The first day of campaigning after the conventions suggested the contours of the two months ahead: the Obama campaign will use the deteriorating economy to try to link Senator McCain to President Bush’s economic policies, and Gov. Palin will be deployed to rally the Republican base as the main weapon against Senator Obama.
On paper, Pakistan’s president is a ceremonial head of state, but the post, like the presidential palace Mr Zardari is likely to inherit, has undergone a vast expansion. He will have his finger on the nuclear button, and will possess the authority to fire and appoint the all-important army chief and to summarily dismiss the government.
It would be easy to be confused about which national convention was really the gathering of the opposition. As Senator John McCain accepted the Republican nomination for president, he and his supporters sounded the call of insurgents seeking to topple the establishment, even though their party heads the establishment.
With his speech, Senator McCain laid out the broad outlines of his general election campaign. He sought to move from a convention marked by an intense effort to reassure the party base to an appeal to a broader general election audience that polling suggests has turned sharply on Republicans and President Bush.
The difficulty for the Republicans in talking about change and reform and acting like insurgents is that they have been running Washington — the White House and Congress — for most of the last eight years. As hard as he tries, Senator McCain cannot escape the burdensome shadow of President Bush because his policies offer no real change.
The aid — along with Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-profile visit to a region the Russians call “the near abroad” — is sure to inflame tensions further. Russia’s leaders have openly accused the United States of having provoked the conflict by arming the Georgia military while encouraging its aspirations to join the NATO alliance.
Georgia is already drawing up lists of options, including restoring the military to its prewar strength or making it a much larger force with more modern equipment, like air-defense systems, modern antiarmor rockets and night-vision devices. So far the Bush administration has avoided publicly discussing how best to rebuild the Georgian military.
Dmitri A. Medvedev speculated that the war in Georgia was intended to benefit one of the candidates in the American presidential election, almost certainly a reference to Senator John McCain. He said the United States armed Georgia and then “gave Mr. Saakashvili carte blanche for any actions, including military ones.”
Monday’s turnover of responsibility to the Iraqis for security in Anbar Province, once Iraq’s most violent territory, serves a purpose for each man. It allows President Bush to claim that five years after the invasion, Iraq is achieving stability, and it allows Senator McCain to argue that he was the first to come up with the winning strategy.
“John is an independent man who thinks for himself,” Mr. Bush said via satellite from the White House, in an eight-minute speech intended to reinforce the McCain campaign’s theme that the senator is no clone of the president. “He’s not afraid to tell you when he disagrees. Believe me, I know.”