticking to the playbook that worked well in the 2004 campaign, painting the Democrats as weak on the core issues of national security. GOP contenders continue to play on the theme that Democrats are weak and too willing to give up in places such as Iraq. For example, they characterize Democratic plans on Iraq as “cutting and running” and castigate them for denying that there is a “war on terror.” “In four Democratic debates, not a single Democratic candidate said the words ‘Islamic terrorism,’” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani argued in a recent Republican debate. “Now, that is taking political correctness to extremes.… The reality is that you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement.”5 In this

Republicans are like the Green Bay Packers football teams of the 1960s who telegraphed their running plays, daring their opponents to stop them. sense,

2NC – Syria Link Spew -- Primaries: Obama’s anti-Bush credentials are key to distinguishing himself from Hillary. AP Online, 11-27-7 Democrat Barack Obama, confronting claims that he's light on foreign policy, surrounded himself Tuesday with heavyweights who said his differences with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and others are just what the country needs: A new leader willing to talk with America's enemies and become a better friend to struggling nations. Obama, closing the three-hour policy forum, said a president should be unafraid to meet with tyrants, and must restore the nation's moral authority by ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay's military prison and helping fight global poverty and AIDS. "Our ability to lead has been set back by our bluster and our refusal to talk to nations we don't like," the Illinois senator said. "Our security and standing have suffered because of the misguided war in Iraq that should have never been authorized." Obama, who was elected to the Senate in 2004, never mentioned Clinton, a New York senator and the Democratic front-runner in national polls. But Obama underscored some of his main criticisms of her, recalling how he opposed from the outset a war that she voted to authorize and repeatedly calling for greater openness in setting policy. In perhaps another veiled reference to Clinton's claims of deep experience in Washington, Obama said of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "Their experience has not led to good judgment." Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, another top Democratic contender, also voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. For months, Obama has portrayed himself as more willing than Clinton to veer sharply from Bush administration policies on many fronts. Foreign affairs may pose his biggest challenge, however, as the New York senator and former first lady has called him naive and irresponsible. Obama has fired back, saying Clinton is too secretive and too wedded to existing or familiar ways of handling domestic and diplomatic matters. In this seaport town Tuesday, he was embraced by several foreign policy advisers, including three appointees from President Bill Clinton's administration: former national security adviser Tony Lake, former Navy secretary Richard Danzig and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.

Key difference between Hillary and Obama is engagement. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) Not surprisingly, some of the most interesting tensions are playing out inside the political parties rather than between them. The essential drama playing out in Democratic circles is a struggle between change and experience, and much of this debate is being fought on national security terrain, if not always amplified by specifics. Democratic contenders agree that the United States has to reengage with the world but sometimes differ on how to do so. For example, Clinton and Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) recently agreed that the United States should seek discussions with the leaders of countries such as Iran and North Korea. Yet, Obama stated that he would be willing to meet them without precondition, whereas Clinton argued that she would first use envoys to test the waters. The disagreement quickly escalated into bitter exchanges between the campaigns, with Obama being charged with naïveté and Clinton being accused of remaining trapped in the past. The dispute over these details masked their fundamental agreement, that if either became president in January 2009, either would seek ways to engage in dialogue with such countries (the same can be said of the other major Democratic candidates).9

Only Obama can beat McCain. Wexler, '8

(Congressmen -- Florida, http://www.pjvoice.com/v33/33303wexler.aspx) No question: it is Sen. Obama who will be our strongest candidate. He is very attractive to independent voters and to moderate Republicans. He will get a crossover vote. While he disagrees with conservatives, he does so civilly. He will unite the Democrats and he’s going to create a bigger tent for us, including independents and Republicans, and he’s going to take that big tent into office, and that’s how we’re going to do things like universal health care and improve education and address global climate change – with a consensus of people that the Democratic Party has not been able to create in a very long time. That’s why I’m so excited about his candidacy. And, of course, the last half-dozen polls have shown that Sen. Obama runs anywhere from five to eight points better than does Sen. Clinton in a race again Sen. McCain.

Syria Link – Popular -- Engaging Syria is popular. World Public Opinion, '6 (http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/283.php?nid=&id=&pnt=283&lb=hmpg 1) A new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org finds that three out of four Americans believe that in order to stabilize Iraq the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria, and eight in ten support an international conference on Iraq. A majority also opposes keeping U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely and instead supports committing to a timetable for their withdrawal within two years or less. Iraq Study Group Chairmen Lee Hamilton and James Baker (USIP). The poll shows that the attitudes of the U.S. public are consistent with several key proposals endorsed by the Iraq Study Group, which released its recommendations Dec. 6. The bipartisan commission suggested opening negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors and holding an international conference. It also recommended that the United States establish the goal of withdrawing most combat forces from Iraq by early 2008. The poll of 1,326 Americans was developed in conjunction with the conference, “Leveraging U.S. Strength in an Uncertain World,” to be held by the Stanley Foundation Dec. 7 at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave.,Washington, D.C. Results of the full survey, which covers a wide range of international security issues, will be released at the conference on Thursday. Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org and director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said that the findings showed broad public support for the Iraq Study Group's proposals. “There is potential for finding some bipartisan consensus on the next steps for the U.S. to take in Iraq,” Kull said. Stanley_Dec06_iraq_graph1.jpg WorldPublicOpinion.org told respondents that there is “a debate about whether to work with Iraq’s neighbors with whom we have other disputes.” Nonetheless, 75 percent say that the United States should have talks with Iran and the exact same number say that the United States should have talks with Syria. This diplomatic approach is endorsed overwhelmingly by both parties: eight in ten Democrats and seven in ten Republicans endorse talking with both Iran and Syria.

