The Note: Old Sweet Song

August 12, 2008 -- If it's 3 a.m. in the race -- does it matter what time zone a candidate is in?

If the Russians are acting like Soviets -- does it help to think Czechoslovakia still exists?

Will Mark Penn's strategy become Sen. John McCain's? (And which tapes exactly did Penn want released?)

It's not a terrible time for Penn's visage to reemerge: The Russia-Georgia conflict -- with its memories of bad-old-days Cold War flare-ups -- just may reorder the race in the same way Penn wanted to back when he tried to sound a middle-of-the-night wakeup call.

That's McCain's play -- and a vacationing Sen. Barack Obama can hope that that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is really in control -- that when he orders hostilities cease, as he did early Tuesday, no one has other ideas.

"The violence between Russia and Georgia quickly thrust foreign policy into the U.S. presidential election, with John McCain standing to benefit and Barack Obama facing a more perilous situation," Laura Meckler writes in The Wall Street Journal. "As such, the conflict gave Sen. Obama the opportunity to show that he is indeed prepared, but it also gave prominence to foreign policy, one of the few areas where polling shows that Sen. McCain has a clear advantage with voters."

With President Bush stepping up his rhetoric upon his return from the Olympics, this may be one area where McCain is happy to see him.

This is Obama, D-Ill., playing a bit of catch-up -- with a lovely Hawaiian backdrop: "No matter how this conflict started, Russia has escalated it well beyond the dispute over South Ossetia and has now violated the space of another country," he told reporters in Kailua Monday.

For McCain, R-Ariz., it's a double whammy: He gets to highlight his experience, plus put some space between himself and President Bush. (Remember those letters McCain saw when he looked into Putin's eyes? McCain wants you to.)

"The crisis has played mostly to McCain's advantage," Time's Massimo Calabresi writes. "Obama's campaign made two early missteps. First, in its initial statement, it called for restraint from both Russia and Georgia. . . . Then Obama's campaign released a statement questioning McCain's objectivity in the crisis because a top McCain aide, Randy Scheunemann, had lobbied for the Georgians."

Experience (maybe) counts: "Senator John McCain, who has met the Republic of Georgia's president and whose chief foreign policy adviser has lobbied for the country, responded to the news Friday with visceral anger, condemning Russian forces' crossing into Georgia and warning of 'grave' repercussions in long-term relations between Moscow and Washington," Michael Kranish writes in The Boston Globe. "Senator Barack Obama, who has never been to Georgia, initially seemed reticent to single out Russia for criticism, issuing a general call on Friday for ending 'the outbreak of violence.' "

"The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement," Michael Cooper writes in The New York Times.

"His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change," writes Cooper. "But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain's position as principled, and prescient."

"This moment calls for more than playacting, yet Obama looks lost without a presidential script," Jonah Goldberg writes in his Los Angeles Times column. "Perhaps this is not a time for a novice spouting grand rhetoric about a new page in history, but for someone who's actually read the pages of some old, but still relevant, books. Perhaps this is not the time for playacting. Perhaps it is not the time for body surfing?"

And yet -- is this the era of American politics where you want neocons on your side?

Obama "tempered his comments, saying: 'We seek a future of cooperative engagement with the Russian government and friendship with the Russian people,' " Peter Wallsten writes in the Los Angeles Times. "The contrasting tenor of their statements came as aides to both presidential candidates scrambled to reconfigure their policies toward Russia -- reckoning with a war that, analysts said, marked a major turning point in the already tense relationship between Russia and the United States."

McCain's challenge is to elevate the conflict into something that matters to voters who are more interested in Michael Phelps than Vladimir Putin. "If voters ultimately don't get exercised over what's now occurring in Georgia, it won't be for McCain's lack of trying," Frank James blogs for the Chicago Tribune.

Does it register? "My guess is that most Americans see this as an obscure regional dispute, not a portentous historical moment akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall," writes The New Republic's Michael Crowley. "There was much talk in December that Benazir Bhutto's assassination would boost Hillary Clinton, who, much like McCain does now, claimed that such a reminder of our perilous world argued for someone with her 'experience' in the White House. Iowa voters didn't buy it and I'd guess much the same will go for McCain."

(Bubbling up in the blogosphere: "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Taegan Goddard writes. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia.")

McCain has the benefit of actually campaigning while the crisis unfolds -- he's in Pennsylvania Tuesday for a second straight day.