As Obama Surfs, McCain Owns Week

As the conflict in Georgia wears on, John McCain has seized every opportunity this week to showcase his foreign policy chops, notes Michael Falcone in the New York Times, all but positioning himself as a putative commander in chief. McCain boasted of his multiple visits to the region and even dispatched allies Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to Georgia—a far cry from Barack Obama's holiday in Hawaii.

Only weeks ago Obama's overseas tour de force crushed McCain's efforts to grab the spotlight, but this week he remained relatively low key—all while taking heat for choosing the "exotic" and "foreign" shores of the 50th state to unwind. Not so McCain: even if he has rankled some observers with his forceful anti-Russian rhetoric, his decision to attack the Caucasus war daily has won admiration from doubting neoconservatives.