***Israel/Palestine Links***

1NC – Israel Palestine Link (B) Links – Plan’s popular – Public wants peace. DiMaggio, '7 (Prof -- Mid East Politics @ ISU, July 20, http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio07202007.html) Studies also show that a majority of Americans favor a negotiated peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. This is significant, since such support stands in marked contrast to the rejectionist positions of American and Israeli leaders, who have escalated the violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are responsible for the vast majority of the civilian deaths in the conflict, and have consistently opposed a two-state solution including the formation of a sovereign Palestine and an end to the illegal 40 year occupation. Public support for negotiations again stands in opposition to the official government stance when we look at the issue of aid to Palestinians. While supporters of Israel have long cited polls showing that Americans favor aid to Israel over Palestinians, this is a misleading portrayal. Recent surveys (from 2001 and 2002) show that between 57% and 62% of Americans feel that the U.S. should "equalize aid" between Israelis and Palestinians "if the Palestinians come to terms with Israel in a peace agreement." One would expect American leaders (at least those with even a minimal commitment to democracy) to have moved toward equalizing aid long ago, considering that Palestinian leaders from Fatah have recognized the state of Israel for over 15 years, and have engaged in negotiations for as long. Unfortunately, American political elites have long preferred to ignore the public's will, relying on vulgar vilifications that single out the Palestinians for obstructing peace without exacting serious demands on Israeli leaders. In the case of the election of Hamas to political power in Palestine, one might very well expect that the American public would oppose equalizing aid, even in light of negotiations. This may very well be true, but it hardly justifies further political contempt for American public opinion concerning prospects for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. A 2006 Gallup poll found that 66% of Americans favored conducting diplomatic relations with Hamas if it recognizes Israel. This is contrary to the views of American political leaders, who insist that Fatah and Israeli leaders declare war on Hamas in order to wipe the democratically elected organization off the political map, rather than pursuing a negotiated settlement.

Israel-Palestine will be a key issue in the election. McConnell, 3-10 (http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_10/article.html) These elements alone will probably ensure that if Obama is the nominee, Israel-Palestine will be a topic in the general election. Those already attacking his advisers—Marty Peretz, The American Thinker, the Commentary blog—will raise the volume on their efforts. Obama and his allies will initially try to deflect the blows but will eventually be forced to argue back. Jews who support a twostate-solution—who have long taken a backseat to AIPAC and the neoconservatives—will find their voices amplified through a major presidential campaign. So will Arab-Americans who support Obama. For the first time in a presidential race, the Israel-Palestine issue will consist of something other than two men squabbling over who will more rapidly overrule the State Department and absolutely positively move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew We have 2 independent internal links – (a) Popularity – That’s the Lichtman evidence. The only way for McCain to win is if Bush get a popular foreign policy initiative implemented. Prefer its methodology – it is preferable to abstract formulas and political punditry – it has predicted all of the elections since 1948. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. 12-13) The Keys to the White House differ from the abstract formulas of the election modelers as well as the lively but anarchic approach of the commentators. Like the horse-race approach, the keys are dynamic--they recognize politics is a matter of real people and events that unfold over time. Like the academic models, the keys are conceptual--they provide a systematic guide to the electoral process. Also like these models, the Keys to the White House are diagnostic--they do not tell us explicitly why people vote the way they do. Unlike models, however the keys identify the concrete circumstances in which the electorate retains or rejects the party in power. The keys are driven by a dominant idea: that the American electorate is pragmatic: it responds to the broad-based performance of the party in power, not just the condition of the economy. Seven of the keys (5 through 11) gauge performance directly, and four more (political keys 1 through 4) reflect executive performance indirectly. Not a single key directly measures ideology, issue positions, voters' party identification, or campaign strategy or tactics. Although these and other factors may have some influence on the decisions of individuals voters, none of them improves the ability of the keys to discriminate between winning and losing candidates, and the inclusion of several--ideology (centrism) and party identification, for example--diminishes the predictive power of the system. In picking winners and losers, the keys differ from conventional models that try to estimate each candidate's share of the popular vote. Although there is a roguh correlation between the number of keys turned against the party in power and its percentage of the popular vote, the final verdict depends only on the simple, unweighted total of negative keys (the use of weighted keys does not improve the ability of the system to distinguish between incumbent and challenging-party victories). A threshold of six negative keys separates the losers from the winners of the popular vote without regard to their percentages. Although this either/or approach involves some loss of information, it achieves a stability of results that eludes more detailed analyses. The keys are able to predict the outcomes of close elections that the percentage models miss because the differences between the candidates' shares of the vote are well within the average error margins. The winners of all five elections decided by six or fewer points since 1948 (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1992) are missed by one or more of the percentage models published to date. Unlike the percentage models, which can be "right" -- within an arbitrary margin of error--even when they forecast a plurality for the second-place finisher, predictions made by the keys are always either right or wrong.

(b) Palestine Key – That’s McConnell -- Obama has already made it in issue, it has been caught up in the media, and candidates will campaign on it. Also – we have a shit-ton of links: -- Popularity – That’s the 1NC Link -- The public overwhelming supports the plan, that’s DiMaggio. Card even slays any attempt at a link turn since it says that socalled public opposition to the plan are trumped up elite lies and not based in reality.

2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew -- Terror Spin: Reps will spin the plan as a way of winning the War on Terror. Beinart, 1-31 (Senior Fellow -- CFR, Federal News Service) The biggest one is that when Republicans talk about foreign policy -- particularly true for McCain and Giuliani, but even for Romney -- the war on terror virtually is American foreign policy. I mean, for them, the war on terror is the defining prism for American foreign policy, in a similar way that the Cold War was for American foreign policy from the late '40s through the '80s. And they define the war on terror very broadly, so the war on terror does not just refer to kind of Sunni jihadists of the al Qaeda variety, but it is a prism for understanding how we should deal with Iran, Syria, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, Iraq; it's all bundled under this kind of broad war on terror. And there's much, much less discussion of nonmilitary threats to American security.

That’s key to the election. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) As it is often said that military strategists always fight the last war, political consultants often plan to execute campaign strategies based on the experiences of the last election. So far, this campaign is no exception. For Democrats, the 2004 election served as a searing and painful reminder of how Republicans have effectively capitalized on their long-standing advantages in terms of public trust when it comes to national security and keeping the nation safe from looming threats. Republicans aggressively castigated Democrats for having a “pre-9/11 worldview” insufficiently vigilant to the onerous task of protecting the nation from terrorist threats and rogue nations. This line of attack turned out to be devastatingly successful. According to exit polls, 86 percent of voters who cited terrorism as the top issue facing the country in 2004 voted for Bush.3 Throughout the last campaign, it sometimes seemed that the Democratic Party had still not recovered from the awkward image of Michael Dukakis getting into that tank in 1988. Continues In gearing up for 2008, Republicans are also talking a lot about foreign policy in speeches and on the campaign stump. They seem to be sticking to the playbook that worked well in the 2004 campaign, painting the Democrats as weak on the core issues of national security. GOP contenders continue to play on the theme that Democrats are weak and too willing to give up in places such as Iraq. For example, they characterize Democratic plans on Iraq as “cutting and running” and castigate them for denying that there is a “war on terror.” “In four Democratic debates, not a single Democratic candidate said the words ‘Islamic terrorism,’” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani argued in a recent Republican debate. “Now, that is taking political correctness to extremes.… The reality is that you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement.”5 In this

Republicans are like the Green Bay Packers football teams of the 1960s who telegraphed their running plays, daring their opponents to stop them. sense,

2NC – Israel-Palestine Link Spew -- Iraq Shift: Bush will use the plan to detract from the Iraq debacle. Marcuse, '7 (1-24, http://www.ypfp.org/israel-syria) First, like Clinton before him, Bush will look to the Middle East to try and redeem his tarnished image by seizing the holy grail of presidential diplomacy: a deal between Israel and an Arab neighbor. Every president wants one, and Bush needs one now more than ever. The last two years are about legacy, and anything in the region to detract from the Iraq debacle is welcome.

