Matters of Opinion

The Op-Ed columnists in today's Buffalo News offer three different takes on presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain:
* Charles Krauthammer finds Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insufficiently grateful for the success of "Bush's war." Or, as I would interpret what Krauthammer is saying, insufficiently imperial in their thinking. Maliki’s endorsement left the McCain campaign and the Bush administration deeply discomfited. They underestimated Maliki’s sophistication and cunning.
* Trudy Rubin says Obama is too optimistic about how fast U.S. troops can leave Iraq, while McCain doesn't grasp the need to shift the focus back to Afghanistan: So who’s more on track? Obama is right on regional strategy, but shaky on how to implement it. McCain seems out of touch with shifting realities, and too linked to Bush visions of reshaping the region. That gives an edge to the candidate of change.
* Michael Gerson writes that the quiet Cindy McCain doesn't get the credit she deserves for bravely helping Doctors Without Borders with its dangerous relief work in Rwanda. The election of her husband would also bring to the White House an adventurous, traveled, intriguingly fearless first lady. Over the years, McCain has brought medical services to a Sandinista stronghold following Nicaragua’s civil war; set up a mobile hospital near Kuwait City while the oil wells still burned from the first Gulf War; helped in Bangladesh following a cyclone.

Elsewhere:
* Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson takes back what she said on TV about how it might have been bad domestic politics for Obama to draw such a huge crowd for his speech in Berlin: Then I got a hold of myself. For eight years, the country has accommodated itself to a president the rest of the world reviles. Surely this hasn't become a requirement for the office. The Democrats are nominating someone the Earth's 6.7 billion inhabitants find likable. That's a bad thing?
* In the Boston Globe, egghead Lawrence Korb explains why Bush and al-Maliki see the world differently: It is increasingly obvious that Iraqi political leaders are calling the shots when it comes to a future role for the United States, and that President Bush has not learned anything about Iraq in the last five years.
* The Appeal-Democrat in Marysville, Calif., wants out ASAP: It might take as long as the 16 months Democratic nominee Barack Obama has predicted it will take if he is elected. But it should begin quickly. Tomorrow would not be too soon.
* In the Pensacola's News-Journal, Morning Joe Scarborough worries that Obama will be as ideologically rigid in getting out of Iraq as Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were bureaucratically inept in getting in.

--George Pyle/Editorial Writer
[Photos: Top, McCain in an Ohio supermarket; Above, Obama in Berlin; both AP]