As Obama’s conflation of NAFTA with “factories being moved to China” makes manifest, isolation has both foreign and domestic policy implications — which is why it strikes me as fertile ground when it comes to developing an overarching, coherent theme. It would, of course, needed to be converted from an anti-isolation negative to a positive like, say, global engagement. Instead of looking like an intellectual loose cannon, McCain could then start knitting his otherwise disparate commitments to things like greening up and Iraq, for example, together under a single ideological umbrella, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. Active engagement means more than talking to anybody who darkens your door, and only amateurs confuse diplomacy with polite conversation.

The messaging problem Ms. Rubin points out is something of a fractal proposition, repeating itself in micro versions of the whole. Recasting the campaign in isolationist terms, Iraq becomes a rhetorical starting point instead of a dead end. Has Obama actually ever been to Iraq? We know he hasn’t bothered to convene his subcommittee on Afghanistan. Do you really want to trust his judgment on whether or not we’re safer than we used to be? How would he know? He apparently doesn’t know enough about events on the ground in Iraq to recognize that deploying smaller cohorts of troops in isolated installations to emerge as needed is the same failed approach that precipitated the pre-surge Iraqi disaster in the first place. Obama needs to be pushed beyond his inward-looking, knee-jerk political positioning on the war. He needs to be challenged to demonstrate a working knowledge of our relationships with India, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, China, Brazil, eastern Europe, etc. How have election trends in Western Europe impacted his thinking? He needs to be asked about someone other than his grandmother in Africa.

Most of all, McCain then needs to make the case that foreign policy experience is critically important when it comes to addressing domestic concerns across the board. McCain knows that the factory isn’t coming back and he has got a plan for adapting to a changing world, seizing the opportunities it affords with American zeal, not trying to shut it out. Obama doesn’t know enough to realize that his head is buried in the sand and that his punitive, protectionist policy prescriptions have been tried before and failed. That’s where McCain’s age becomes a plus. Obama is too young to recognize just how old his politics are. McCain is not just more knowledgeable and realistic than Obama, his vision is larger and more ambitious. Obama will cut us off from our future. McCain will embrace it. Etc. etc. etc. When it comes to dreams, McCain is the one who is playing on a larger field.

I’d like to add a plug for Todd Jackson’s idea of bringing Iraqis to the American public’s attention — which, oddly enough, dovetails pretty well with the engagement theme. McCain’s sporadic efforts to distinguish himself from Bush on Iraq don’t even begin to address the current unpopularity of the war itself. McCain desperately needs to change the fixed narrative on the war, and change it dramatically. Democrats are down to one essential argument: Until we leave, Iraqis will never step up to bat for themselves. Why not combat such psychobabble by confronting them with real Iraqis, telling their stories, out front, on a stage here at home. Let the Democrats engage actual Iraqis for a change, instead of isolating themselves and their constituents from reality. Call it reality t.v., and it might actually resonate with an electorate that has begun to view the “global battle against radical Islam” as a tiresome, remote abstraction, if not the outright fear mongering of Democratic rhetoric. To paraphrase Mort Kondracke (sp?), all too many Americans think the great ideological battle of the 21st century is the one between Republicans and Democrats. McCain sees further…..

With apologies to Ms. Rubin for length, I wanted to add my 2¢ before this topic slipped off the page and didn’t have the time to make it shorter. You’ve put your finger on a critically important issue!

Besides coming up with some pithy slogans of his own, McCain needs to expose Obama’s “change” slogan as the meaningless and destructive commie agitprop it is. That’s exactly what Castro used to screech over the radio from his lair in the mountains during Cuba’s Devolution. Marxists have always loved that slogan. How many of their failed totalitarian regimes used the same stupid slogans that Obama is using on us? America is not an international sad-sack. It is the world’s premiere country–and everybody knows it, especially its detractors.

Having Iraqis praise the humanitarian mission of the Coalition is also a great idea. Leftists claim to love liberty and oppose injustice, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. Obama’s hypocrisy needs to be forcefully pointed out.

“Truth” is a good campaign slogan for McCain. Obama has no claim on it, and that’s for sure.

Then McCain could say: “Unleash Hell.”

McCain doesn’t need to force change or progress — America will naturally do that, because she is great — but he is there to guide her toward the best course. It’ll contrast with Obama’s “scrap it all and start over” mentality, which might resonate with lefty revolutionaries who see nothing good about the past decade, but Americans generally aren’t in for radical change. They see a need for an experienced hand (a “guide”) who can show the way to better times, but that doesn’t mean that our past has been worthless, or that the experience of our elders is useless (the implicit suggestion behind revolution).

Those who now pride themselves on resisting the Iraq War “from the beginning” must be made to face the responsibility for opposing the freedom of over twenty million people.

There’s no sense winning this war while losing the argument about the war.

We have known what Barack Obama’s message is for a year: change.

Obama’s message in the general election will be a version of: No More Shame, No to McCain, No to - More of the Same.

An apt riposte would be, McCain: Change to What Made America Great.

The predominant mood nowadays, a mood the Left encourages and capitalizes on, is that the US has gone bad, is in decline, has seen its best days, must make its peace with a world that it has wronged and disappointed. Thus Hillary and Obama, a woman and a black, softness and withdrawal, are viewed as ways to conciliate the world and again warm it to the US.

A McCain campaign needs to respond from the opposite direction. The Left is accepting the posture of the old, the feeble, the frightened and defeated.

The US is none of that. She is not near her end, not near the beginning of her end. She has barely begun. She has only just overcome the USSR. She is not about to be pulled down by the Old World that first sought to appease Nazis and then spend half a century yelling, Yankee Go Home and Better Red than Dead. The US did not give in to that and it won’t give in to anti-Americanism nowadays. It did not give in to German and Japanese fascism and it won’t give in to Islamist fascism that despises democracy, freedom of speech and religion and gender equality. The Democrats want to make peace with all that. McCain intends to defeat it.

The world loved America the winner. The more she accepts the pose of a loser the more she will be reviled.

McCain is not the oldest but the youngest of the candidates, because for him America is just starting, she has not yet begun to fulfill her potential, he knows, for America the best is yet to come.

Always remember, this man stood tall in hell; this election is as nothing compared to what he’s been through.

Or “unity.” That’s a good one, especially considering his “across the aisle” Voting record. Obama cant make an honest claim to be a unifier.

“Fidelity.” “Strength.” “Always ready.” “Forward.” There’s no shortage of pithy slogans.