-- Primaries: Obama’s anti-Bush credentials are key to distinguishing himself from Hillary. AP Online, 11-27-7 Democrat Barack Obama, confronting claims that he's light on foreign policy, surrounded himself Tuesday with heavyweights who said his differences with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and others are just what the country needs: A new leader willing to talk with America's enemies and become a better friend to struggling nations. Obama, closing the three-hour policy forum, said a president should be unafraid to meet with tyrants, and must restore the nation's moral authority by ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay's military prison and helping fight global poverty and AIDS. "Our ability to lead has been set back by our bluster and our refusal to talk to nations we don't like," the Illinois senator said. "Our security and standing have suffered because of the misguided war in Iraq that should have never been authorized." Obama, who was elected to the Senate in 2004, never mentioned Clinton, a New York senator and the Democratic front-runner in national polls. But Obama underscored some of his main criticisms of her, recalling how he opposed from the outset a war that she voted to authorize and repeatedly calling for greater openness in setting policy. In perhaps another veiled reference to Clinton's claims of deep experience in Washington, Obama said of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "Their experience has not led to good judgment." Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, another top Democratic contender, also voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. For months,

Obama has portrayed himself as more willing than Clinton to veer sharply from Bush administration policies on many fronts. Foreign affairs may pose his biggest challenge, however, as the New York senator and former first lady has called him naive and irresponsible. Obama has fired back, saying Clinton is too secretive and too wedded to existing or familiar ways of handling domestic and diplomatic matters. In this seaport town Tuesday, he was embraced by several foreign policy advisers, including three appointees from President Bill Clinton's administration: former national security adviser Tony Lake, former Navy secretary Richard Danzig and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.

Key difference between Hillary and Obama is engagement. Campbell & Chollet, '8 (Co-Founder -- Center for a New American Security, Senior Fellow -- CNAS, Washington Quarterly, 31:1) Not surprisingly, some of the most interesting tensions are playing out inside the political parties rather than between them. The essential drama playing out in Democratic circles is a struggle between change and experience, and much of this debate is being fought on national security terrain, if not always amplified by specifics. Democratic contenders agree that the United States has to reengage with the world but sometimes differ on how to do so. For example, Clinton and Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) recently agreed that the United States should seek discussions with the leaders of countries such as Iran and North Korea. Yet, Obama stated that he would be willing to meet them without precondition, whereas Clinton argued that she would first use envoys to test the waters. The disagreement quickly escalated into bitter exchanges between the campaigns, with Obama being charged with naïveté and Clinton being accused of remaining trapped in the past. The dispute over these details masked their fundamental agreement, that if either became president in January 2009, either would seek ways to engage in dialogue with such countries (the same can be said of the other major Democratic candidates).9

Only Obama can beat McCain.

Wexler, '8 (Congressmen -- Florida, http://www.pjvoice.com/v33/33303wexler.aspx) No question: it is Sen. Obama who will be our strongest candidate. He is very attractive to independent voters and to moderate Republicans. He will get a crossover vote. While he disagrees with conservatives, he does so civilly. He will unite the Democrats and he’s going to create a bigger tent for us, including independents and Republicans, and he’s going to take that big tent into office, and that’s how we’re going to do things like universal health care and improve education and address global climate change – with a consensus of people that the Democratic Party has not been able to create in a very long time. That’s why I’m so excited about his candidacy.And, of course,

the last half-dozen polls have shown that Sen. Obama runs anywhere from five to eight points better than does Sen. Clinton in a race again Sen. McCain.

A2 – Public Hates Palestine 1. Misundertands the link – Public may hate Palestine but they want peace. That’s Dimaggio. 2. Link biased and untrue – they don’t care for either side. DiMaggio, '7 (July 20, http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio07202007.html) If 40-50% sympathy levels for Israel is deemed serious evidence of "strong" public support, then surely similarly critical percentages suggest major reservations regarding unconditional aid to Israel. One poll conducted in November 2005 found that nearly 4 in 10 Americans (39%) felt that U.S. support for Israel is a "major reason that people around the world are unhappy with the U.S." Seventyone percent of Americans questioned in 2002 felt that the United States should take "neither side" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surveys from a longer time period (1998-2006) find the same results: depending upon the year in question, between 52% and 78% of Americans feel that the U.S. should take neither the Palestinians or Israelis side in the conflict. This is a radical departure from U.S. foreign policy, which demonizes Palestinian leadership as either participating in, or enabling terrorism, while portraying Israeli leaders as heroically resisting a siege initiated by neighboring Arabs and Muslims.

***Lebanon Links***

1NC – Lebanon Link (B) Link – Plan makes Bush look successful at promoting democracy globally. Abdul-Hussain 2/27 [Writer, Al-Arabiya News Chanel, http://www.alarabiya.net/views/2008/02/27/46203.html] Lebanon, by itself, is not usually an issue of interest to the US or its leaders. The country only took on added importance when used as a demonstration of Bush's success in spreading democracy to the Middle East, an idea which is fading away in Washington. From the perspective of the Lebanese government and parliamentary majority, the Bush administration has been highly supportive of Lebanon. But there have been serious shortcomings. Bush's critics argue that his administration's biggest mistake occurred when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood up to defend extending Israel's war against Hizbullah in July 2006.

