But first, here is some background. McCain has been using the bracelet anecdote on the campaign trail repeatedly. Back in March, ABC News wrote about McCain and the bracelet.
Toward the end of almost every speech he gives or informal remarks he delivers at a town hall-style meeting, Sen. John McCain tells the same story.
If you watch him carefully, you can even tell when it's coming.
The Arizona senator will shoot his right arm forward in his suit sleeve, revealing a dark metallic band low on his wrist. It's probably an unconscious gesture. He doesn't hold up the bracelet. He doesn't look at it. But very soon he will tell the story. He has told it hundreds of times.
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Here's McCain in the debate:
And this was August, a year ago. And then she said, "But, Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that my son's death was not in vain."
Here, McCain has precisely laid out why his thinking on Iraq is flawed and how he continues to pick at America's old wounds from the Vietnam war to score political points. McCain believes there is too much invested in Iraq and therefore the United States must stay in Iraq.
McCain's Vietnam loss aversion causes him to commit a sunk cost fallacy. So even though the case for war that was originally made has long since been disproven, for McCain the U.S. must continue on with the mistake. McCain is a gambler, so when he's losing it's double or nothing. He raises the stakes and digs himself, and the country, in deeper.
There is no surprise that Obama and his team were prepared for McCain's bracelet story, but what Obama was able to do with this opening must be commended. In the debate, Obama responded:
Jim, let me just make a point. I've got a bracelet, too, from Sergeant - from the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopeck, given to me in Green Bay. She asked me, can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I'm going through.
Not only did Obama defuse McCain's bracelet story with a bracelet of his own given to him by the mother of a fallen solider, but unlike McCain, Obama has not used it repeatedly on the campaign trail to prop himself up. McCain has diluted his bracelet story with constant retelling, while Obama caught McCain by surprise, I think, with a bracelet story of his own.
But even more so, Obama devastated McCain's faulting sunk cost thinking. Using McCain's "flawgic" if and when a soldier dies in a war that should not have been started in the first place, more and more soldiers must be sacrificed to the mistake to, somehow, make it not a mistake. Once troops have been committed to a mistake it is too late to pull back and make adjustments. This is akin to George W. Bush perpetually saying 'We must stay the course in Iraq' between 2003-2006.
From the debate, here is how Obama continued after saying he too had a bracelet:
No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they're carrying out the missions of their commander in chief. And we honor all the service that they've provided. Our troops have performed brilliantly. The question is for the next president, are we making good judgments about how to keep America safe precisely because sending our military into battle is such an enormous step.
Bam! Obama lays a powerful left hook across McCain's nose. Obama's response here is a thing of beauty. "No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they're carrying out the missions of their commander in chief," Obama said. He squarely places the responsibility on Bush for every solider who has died in the wars Bush has waged as president.
