From ABC News on Saturday:

Sen. Barack Obama called Sen. John McCain’s refusal to admit he misspoke about troop levels in Iraq "disturbing" and cast his actions as the sequel to the Bush administration’s refusal to admit their own mistakes.

"We've seen this movie before," Obama said at a town hall in Rapid City, S.D. "A leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain is refusing to admit that he's made a mistake."

Obama explained to the crowd of 2,700 that McCain had said on Friday that the United States had drawn down to pre-surge troop levels in Iraq.

. . . "Now we all misspeak sometimes. I’ve done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you’d think that John McCain would just say, 'Oh, I misspoke, I made a mistake' -- and then move on. But he couldn't do that. Instead, he dug in," Obama said and connected it to Bush’s handling of the Iraq war: "We all know this president refused to admit that he made a mistake. That’s the leadership that we’ve had enough of over the last eight years."

Obama's campaign thought this speech was important enough to send the text around to the media in advance. Greg Sargent (at TPM Election Central) and Steve Benen were pleased that it showed Barack as willing to go on the offensive, while D-Day praised him for his ability to "weave new information into his overall narrative" -- but the important thing is how he's going on the offensive, and what that narrative is.

As I've blathered about repeatedly in the past, the standard GOP framing of presidential elections hasn't developed by accident. Republican strategists know that if a contest is determined by who can best solve the problems of the moment, they lose -- because their side only believes in using those problems to further their permanent agenda of funneling money to the wealthy (through tax cuts, military spending and other corporate welfare, etc.). So they've sought to make a virtue out of the fact that they always support the same policies, and a vice out of caring about the effects of those policies. A year and a half ago, I wrote:

The Republicans certainly know where the strength of their brand is, which is why they try to denigrate the very concepts of reality and pragmatism at every turn. . . . ridiculing intelligent and articulate Democratic politicians as morally dubious girlie-men, and ignoring the foreign-policy arts of intelligence and diplomacy in favor of blustering threats and military force. In each case, moral and ideological certainty is portrayed as the highest ideal, and the willingness (or -- gasp! -- desire) to adapt to a changing reality is depicted as a sinful, deadly weakness.

Obama, though, is turning that narrative on its head. Certainty in the face of contrary facts isn't an ideal at all; it's a flaw that leads to disasters like the one we can all see in Iraq. Instead of a choice between "strength" (ideological certainty) versus "weakness," what Americans really face this November is one between common-sense responsibility and phony bluster.

The power of this attack is that it turns McCain's fundamental strategy into an ally for Obama. The "flip-flopper" meme has been effective in the past against Democrats in part because the GOP could always count on them to say something nuanced ("I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it") that could be pounced upon as proof to further it along. Since McCain's would-be daddy frame (like Dubya's) depends on him pretending to be infallible -- which is why he couldn't admit the error on how many troops we have in Iraq to begin with -- he almost doesn't have a choice but to keep proving Obama right by generating more phony bluster, and then being unable to back down.