Democracy promotion is popular and a key issue in elections that will be publicized. Tures, '7 (Associate Poli Sci Prof -- LaGrange, Journal of American Studies, 41:3) A key feature of American foreign-policymaking has been the verbal promotion of democracy abroad by America’s leaders. One could say this practice has its recent origins in the second debate of the 1976 election, located in San Francisco. Here, Governor Jimmy Carter sought to contrast himself with Republican President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.2 Whereas Kissinger promoted policies that sought security, stability, and order, often the expense of ideals such as democracy, Carter called for America’s foreign policy to adopt a pro-democracy and pro-human rights attitude.3 In fact, in his inaugural address, Carter stated, I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values. These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our nation’s continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream.4 Subsequent Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush championed freedom in their critiques of communist governments or unfriendly tyrants.5 Democrat Bill Clinton, having accused his predecessor of ‘‘coddling dictators from Baghdad to Beijing, ’’ made democracy promotion a key plank of his foreign policy, in statements made by his national security adviser Anthony Lake.6 Continues Americans’ appetite for democracy promotion did not appear to wane after 11 September 2001 (see Figure 5). Even as critics worried that the USA Patriot Act would curtail civil liberties at home (and that the people would accept this), 70 percent of Americans said that the US should promote democracy worldwide. Only 23 percent thought this would be a bad idea.14 Perhaps policymakers have accepted these results and sought to incorporate them into their pronouncements and procedures.

2NC – Lebanon Link Spew We have 2 independent internal links – (a) Popularity – That’s the Lichtman evidence. The only way for McCain to win is if Bush get a popular foreign policy initiative implemented. Prefer its methodology – it is preferable to abstract formulas and political punditry – it has predicted all of the elections since 1948. Lichtman, ‘5 (Political Science Professor – American University, The Keys to the White House, p. 12-13) The Keys to the White House differ from the abstract formulas of the election modelers as well as the lively but anarchic approach of the commentators. Like the horse-race approach, the keys are dynamic--they recognize politics is a matter of real people and events that unfold over time. Like the academic models, the keys are conceptual--they provide a systematic guide to the electoral process. Also like these models, the Keys to the White House are diagnostic--they do not tell us explicitly why people vote the way they do. Unlike models, however the keys identify the concrete circumstances in which the electorate retains or rejects the party in power. The keys are driven by a dominant idea: that the American electorate is pragmatic: it responds to the broad-based performance of the party in power, not just the condition of the economy. Seven of the keys (5 through 11) gauge performance directly, and four more (political keys 1 through 4) reflect executive performance indirectly. Not a single key directly measures ideology, issue positions, voters' party identification, or campaign strategy or tactics. Although these and other factors may have some influence on the decisions of individuals voters, none of them improves the ability of the keys to discriminate between winning and losing candidates, and the inclusion of several--ideology (centrism) and party identification, for example--diminishes the predictive power of the system. In picking winners and losers, the keys differ from conventional models that try to estimate each candidate's share of the popular vote. Although there is a roguh correlation between the number of keys turned against the party in power and its percentage of the popular vote, the final verdict depends only on the simple, unweighted total of negative keys (the use of weighted keys does not improve the ability of the system to distinguish between incumbent and challenging-party victories). A threshold of six negative keys separates the losers from the winners of the popular vote without regard to their percentages. Although this either/or approach involves some loss of information, it achieves a stability of results that eludes more detailed analyses. The keys are able to predict the outcomes of close elections that the percentage models miss because the differences between the candidates' shares of the vote are well within the average error margins. The winners of all five elections decided by six or fewer points since 1948 (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1992) are missed by one or more of the percentage models published to date. Unlike the percentage models, which can be "right" -- within an arbitrary margin of error--even when they forecast a plurality for the second-place finisher, predictions made by the keys are always either right or wrong.

(b) Democracy Promotion Key – Historically it’s been a key issue in elections and allows competitors to paint the opposing party as immoral and against American values. That’s Tures. Independently, Lebanon is an important issue in the election. Kseibati, 3-17 (http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/OPED/03-2008/Article-20080317-bd5835a9-c0a8-10ed-017c43243aaac469/story.html) Prior to the post-Arab Summit period during which it is feared the situation in Lebanon could get out

of control, and regardless of whether there is a link between Lebanon's attendance or absence at the summit on the one hand and the loss of control on the other, Lebanon has already become an issue in the American presidential elections….

Winning these internal links also mean there is only risk of a link – Our link evidence is uni-directional. Only BROADLY popular policies help McCain and our evidence doesn’t say unpopular foreign policies hurt him.

2NC – Lebanon Link Spew Also – we have a shit-ton of links: -- Popularity – That’s the 1NC Link – Bush will spin the plan as a major win in his effort to promote democracy globally. That’s Abdul-Hussein. Democracy promotion is supported by 70 percent of the public. That’s Tures. -- Primaries: Obama is going after Bush on lack of Lebanon support NowLebanon.Com 2/7 Democratic candidate for the US presidential elections Barak Obama stressed on supporting Lebanon against extremism and Syrian-Iranian interference in its internal affairs. He also stressed on the need to convene the Special Tribunal for Lebanon to try the assassins of ex-Premier Rafik Hariri. "The ongoing political crisis is resulting in the destabilization of Lebanon, which is an important country in the Middle East. The US cannot watch while Lebanon's fresh democracy is about to collapse," Obama said. "Washington musts rectify the wrong policy of President George Bush in Lebanon and resort to an efficient and permanent diplomacy, rather than empty slogans," he added. He also said that the US must cooperate with its European and Arab allies to sponsor an inter-Lebanese consensus on a stable and democratic Lebanon. Obama accused the administration of ignoring Lebanon during Bush's first term and said that the assassination of Hariri caught his attention. "Only then did the US administration take the appropriate steps, pressure the Syrian regime to end its hostile presence in Lebanon, and call on the international community to identify and punish those responsible for this crime," Obama said. He also called for the implementation of Security Council resolutions related to Lebanon, including Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah to give up its weapons. "Syria and Iran are still violating this resolution," Obama said. "We must keep supporting the democratically-elected government of PM Fouad Siniora, strengthening the Lebanese army and insisting on the disarmament of Hezbollah before it leads Lebanon into another unnecessary war," Obama said.

