PhotobucketIn this Friday’s edition of our weekly Schultz Report, political analyst David Schultz expresses surprise over the way media has covered Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony this week before Congress. “If you listen to what Petraeus said, the surge failed,” he says. “It essentially failed. In his testimony, he talked about a variety of factors that contributed to the downturn in violence in the last few months. He couldn’t isolate the surge as the cause for it. He talked about a whole bunch of agreements between warlords and religious sects in Iraq, but couldn’t commit [to saying] that the surge had worked, and second, couldn’t commit to saying we could do a draw-down now.  He was unprepared to say that either the surge worked or that we can see victory down the line. What it really suggested in many ways was that the temporary surge that McCain and the Bush administration [had supported] didn’t work.

“That should have been the headline in the media: Surge failed. But it didn’t play. It almost reminds me of when Oliver North testified before Congress back in the ’80s. He showed up with a chest of medals and everyone was  dazzled by his presence. I just wonder if the media was similarly dazzled by seeing this general, and [was] unwilling to dig beneath.”

We also discuss the looming Third District endorsing convention, where one-time dark horse Ashwin Madia appears to be on the verge of securing enough delegates to take the prize. “Terri Bonoff was way in the lead for a while as the presumptive DFL nominee,” Schultz notes. “Ashwin Madia came out of nowhere. The stories are that he is within about eight votes of getting the 60 percent necessary for the nomination. Bonoff appears to be nowhere near getting that.

“That will tell us a lot about what the race is going to look like this coming November. You have Erik Paulsen, who is very, very conservative — probably, I’ve argued, more conservative than the district is. And you have Bonoff and Madia, who each are trying to paint themselves as moderate Democrats, with Madia looking like somewhere between an Obama grassroots candidate and, as he describes himself, a McCain supporter in 2000. It’s a race that both the Democratic and Republican national committees have highlighted for putting a ton of money into.”

The Schultz Report: Petraeus talks to Congress, plus Minnesota’s Third District Congressional endorsement battle (14:32)


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