San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom just introduced the concluding speaker here at Netroots Nation, Van Jones (two ridiculously good-looking guys, by the way). First time I’ve heard Newsom speak in person. He is indeed high-wattage, a policy wonk with a commanding stage presence and no end of charisma.

I’ll confess to having no idea who Van Jones was before last week, to the dismay of Andrew Golis, our deputy publisher, who’s been giving me no end of grief about that. For those of you who don’t know Van, he’s a Yale law grad who went on to found the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland and is president of Green for All, which focuses on the unequal impacts of environmental degradation and climate change on the poor and disenfranchised.

Van arrived in Austin directly from an 8-day boat trip above the Arctic Circle with President Carter, Madeline Albright, Google’s Larry Page and other business and political leaders.

We’re going to be interviewing Van after his speech for TPMtv and will bring you that interview in the coming days.

Joe Lieberman says the very fact of Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to Iraq is proof that John McCain was right about the war and the surge. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

Der Spiegel is standing by its story, its translation of what Maliki said.

And as Ben Smith aptly puts it, “It’s almost a convention of politics that when a politician says he was misquoted, but doesn’t detail the misquote or offer an alternative, he’s really saying he wishes he hadn’t said what he did, or that he needs to issue a pro-forma denial to please someone. The Iraqi Prime Minister’s vague denial seems to fall in that category. The fact that it arrived to the American press via CENTCOM, seems to support that.”

Matt Yglesias enumerates the reasons why this ‘walk back’ almost certainly falls into the latter category.

I’ll be watching to see whether the major papers continue to downplay the story. As Todd Gitlin notes, of the LA Times, Washington Post and NY Times, only the LAT put the story on the front page of their Sunday paper, though the Post had it as an ambiguous subhed on their front page Obama to War Zone story.

Notably and humorously, the Post editorial page appears to ignore the issue entirely.

Late Update: TPM Reader TB notes that weekend editorials are usually banked in advance and not written in response to the news of the preceeding day. In this case, the topic seems so central to the Post editors’ concerns that I thought they might take a crack at it. But TB makes a good and fair point.

Bush administration officials leaned on Maliki’s office to issue ‘clarification.’

Remember too that as far as I know the Prime Minister’s office has yet to release any statement itself. The statement was released by CentCom and Multi-National Force-Iraq.

Ouch. Chait catches Halperin falling for the ‘clarification’ hook, line and sinker.

Also of interest … A tree grows in Brooklyn. And with this story at least the AP’s got a pretty decent lede.

In the unfolding Maliki/Obama story, here are two new articles you should read. The first is in Monday’s New York Times. Though the headline is misleading (“Iraqi Premier Steps Back on U.S. Troops Comment”), the article itself is quite good. And it contains two key details.

First, any question of mistranslation or misunderstanding is put to rest. The interpreter was al Maliki’s, not Der Spiegel’s. And Der Spiegel provided the Times with a tape recording of the interview, which was then independently translated and confirmed the accuracy of the original Der Spiegel account.

There is also a more detailed explanation of the White House’s pressure on the Iraqi government (first reported in the Post) to walk back Maliki’s comments. The gist of the White House’s explanation is that the Iraqis and Maliki specifically were simply too unsophisticated to grasp the implications of Maliki’s remarks.

The key passage from the Times …

The interview prompted immediate concern from the Bush administration, which called to seek clarification from Mr. Maliki’s office, American officials said.

Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., said that embassy officials explained to the Iraqis how the interview in Der Spiegel was being interpreted, given that it came just a day after the two governments publicly announced an agreement over American troops.

“The Iraqis were not aware and wanted to correct it,” he said.

For those unconvinced by this wet-behind-the-ears theory of the remarks, AP Baghdad Bureau Chief Robert Reid portrays the controversy as part of the Maliki’s government’s effort to take the upper hand in negotiations with US over the future of the American military deployment in the country.

Writes Reid: “The goal is not necessarily to push out the Americans quickly, but instead give Iraqis a major voice in how long U.S. troops stay and what they will do while still there.” Key issues are “U.S. demands for extensive basing rights, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law for U.S. soldiers and private contractors.”

Part of Reid’s argument is that Maliki’s remarks are intended in part as bows to public opinion within Iraq. Indeed, this seems to be the Bush administration’s basic response to the imbroglio, that this isn’t so much Maliki speaking as Maliki playing to restive Iraqi public opinion.

But as others have argued, to the degree to which we are trying to foster a democracy in Iraq, it is a distinction without a difference. If an Iraqi leader must oppose a continuing US military presence in order to stay in power, then clearly the days of the US military presence in Iraq are numbered.

Any understanding of what is happening here has to begin by dismissing out of hand the White House’s ludicrous and insulting suggestion that Maliki didn’t realize what he was saying. I assume we’re all grown up enough to realize that Maliki didn’t just give Obama’s plan a thumbs-up for no other reason than that he thought it sounded like a good idea. As the Times notes, upon reviewing the taped interview in the original, it was Maliki and not the Spiegel interviewers who raised Obama’s name. There are, yes, various levels of nuance and jockeying. But what it comes down to is what it looked like at the start. The premise of John McCain’s campaign is that Obama’s timetable for withdrawal from Iraq shows his naivete and threatens to squander the improvements on the ground in the country. But Maliki, who is constantly presented as the embodiment of what we are trying to foster and build, disagrees. No amount of teeth-gnashing spin from the McCain camp will get around that fact.

Reed Hundt explains the wisdom of Al Gore’s focus on the electricity grid and zero-carbon emission electricity generation.

Obama has arrived in Iraq and will be meeting with Gen. David Petraeus and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

After the events of the weekend, and taking into account the McCain camp’s response to Maliki’s statements, it seems that John McCain now plans to run his campaign almost entirely on the surge, and his claim that he was right about it and Obama wrong.

Even taking that claim on its own terms, though, is that enough?

McCain implicitly concedes that he was wrong on getting into the war itself (concedes in as much as public opinion is firmly on the side of his being wrong and he realizes that). He’s also now all but forced to concede to Obama’s stand on the timing of withdrawal, in as much as the Iraqis are now being clear that they want US troops out in roughly the same period of time.

So he goes to the public with Obama being right and him wrong on starting the war in the first place and with the timing and approach to getting out — but along the way he was right about the surge, so he should be president?

Maybe the hypothetical Barack says to the hypothetical McCain, “Fine, I’ll take the hit on the surge. And you cop to being wrong about getting us into this mess in the first place and supporting it for years. And we’ll call it even.”

I find McCain’s claim to being ‘right about the surge’ dubious but arguable. But even if you concede that, it leaves McCain talking about the past and conceding the real issue that is before the public.