-- Obama’s anti-Bush credentials are key to distinguishing himself from Hillary. AP Online, 11-27-7 Democrat Barack Obama, confronting claims that he's light on foreign policy, surrounded himself Tuesday with heavyweights who said his differences with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and others are just what the country needs: A new leader willing to talk with America's enemies and become a better friend to struggling nations. Obama, closing the three-hour policy forum, said a president should be unafraid to meet with tyrants, and must restore the nation's moral authority by ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay's military prison and helping fight global poverty and AIDS. "Our ability to lead has been set back by our bluster and our refusal to talk to nations we don't like," the Illinois senator said. "Our security and standing have suffered because of the misguided war in Iraq that should have never been authorized." Obama, who was elected to the Senate in 2004, never mentioned Clinton, a New York senator and the Democratic front-runner in national polls. But Obama underscored some of his main criticisms of her, recalling how he opposed from the outset a war that she voted to authorize and repeatedly calling for greater openness in setting policy. In perhaps another veiled reference to Clinton's claims of deep experience in Washington, Obama said of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "Their experience has not led to good judgment." Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, another top Democratic contender, also

Obama has portrayed himself as more willing than Clinton to veer sharply from Bush administration policies on many fronts. Foreign affairs may pose his biggest challenge, voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. For months,

however, as the New York senator and former first lady has called him naive and irresponsible. Obama has fired back, saying Clinton is too secretive and too wedded to existing or familiar ways of handling domestic and diplomatic matters. In this seaport town Tuesday, he was embraced by several foreign policy advisers, including three appointees from President Bill Clinton's administration: former national security adviser Tony Lake, former Navy secretary Richard Danzig and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.

Only Obama can beat McCain. Wexler, '8 (Congressmen -- Florida, http://www.pjvoice.com/v33/33303wexler.aspx) No question: it is Sen. Obama who will be our strongest candidate. He is very attractive to

independent voters and to moderate Republicans. He will get a crossover vote. While he disagrees with conservatives, he does so civilly. He will unite the Democrats and he’s going to create a bigger tent for us, including independents and Republicans, and he’s going to take that big tent into office, and that’s how we’re going to do things like universal health care and improve education and address global climate change – with a consensus of people that the Democratic Party has not been able to create in a very long time. That’s why I’m so excited about his candidacy.

And, of course, the last half-dozen polls have shown that Sen. Obama runs anywhere from five to eight points better than does Sen. Clinton in a race again Sen. McCain.

***Impact Debate***

***Bush Doctrine***

2NC – Bush Doctrine Impact -- McCain victory restarts the Bush doctrine and he will strike Iran. Broder, '7 (Staff, June 7, Washington Post) The leading Republicans, for their part, very clearly see the risks of failing militarily in Iraq but have offered no ideas other than a continuation of the Bush policies that have lost most of their domestic support. Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney all endorse what is in effect the status quo -- even when asked to suggest a possible alternative or fallback. None of them appears to have heard of the Iraq Study Group suggestions. Meantime, they see nothing wrong with raising the possibility of using a nuclear weapon -- for the first time in more than six decades -- as a bargaining tool in dealing with the ticklish situation in Iran. It is hard to imagine a policy more likely to shift international pressure away from sanctions on Iran and against the United States than talk of using the nuclear weapons in our arsenal against targets in that part of the world. Sure, they say nukes would be a last resort, but they seem remarkably sanguine about brandishing them.

Bush doctrine causes Indo-Pak war and a Taiwanese invasion. Fetzer, 02 (www.assassinationscience.com/domination.pdf) A policy of preemption is not only morally corrupt but inherently destabilizing. As I observed in Reader Weekly (19 September 2002), embracing first strikes encourages attacks upon your enemy for perceived threats, real or imagined. Unlike our policies of the past, according to which the US would attack you only if you attacked us first, this new approach functions as an incentive to use 'em or lose 'em. It will inevitably encourage Pakistan to attack India, China to attack Taiwan, North Korea its southern neighbor, and--most conspicuously--Iraq to attack US forces in the Middle East.

Indo/Pak war causes extinction. Fai, 01 (Executive Director of the Washington-based Kashmiri American Council. http://pakistanlink.com/Letters/2001/July/13/05.html ) The most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary. This apocalyptic vision is no idiosyncratic view. The Director of Central Intelligence, the Department of Defense, and world experts generally place Kashmir at the peak of their nuclear worries. Both India and Pakistan are racing like thoroughbreds to bolster their nuclear arsenals and advanced delivery vehicles. Their defense budgets are climbing despite widespread misery amongst their populations. Neither country has initialed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or indicated an inclination to ratify an impending Fissile Material/Cut-off Convention.

And so does a Taiwanese war. Johnson, 01 (The Nation. 5-14) China is another matter. No sane figure in the Pentagon wants a war with China, and all serious US militarists know that China's minuscule nuclear capacity is not offensive but a deterrent against the overwhelming US power arrayed against it (twenty archaic Chinese warheads versus more than 7,000 US warheads). Taiwan, whose status constitutes

the still incomplete last act of the Chinese civil war, remains the most dangerous place on earth. Much as the 1914 assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo led to a war that no one wanted, a misstep in Taiwan by any side could bring the United States and China into a conflict that neither wants. Such a war would bankrupt the United States, deeply divide Japan and probably end in a Chinese victory, given that China is the world's most populous country and would be defending itself against a foreign aggressor. More seriously, it could easily escalate into a nuclear holocaust. However, given the nationalistic challenge to China's sovereignty of any Taiwanese attempt to declare its independence formally, forward-deployed US forces on China's borders have virtually no deterrent effect.

2NC – McCain = Every Scenario for War -- McCain will cause multiple scenarios for war – name a scenario and McCain will cause it. Dreyfuss 3-6-08 (Journalist for the Nation, http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080306/cm_thenation/20080324dreyfuss) If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he

You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe. And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.

entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me." But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of]

McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of radical Islamic extremism,"

"League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from

the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century. "We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me." If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy. First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops. This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation. But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does." The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do

Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people."

According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican

"They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain school of foreign policy.

well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat." McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At

first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced,

since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy

I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist. "We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from toward Putin's Russia. "

the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO

"McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia." Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in provocative, to say the least.

Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values,"

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word." Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones

For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax. More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism."

