Senator John McCain’s advisers evidently told him to crank up the rhetoric a bit yesterday, because his longstanding stump speech line about “rather lose an election than lose a war” became this:

When we adopted the surge, we were losing the war in Iraq, and I stood up and said I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Apparently Sen. Obama, who does not understand what’s happening in Iraq or fails to acknowledge the success in Iraq, would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.

There’s something strange about the logic of that statement. McCain’s implying that “losing” the war will win Obama the election — that the American people want to “lose.”

And, it turns out, by McCain’s definition of losing, he’s correct. A Rasmussen/FOX survey reports today that 63% of Americans want troops home from Iraq within one year:

Twenty-four percent (24%) would like to see the troops brought home immediately while 39% say they should be brought home at some point within a year.