Brownstein also takes McCain to task unfairly. “Obama’s language about his opponent generally has been restrained,” he writes. “That’s emphatically not the case when McCain talks about Obama. McCain seems incapable of masking feelings about his younger opponent that border on disdain. He often says that Obama, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has ‘no experience on national-security issues.’”

Yes, but isn’t truth the best defense against libel? McCain’s making the very point he must make if he hopes to win this election. He’s got the experience, Obama doesn’t. It isn’t “negative campaigning” to point that out; it’s a matter of political survival.

Obama realizes this, and is touchy about the question of experience. “Well, actually, my experience in foreign policy is probably more diverse than most others in the field,” he said during the Democrat primary process. “I’m somebody who has actually lived overseas, somebody who has studied overseas. I majored in international relations.”

But maybe Obama ought to go back to school. “While pressing Obama to visit Iraq with him, McCain said he would use such a trip to ‘educate’ his rival,” Brownstein writes. Again, though, McCain’s making a good point. Recall that last year McCain strongly supported the then-controversial “surge” into Iraq. Obama opposed it.

In the fall of 2006 the Illinois senator said, “It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now." That something would, apparently, have been to withdraw troops.

Now that the surge has worked, though, Obama’s eager to celebrate the fact that U.S. troops will be able to pull out in the months ahead. But that’s only because they followed McCain’s formula, not his. And they’re leaving having stabilized the situation in Iraq.

There’s no doubt which candidate has experience reaching across the aisle to members of the other party. The question is: Do voters even care? We won’t know that until November.