Internal – McCain = Bush Doctrine -- McCain will continue the Bush doctrine. Kurlantzick, '6 (New Republic, Feb 13) And then there is McCain, probably the best chance for believers in the 2002 National Security Strategy to keep their vision alive. Ironically, despite his past clashes with the Bush court, McCain is probably the truest heir to Bush's foreign policy doctrine. Unlike Rice, McCain does not blend realism and transformationalism; his democratizing instincts run deep. In the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, it was McCain who talked of democratization and preemption, focusing on the idea of "rogue-state rollback." In a recent speech at AEI, it was McCain who not only refused the idea of an exit strategy for Iraq, but also called for at least 10,000 more troops on the ground. "The promotion of democracy has been central to McCain, going back a decade. I'd be surprised if he downplayed it in any way," says one Republican strategist. McCain hews closer to Bush in other ways as well. Unlike the nationalists or even Brownback, McCain is as pure a free trader as the president. Indeed, McCain has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the Cato Institute, topping even Frist, and he was an advocate of nafta and a skeptic of offshore tax breaks. What's more, unlike Rice, McCain tends to be more skeptical of international institutions and multilateralism. He has vociferously criticized the United Nations: In the '90s, McCain supported paying dues to the United Nations only after significant reforms, and he voted against the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. More recently, McCain prodded the White House to take an extremely tough stance on Iran. And, unlike Brownback, he tends to be skeptical of religious and moralist foreign policy that emphasizes spiritual issues abroad, especially when it focuses on regions of the world not germane to core U.S. interests.

***Tax Cuts***

2NC – Tax Cuts Scenario -- McCain will make Bush tax cuts permanent Blitzer 3-13-08 Wolf http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/14/blitzer-echoes-of-1992/ Despite McCain’s opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, they will stress that he will follow the Bush status quo. Those Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire in 2010, but McCain now vows to make those tax cuts permanent. He says to do otherwise would see an increase in taxes – this at a time when the nation fears recession. He has pledged not to increase taxes

That crushes the economy. Zakaria, '5 (Newsweek Columnist, 9-26, Newsweek) This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts:in fact, he expanded them:and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare. Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts. People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq. Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created. The only period:other than the current one:when the United States avoided hard choices was Vietnam: spending increased on all fronts. The results eventually were deficits, high interest rates and low growth:stagflation.

Nuc war. Mead, ‘92 (CFR Senior Fellow, NPQ, Summer, Pg. 30) What if the global economy stagnates, or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia. China. India-these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than German and Japan did in the 1930's.

***Iraq***

2NC – A2 Iraq Withdrawal -- No internal – (a) Obama won’t withdraw. Shrink Wrapped, 2-7 (Lexis) Any president who simply withdrew forces from Iraq without a political settlement would find himself or herself in an enormously difficult position. Indeed, such a president would find himself or herself in a politically untenable position. The consequences of a withdrawal are as substantial as the consequences of remaining. The decline in violence and the emergence of some semblance of a political process tilts the politics of decision-making toward a phased withdrawal based on improvements on the ground and away from a phased withdrawal based on the premise that the situation on the ground will not improve. Therefore, even assuming Obama wins the nomination and the presidency, the likelihood of a rapid, unilateral withdrawal is minimal. The political cost of the consequences would be too high, and he wouldnt be able to afford it.In response to this post, Dinocrat poses a Qu suppose Obama were elected, and it was partially on the strength of his seemingly firm commitment to withdraw from Iraq what would happen to his popularity and his standing among his Democratic base if he failed to deliver on his apparently clear promise, assuming the Stratfor analysis is correct?I agree that it would be problematic for Obama to disappoint his Democratic base, though I also suspect that the anti-war fever is primarily a cause and a symptom of BDS. Once George Bush is no longer identified with Iraq, the drop in casualties will be accompanied by a drop in interest in immediate withdrawal. Like JFK discovering the "missile gap" didn't really exist once he was elected President in 1960, I do not think it unlikely that if Obama wants to manage Iraq as per George Friedman's suggestions, he will have no trouble enlisting the MSM in his "discovery" that circumstances in Iraq, post election, require keeping our troops there a bit longer than he previously thought. The issue, as long a casualties remain low, will disappear at that point.

(b) Next president won’t impact Iraq. Arkin, 2-20 (National Security Writer, Washington Post, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2008/02/pause_in_iraq_try_permanent_ba.html?nav=rs s_blog) Regardless of who is elected, in the coming year U.S. combat forces in Iraq will undoubtedly continue to contract to a fewer number of combat brigades and special operations forces focused on counterterrorism and the mission of continuing to train and mentor the Iraqi Army and police forces. Much of the "war" that is already being fought is being supported from Kuwait and other locations, and the ongoing shifts seem to point to an intent to increasingly pull additional functions and people out of harm's way. Of course they will not be out of harm's way at all, because a permanent American military presence in the region brings with it its own dangers and provocations. But most important what it brings for the next president is a fait accompli: a pause that facilitates a drawdown that begins to look a lot like a continuation of the same military and strategic policy, even at a time when there is broad questioning as to whether this is the most effective way to fight "terrorism."

No Withdrawal -- Won’t withdraw. Larner 3-6-08 Jesse http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-larner/john-mccains-surge-pro_b_90326.html Bush's failure to foresee this very foreseeable reaction to what was (among other things) a liberation, and his deeply ignorant reliance on the fairy tale that "the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth," confers on him and on the American people certain obligations towards the people of Iraq. One of these is not to abandon them to the most savage and atavistic impulses of their countrymen; and, in so doing, hand al-Qaeda a very important victory (yes, I know we're not fighting against bin Laden in Iraq, but he would nonetheless claim a US withdrawal as a triumph for Islam.) I believe that, no matter what they say now, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do understand this reality. We are going to be in Iraq for a while yet, no matter who wins the presidency.

***Health Care***

2NC – Health Care Impact -- Clinton wants universal health care – Obama doesn’t. Leonhardt, 1-2 (Columnist, http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/02/business/policies.php) Perhaps you have heard that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have come up with different health care plans. Hers would require every American to have health insurance. His would not.

UHC undermines vital medical breakthroughs and research. Smith, 01 (Penn State Student, Dec 21, http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=1296) Why should the rest of us, through the inevitable increase in taxes, be forced to provide heath care for those that are not productive and cannot afford it? America has the best health care system in the world precisely because free-market capitalistic forces are able to work to provide the best health care at the lowest cost. Without "excessive profits" of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, there would be no funding for vital research. It is rather ironic that in other countries that have socialized national health care, when an important leader of that country is critically ill, he is rushed to America for treatment or American-trained doctors are rushed to him. It is a testament to the fact that health care under a socialized system would do nothing but create increasingly substandard health care at increasing costs.

