July 23, 2008 4:39PM # Losing Elections, Losing Wars By [Justin Logan](https://www.cato.org/people/justin-logan) --- SHARE 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](http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/2008/07/22/mccain-says-obama-would-rather-lose-a-war-than-lose-an-election/): > 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](http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/the_war_in_iraq/iraq_troop_withdrawal): > 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. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).