The Obama-Lugar 'Coalition'

Politics: Barack Obama has a curious way of trying to hoodwink voters into believing he is more hawkish than they think — by showing them how pally he is with a leading Republican dove.

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The star of the latest Obama campaign commercial is, of all people, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. The 30-second spot is airing — or erring to put it another way — in GOP strongholds such as Georgia, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina and Virginia.

It shows the Illinois senator and pending Democratic presidential nominee with the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Obama claims he and Lugar kept Russian nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands. But beyond getting a tour of a junkyard for old warheads in Russia in 2005, and supporting Lugar-sponsored missile legislation, it's actually unclear what Obama did.

Lugar is a poor choice of Republican for Obama to pair up with in feigning foreign policy credibility.

The last thing Lugar did of any note was deliver an interminable speech on the Senate floor a year ago.

In those remarks, he complained that "our continuing absorption with military activities in Iraq is limiting our diplomatic assertiveness there and elsewhere in the world." He called for "a multifaceted diplomatic offensive" instead of President Bush's military surge.

Lugar's betrayal was described as historic by the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid.

Portrayed in much of the media as a foreign-policy wise man, Lugar and his advice proved dead wrong. Had his counsel been followed last year, a chaotic Iraq would be dominated today by al-Qaida and Iran.

Now Lugar is actually being mentioned as a possible cross-party running mate for Obama. The Hoosier claims no interest, but back at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit the then-little-known senator was almost begging publicly to be placed on the ticket with Ronald Reagan.

Lugar later sowed distrust with Republicans when he suggested selling out Nicaragua's Contra freedom fighters in the 1980s in exchange for a communist Sandinista version of "free elections."

Now, in an election year, Lugar describes the assertions in Obama's commercial as "accurate" — rather than taking the opportunity to blast Obama's naive foreign-policy radicalism.

"I'm pleased we had the association Sen. Obama describes" was how Lugar reacted to being used in the national campaign of the opposing party.

No doubt Lugar was flattered that Obama depicted him as a great voice of moderation and statesmanship within the party of Bush and McCain.

Might Lugar be thinking a Cabinet appointment awaits him, as it did former Republican Sen. William Cohen of Maine, named Defense Secretary by Bill Clinton?

In his foreign policy speech on Tuesday in Washington, Obama noted working with Lugar and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., on a big foreign aid bill for Pakistan.

In that speech, Obama repackaged the same Carteresque foreign policy he used to gain his now-radicalized party's nomination.

But if Iran is allowed to produce its own nuclear materials for a weapon, Obama's promise of "a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials around the world" will be of little use.

His intention to use "diplomacy backed with strong sanctions and without preconditions" would be as useless against Iran's fanatical mullahs as it was against Adolf Hitler 70 years ago.

Moreover, Obama's promise to "take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights" is the kind of thing we've heard from congressional Democrats for years — as if preventing an occasional video from the ailing, emasculated terrorist kingpin is more important to the global war on terror than the Bush administration's perfect record of protecting the homeland from terrorist attack in the almost seven years since 9/11.

Killing Osama bin Laden, as desirable as that may be, is not as vital as either U.S. victory in Iraq or effective terrorist surveillance, both of which would be in jeopardy under a President Obama.

Dick Lugar could have made that point when asked what he thought about starring in a piece of Obama propaganda — instead of basking in Obama's flattery.