Medical research is key to biotech. More, 2k (Director – Entropy Institute, http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0106.html?printable=10 My assessment of the costs of relinquishment differ from Joy's for another reason. Billions of people continue to suffer illness, damage, starvation, and all the plethora of woes humanity has had to endure through the ages. The emerging technologies of genetic engineering, molecular nanotechnology, and biological-technological interfaces offer solutions to these problems. Joy would stop progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and related fields. Too bad for those now regaining hearing and sight thanks to implants. Too bad for the billions who will continue to die of numerous diseases that could be dispatched through genetic and nanotechnological solutions. I cannot reconcile the deliberate indulgence of continued suffering with any plausible ethical perspective. Like Joy, I too worry about the extinction of human beings. I see it happening everyday, one by one. We call this serial extinction of humanity "aging and death". Because aging and death have always been with us and have seemed inevitable, we often rationalize this serial extinction as natural and even desirable. We cry out against the sudden death of large numbers of humans. But, unless it touches someone close, we rarely concern ourselves with the drip, drip, drip of individual lives decaying and disintegrating into nothingness. Some day, not too far in the future, people will look back on our complacency and rationalizations with horror and disgust. They will wonder why people gathered in crowds to protest genetic modification of crops yet never demonstrated in favor of accelerating anti-aging research. Holding back from developing the technologies targeted by Joy will not only shift power into the hands of the destroyers, it will mean an unforgivable lassitude and complicity in the face of entropy and death.

***Pakistan***

A2 – Pakistan Attack -- No attack and Obama's statements are conditional. Media Matters, 2-20 (http://mediamatters.org/items/200802200003?f=h_latest) In their coverage of the February 19 primary elections, both The Wall Street Journal and washingtonpost.com's The Trail quoted Sen. John McCain's false assertion that Sen. Barack Obama "once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan." The Wall Street Journal's Jackie Calmes wrote in a February 20 article that McCain "asked whether the next president will have the experience to counter the world's threats" and quoted McCain claiming that Obama "once suggested bombing our ally Pakistan." Similarly, in a February 19 post on the washingtonpost.com blog The Trail, staff writer Glenn Kessler wrote that "McCain asked: 'Will the next president have the experience? Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate' who, he said, threatened to bomb Pakistan and would sit down with rogue dictators?" Kessler then added that "[w]hile McCain did not mention Obama, both referenced statements that [sic] have caused Obama grief in the primaries." However, neither

Calmes nor Kessler reported Obama's actual comments about Pakistan, which McCain misrepresented: In an August 1, 2007, foreign policy speech, Obama stated: "If we have actionable intelligence about highvalue terrorist targets and [Pakistani] President [Pervez] Musharraf won't act, we will." Contrary to McCain's assertion, Obama did not say he would take action against Pakistan -- he made any action against "high-value terrorist targets" inside Pakistan conditional -- and he did not specify what the action would be.

-- He only said we would attack if Pakistan doesn't cooperate. Katulis, 1-18 (Senior Fellow -- Center for American Progress, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-opdustup18jan18,0,4177150.story?coll=la-home-commentary) The best path forward, of course, is to work with Pakistani governing institutions to boost their capacity to conduct these operations. If the Pakistani government is willing and able, so much the better. One of Sen. Obama's main points was that the United States would mount a unilateral operation if and only if the Pakistani government can't or won't mount such an operation.

-- Attacks now without Pakistani permission. Cohen, 2-20 (Democracy Arsenal, http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/02/mccains-pakista.html) In John McCain's victory speech this evening he made a rather startling attack on Barack Obama accusing him of "confused leadership" and "inexperience" because he "once suggested bombing our ally Pakistan." What's really stunning about this rhetorical broadside is that the Washington Post revealed today this is precisely what the Bush Administration did last month. In a predawn attack on January 29th a Predator aircraft killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant - and it did so without the cooperation and permission of the Pakistani government. Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. Is John McCain going to criticize the Bush Administration for "bombing Pakistan?" Something tells me that ain't going to happen. In fact, this type of limited attack, based on actionable intelligence is exactly what Obama suggested in a speech last Fall.

-- Attacks solve terrorism and no coup. Katulis, 1-18 (Senior Fellow -- Center for American Progress, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-opdustup18jan18,0,4177150.story?coll=la-home-commentary)

The Pakistani government's inability to control many parts of its territory is a key part of the problem. The failure to capture top Al Qaeda leadership is a result either of a lack of capacity or a lack of desire on the part of Pakistani authorities — or some combination. As long as the Pakistani government does not deal with this problem, the United States and other countries have a responsibility to address this threat.

***Free Trade/Protectionism***

2NC – A2 Protectionism Turn -- No protectionist upswing. Rose, 1-31 (Managing Editor -- Foreign Affairs, Federal News Service) I mean, the Democrats' protectionist bent, we always hear about this; it never comes through in practice, because everybody knows populist demagoguery is idiotic as policy and so it won't actually get enacted. So it just means that you'll pursue a generalized free-trade agenda sub-rosa rather than more overtly. You won't go with brand-new free-trade pacts, you'll just do the same kind of thing in sort of less visible ways. So I don't buy the idea that there is going to be this great protectionist or populist swing on the Democratic side, no matter who would have gotten in.

