1/ Gen. Wesley Clark, from last night’s Ver­dict on MSNBC:

2/ Andrew Bace­vich (who con­tributed to this piece) in “What Hath Bush Wrought” in the Boston Globe:

The burden of iden­ti­fy­ing and con­fronting the Bush legacy nec­es­sar­ily falls on Obama. Although for tac­ti­cal rea­sons McCain will dis­tance him­self from the president’s record, he largely sub­scribes to the prin­ci­ples inform­ing Bush’s post-9/11 poli­cies. McCain’s deter­mi­na­tion to stay the course in Iraq expresses his com­mit­ment not simply to the ongo­ing con­flict there, but to the ideas that gave rise to that war in the first place. While McCain may differ with the pres­i­dent on cer­tain par­tic­u­lars, his elec­tion will affirm the main thrust of Bush’s approach to national security.

The chal­lenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely point­ing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demon­strate that Iraq rep­re­sents the truest man­i­fes­ta­tion of an approach to national secu­rity that is fun­da­men­tally flawed, thereby help­ing Amer­i­cans dis­cern the cor­rect lessons of that mis­be­got­ten conflict.

By show­ing that Bush has put the coun­try on a path point­ing to per­ma­nent war, ever increas­ing debt and depen­dency, and fur­ther abuses of exec­u­tive author­ity, Obama can trans­form the elec­tion into a ref­er­en­dum on the cur­rent administration’s entire national secu­rity legacy. By artic­u­lat­ing a set of prin­ci­ples that will safe­guard the country’s vital inter­ests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while pre­serv­ing rather than dis­tort­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion, Obama can per­suade Amer­i­cans to repu­di­ate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.