Senator John McCain said on Monday that he needed to convince the American people that the troop escalation in Iraq was working and that US casualties there would continue to decline. If he did not, he said, "I lose" the election.
"Is there any doubt?" McCain said to reporters on his campaign bus.
But then he pulled back from his blunt assessment. "Let me not put it that stark," he said, explaining that he believed people would judge his candidacy on his ability to handle the economy, which has emerged as a pre-eminent voter concern, as well as on national security.
Nevertheless, McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made clear that he believed his prospects in November would rest in large measure on the way the situation in Iraq played out.
"If I may, I'd like to retract `I'll lose,"' he said. "But I don't think there's any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me."
McCain said he believed opinion was shifting to his point of view, referring to a recent USA Today poll that, he said, showed that "now the majority of Americans believe the surge is succeeding."
The USA Today/Gallup poll he was apparently referring to, however, found that not a majority, but 43 percent of Americans believed the troop increase was "making the situation there better," an increase from 22 percent last July.
The poll, conducted between Feb. 8 and Feb. 10, also underscored just how unpopular the war continues to be, with 60 percent saying it was a mistake.
Yet the new dynamic in Iraq -- with US casualties plummeting and violence in Baghdad falling to 2005 levels -- has altered the political landscape for McCain since last summer, when US troop deaths spiked and his candidacy ran aground.
McCain has, of course, staked his candidacy on his support for US President George W. Bush's escalation strategy, which was unveiled early last year and resulted in more than 30,000 additional troops getting deployed to Iraq.
When McCain's campaign stalled, he set about reviving it with a "no surrender" tour meant to identify him even more closely with the strategy.
He invariably cites his early call for assigning more troops to Iraq as evidence of his ability to handle what he calls the "transcendent challenge" facing the country in the form of radical, violent Islam.
McCain has continued to paint a far rosier picture than the Democratic candidates, senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, about military progress in Iraq, as well as political gains.
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