***Obama Better Than Clinton***

Obama Beats McCain -- Only Obama can defeat McCain – Hilary is a big loser. Allen, 2-18 (http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bruce_al_080217_why_it_has_to_be_oba.htm) This morning I sat through a disheartening performance of Hillary Clinton supporter and Bill Clinton enabler, Lanny Davis, angrily and aggressively sliming Barack Obama on CNNs’ Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. I was too depressed to take notes and don’t remember exactly what he said beyond repeating several times the hilarious accusation that Obama is trying to change the rules mid-game for urging superdelegates to vote with their states or Congressional districts (Florida and Michigan, anyone?). Overall, though, it might as well have been that Barack Obama is a shallow, slick talkin’, no good, lyin’, cheatin’, no account political featherweight.(I have not written in months because I have been so disgusted and wilted by our political situation of late. But now I have been inspired, finally, by presidential candidates with a chance to win. First, John Edwards’ populist position and then surprising myself by being deeply moved by Barack Obama’s powerful message of hope, new ways, and unity coupled with his soaring and inspiring descriptions of it. So my combination of revulsion and inspiration has spurred me to write again.)One of the most incomprehensible facets of our endangered democracy is this: our economy is tanking rapidly and severely; we remain stuck in a destructive, highly unpopular war, while our risk of a terrorist attack is rising even according to the Bush Administration; the President is broadly and deeply disliked; we are dangerously in debt to our main rival as a nation and our currency is about to go down the tubes taking us with it at a time when most of the world reviles us; we are foolishly dependent on debt, domestically and individually; and just about everyone thinks our nation is headed in the wrong direction.Yet, the party that brought us to this perilous and embarrassing place has a good chance to win the presidency again.Right now, today, one of the main reasons Republicans might win can be summed up in two words: Hillary Clinton. OK, calm down now and let me explain. I respect Clinton and think she would make a good president. She is smart, focused and very talented. She is certainly far better than any Republican. I also think at heart she is more progressive than she has behaved recently.BUT. SHE. CANNOT. WIN. And,OBAMA WILL BE MUCH BETTER FOR THE COUNTY RIGHT NOW.More on the various reasons Obama will be better for the country than Clinton in part 2.Here is why Clinton cannot win from the known and obvious to the known and more sophisticated reasons:Clinton cannot win because she is a uniter and not an exciter.Clinton will absolutely unite and seriously motivate the currently divided and dispirited hard-core conservative Republican base around one of their most effective and powerful emotions, hatred, and perhaps their favorite species thereof: all things Clinton. The important question here is not whether these voters would vote for Obama – highly doubtful – or even whether they would stay home on election day, diminishing McCain votes – more likely, but likely not determinative. No, the main question is whether these rabid conservatives will stay home during election season or get out and work their butts off to turn out the vote for McCain (read against Clinton). They will literally be crazed by the thought of President Hillary and First Man Bill (effectively “Hillary’s Cheney”) in the White House and on their TVs and radios for four to eight years. They will churn themselves into a hurricane of political action to avoid that.On the other side, Hillary does not excite the hard-core progressive Democratic base as a countering force, and many are so offended by her Iraq and Iran votes and stances that they downright detest and oppose her. With an uninspiring Clinton against the relatively inoffensive (for a Republican) McCain, I believe the progressive base that worked so hard to turn out votes in 2006 will put out a lackluster effort in election season and fail to turn out the votes needed to win. Such a contest would also fail to inspire independents one way or the other, subjecting Clinton to losing them for the reasons below. Clinton cannot win due to Clintonian attack politics.

Obama Beats McCain -- If Hilary wins -- McCain wins. Warren, 3-10 (Ottawa Sun Columnist, Windsor Star) Given a choice not between a good and an evil, but rather only between two evils, I'm for choosing the lesser one. This has been my excuse for praying that Hillary Clinton would somehow win the presidential nomination of the U.S. Democrat Party. That accomplished, I could then turn my prayers to the benefit of John McCain, in the hope he would defeat Ms. Clinton in November. As a bonus, for a foreigner who is conservative, and thus tends to favour the Popular Party in Spain, and the Republicans in the United States, I think Ms. Clinton is the more defeatable Democrat candidate; and I am supported by the polls in that. But I don't trust polling of hypothetical adversaries, eight months in advance of an election, and will continue to ride on gut feelings. From this misty distance, I see no reason why the Democrats, given that they are not only Democrats, but Democrats at the current stage of political degeneration, will not choose Barack Obama as the candidate more likely to unite them. He has captured the hearts of a large constituency of very naïve people, together with the glitter of "identity politics." A victory for Ms. Clinton would make all those people sad, and persuade many of them not to vote in the general election. Mr. McCain has more cross-party appeal than Ms. Clinton, thanks to his somewhat maverick record in the Senate. And the Nader factor is worth toting in, too. Ralph Nader is, from a Republican view, an ideal third-party candidate, because he subtracts votes almost exclusively from establishment Democrats. Which makes him, by my assessment, a spoiler for Ms. Clinton, but less a spoiler for Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama emerged, late last fall, when he suddenly caught fire rhetorically. Prior to that, he had been a rather bland speaker with nothing substantial to say. His Senate track record was similarly undistinguished: no sign of leadership on any question of policy. His attraction was novelty and a specious charm. But without acquiring any discernible policy interests, he suddenly mastered the alchemist's art of making empty phrases turn golden when touched by sparkle words like "hope" and "believe," and by communicating to the inexperienced young the notion that "change" can happen by the Peter Pan magic of everyone wishing it simultaneously. As David Brooks has pointed out, Mr. Obama is master of the minds of those whose consciousness is invested in Facebook and YouTube and open-source software. Perhaps he should also have mentioned Harry Potter. In the course of this transformation, Mr. Obama became the photogenic media darling, replacing Ms. Clinton in that role so completely that the media now turn on her, and on her superannuated husband, whenever they dare suggest that Mr. Obama has no clothes. We must assume that in a race between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, the media commitment to the former will be total, and that the latter will be horsewhipped for any word of criticism.

Clinton Won’t Solve Iran -- Hillary victory won’t solve the case – Only Obama victory can guarantee diplomacy with Iran. Falk, '8 (Princeton Ilaw Professor, http://www.todayszaman.com/tzweb/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=134564&bolum=109) . She remains unwilling to admit she had been wrong when she favored the war and voted to support it and more importantly, her main foreign policy advisors are "liberal hawks" who backed the Iraq War at the outset and are generally disposed to the use of military force. Clinton now argues that on the basis of what she knew in 2003, support of the war was the right move to make then, but given the changed circumstances of 2007 and the irreversible incompetence of the occupation, withdrawal seems right now. I think Obama's clarity on Iraq, plus advisors that are less enamored of military solutions and rather emphasize multilateralism, the United Nations and international law, does make a difference both in the primary campaign and subsequently. Obama seems less likely to choose a military option when confronted with a hostile regime in the Muslim world. He has strongly endorsed a creative approach to diplomacy, offering to meet with hostile leaders in the Middle East, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Clinton sharply criticized him for this, seeming to want to do diplomacy in the old way by viewing a meeting of an American president with a foreign leader as of enormous benefit to the latter and a sign of American weakness -- and Obama's inexperience. Clinton proposing relying on power, status and threat rather than on the "soft power" options of discussion, mutuality and accommodation. Obama seems much more aware that uses of American military power to achieve "regime change" rarely, if ever, produce success. Only Obama of the candidates on either side seems to have this understanding. That this principal lesson of America's defeat in Vietnam remains unlearned by most influential Americans is sad but true, as is evident from the debate in the US Congress and elsewhere about Iraq policy. The failure to heed this same lesson led to the Soviet defeat during the 1980s in Afghanistan, which in turn contributed to the implosion of the Soviet state. Unless this lesson is learned by American leaders, the prospect of more Vietnams and more Iraqs remains high.

***2NC CP Out Turns***

2NC CP The USFG should not ____insert scenario____. INSERT 2NC CP’s Good (It’s in the Theory File)