Fascinating...

Instead of being John McCain's strongest argument, the McCain campaign now thinks that the surge--specifically Bush's post-2006 election co-option of the strategy--did him in.

Ambinder:

McInturff, McCain's pollster, told a story.: "The point was, we do the surge, John's been for it from like, 2004,45 and 6, we are the leading critic of the Bush administration, and then we get to January of '07, and then, guess what, the Bush administration ...adopts the surge, we go on TV in January on Meet the Press, and I said 'we have to say, over and over and over again, here's where I've been for years, and the president's behind me... and John was very, very tempered in a way that really affected our numbers with the base."

[...]

"What really happened," McInturff said, "was that John McCain really became President Bush's spokesperson on Iraq."