Byron York on Romney's secret Timetables

From the Corner.

Greetings from Florida. I know the sentiments here in the Corner about the McCain-Romney tussle over Iraqi timetables. But I have to say that, looking at what Romney said last April, I think McCain has a point. Here is the exchange in question, from ABC's "Good Morning America" on April 3, 2007:

MS. ROBERTS: Iraq. John McCain is there in Baghdad right now. You have also been very vocal in supporting the president and the troop surge. Yet, the American public has lost faith in this war. Do you believe that there should be a timetable in withdrawing the troops?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, there's no question but that — the president and Prime Minister al-Maliki have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about. But those shouldn't be for public pronouncement. You don't want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you're going to be gone. You want to have a series of things you want to see accomplished in terms of the strength of the Iraqi military and the Iraqi police, and the leadership of the Iraqi government.

MS. ROBERTS: So, private. You wouldn't do it publicly? Because the president has said flat out that he will veto anything the Congress passes about a timetable for troop withdrawals. As president, would you do the same?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, of course. Can you imagine a setting where during the Second World War we said to the Germans, gee, if we haven't reached the Rhine by this date, why, we'll go home, or if we haven't gotten this accomplished we'll pull up and leave? You don't publish that to your enemy, or they just simply lie in wait until that time. So, of course, you have to work together to create timetables and milestones, but you don't do that with the opposition.

Reading that, I think it's fair to conclude that Romney was saying he was in favor of Bush and Maliki setting a secret timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. (By the way, I didn't think that was a bad idea, on the grounds that the Iraqis needed to be pushed hard before they would get anything done.) Certainly people who were listening took it that way; at the time of Romney's statement, there was a fair amount of reaction, much of it from the left, to the effect that Romney was coming around to the idea of a timetable. His pledge to veto a congressionally-imposed timetable seemed based on the idea that such a timetable would necessarily involve a publicly-known deadline, although there are clearly separation-of-powers objections one could make, too.

In addition, I think it's indisputable that, at the time, McCain's Republican rivals supported the surge but were also happy that it was McCain who was all the way out on the limb. Last February, someone in the Romney camp told me that yes, Romney supported the surge, but that "McCain owns the surge." The implication was that if things didn't go well, McCain would be the one to suffer; the other guys would be OK precisely because they didn't put it all on the line for the surge. So when I look at Romney's comments on "Good Morning America," I see a lot of caution and a bit of behind-covering, as well.

UPDATE: The War over the War.

Writers from the Associated Press and Time magazine, among others, have suggested Romney's quote does not constitute an endorsement of "secret timetables" for withdrawal. It is a debatable point. If Romney does not actually say, "I support secret timetables for withdrawal," he does seem to endorse such timetables in response to a question about withdrawal. That's important. It was a direct question: "Do you believe that there should be a timetable in withdrawing the troops?" If the answer was no, presumably Romney would have said so. He did not.

Romney further muddled things in his response to a follow-up. Roberts said: "So, private. You wouldn't do it publicly? Because the president has said flat out that he will veto anything the Congress passes about a timetable for troop withdrawals. As president, would you do the same?"

Romney responded: "Well, of course. Can you imagine a setting where during the Second World War we said to the Germans, gee, if we haven't reached the Rhine by this date, why, we'll go home, or if we haven't gotten this accomplished we'll pull up and leave? You don't publish that to your enemy, or they just simply lie in wait until that time. So, of course you have to work together to create timetables and milestones, but you don't do that with the opposition."

Did Romney say he would, like Bush, veto anything with a timetable? Or does the rest of his answer suggest that he's for the timetables as long as they're private? Again, it's debatable.

But to go as far as CNN's Jeffrey Toobin, who claimed that McCain is "lying" about what Romney said, is a stretch. At the time Romney made the comments, many observers, including several reporters, took him to mean exactly what McCain is imputing to him now. If the Romney campaign protested that interpretation, their objections did now show up in any of the follow-up reporting on his comments.