McCain Campaign Cites Bush's National Security Weaknesses

With President Bush's popularity near record lows, Sen. John McCain is trying hard to distance himself from the unpopular man in the White House, and, increasingly, this effort extends to the realm of national security.

John Lehman, one of McCain's national security advisers and secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, draws attention to Bush's pre-White House lack of national security experiences, while pointing out that McCain has been involved in national security issues since his days as a young Navy aviator.

"McCain has felt very strongly that because of his lack of international experience and exposure to these people and these issues, President Bush never really got it about how to deal with NATO and other longtime friends," Lehman says. "Senator McCain's whole approach is going to be much more international. That doesn't mean he is going to let diplomacy paralyze American politics, but he knows how to make international alliance diplomacy work, and that's a huge difference from the Bush administration."

McCain has several high-profile disagreements with the Bush administration on issues such as climate change and the treatment of people detained as suspected terrorists. McCain, for instance, has repeatedly called for the U.S. military-run prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed.

Still, even when it comes to terrorism, arguably Bush's strongest suit, Lehman takes pains to criticize the Bush administration for "talking about 'the war on terror' as if terror was the root cause." He adds, "It would be like Franklin D. Roosevelt saying we were engaged in a war against kamikazes."

"The president doesn't get it, so there is no coherence or integration to their overall policy," Lehman says, citing as an example Bush's reluctance to pressure Saudi Arabia. "The administration has been blind to the role that the Saudi government and its Ministry of Religious Affairs has played in sowing the seeds of terror with its extremist missionary work around the world, creating all these mosques and schools that are preaching this hatred."

But Obama's advisers certainly aren't inclined to give McCain a pass. They have been making the case that many of McCain's positions are close to Bush's, including on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. "I don't know how you press the reset button with our allies and partners around the world when you are committing to intensifying the policies and approaches they have found so difficult to digest under President Bush, whether you are talking about staying indefinitely in Iraq or kicking Russia out of the G-8," says Susan Rice, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, referring to McCain's interest in expelling Russia from the Group of 8 industrialized nations as a protest for its recent undemocratic moves.

—Kevin Whitelaw