Choose the Angry Old Man or the Young Narcissistic Sociopath

There is much that is absurd about our political system, not the least of which is the way we elect our president. Just ask our Australian friend who lives in Paris – she is dumbfounded that it has come down to these two, McCain and Obama. She doesn’t think much of either and wonders why we cannot do better over here. The rest of the crew tries to explain things, or rationalize them away – this is just how we do things here.

 

And she has never been to the United States, so you might, if you like, consider her provincial. But having been born and raised in Australia and having spent most of her career in Europe, and living in Paris for years… we’ll that’s not exactly what you’d call a narrow, insular life. It’s just not American. And for us, a view from the outside is always useful – it adds valuable perspective and that sort of thing.

 

Of course that should be amended – for others of us, a view from the outside, the perspective of someone not here in the everyday, is presumptuous and deeply offensive. What do they know, really? It’s that uniquely American mixture of defensiveness and xenophobia – as in half of our Supreme Count sometimes citing law in other western countries as a way to think about what we’re doing, and the other half screaming bloody murder that they even know about how the rest of the world does things. Since there are nine justices, and no actual “half” is possible, the back-and-forth goes on and on – shall we consider what seems to be how most people think and apply common sense, or tell the rest of the world to take a hike and remain pure, and remain true to the specific values of that small group of white guys from the late eighteenth century scattered up and down the east coast of this then-underdeveloped continent? Even civilians – those far outside the law and any of the specific issues of any case being decided – have strong feelings about the matter. When someone looks at what you’re doing and asks why you’re doing it that way, and you realize you seem foolish and have no good reason to offer them, you do get resentful.

 

But anyone can get wrapped around their own axle – too involved in the process at hand, unable to step back and rethink things, concentrating far too intensely to suddenly laugh and stop for a second, much less just stop entirely. It happens to everyone. And few of us get emails from puzzled Australians in Paris.

 

And, as of Saturday, July 26, this thing with McCain and Obama seemed to need a bit of perspective. Anyone looking at it from the outside would see things were careening out of control, things were being said that were close to absurd, and we were heading, fast, into what might be called the Land of the Silly – sort of like a Monty Python skit, but without the irony, and certainly without much humor.

 

The proximate cause for the silliness was obvious. McCain had a very bad week. It was that overseas trip the McCain camp had goaded Obama into talking, so everyone would see Obama was callow and unsuited for office – just an empty suit. Foreign leaders would laugh in his face, or so the McCain folks might have hoped.

 

It didn’t work out that way. Obama, after being cool, calm and collected, and impressing everyone in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan and Israel, and in Berlin speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of over two-hundred thousand, ended with Paris and London, where Sarkozy and Brown, respectively, treated Obama as if he were the next president already – and John McCain held forth at a German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, and at the dairy case in a supermarket in Bethlehem, the one in Pennsylvania. And it certainly didn’t help that the Iraq prime minister said that Obama, with his sixteen-month goal for withdrawing our combat troops there, seemed to understand the situation, implying that McCain saying we’d always be there, one way or another, really didn’t. Claiming the Iraq prime minister, Maliki, was mistranslated, didn’t fly. All the pressure to get him to take it back didn’t work – he said it twice again, and his spokesman then said it in English. McCain was reduced to saying that he knew Maliki – he’s met with him eight times before – and he knew Maliki didn’t really mean what he said, even if he said it.

 

All and all that was a bad week. The other guy, Obama, wasn’t supposed to be all presidential – the press was to blame, or the foreign leaders who should have known better, or something. From outside America, it must have looked pathetic – McCain outclassed and whining about it.

 

So the obvious thing to do was get as presidential as you could get, and quickly.

 

Now some know that the president always gives a weekly radio address each Saturday morning – that’s been going on for many decades. And the opposition party gives a rebuttal, or an address of their own on what they think is the actual big issue of the week. Of course hardly anyone listens – it’s Saturday morning after all – but it’s kind of a public service thing the radio folks do, and useful filler. These started with Ronald Reagan, who it is said turned to the radio addresses out of frustration with the treatment his administration was receiving in the media. Now it’s just an institution – something every president does, although no one quite knows why these days. The media landscape has changed – best to go on Saturday Night Live or Stewart or Colbert, or on the conservative side, sit down on Fox News or chat with Rush Limbaugh. But the weekly radio address is, by default, a tradition, presidential.

 

McCain has started giving Saturday morning radio addresses, of course. Even if these days each weekly address the president and the opposition give is perfunctory at best – as they say out here in Hollywood of some uninspired performances, they just mail it in – a weekly address is, of course, presidential, even if old-fashioned. But those old radio comedies like Fibber McGee and Molly are amusing in their way – a bit fusty, but amusing.

 

So we finally got this from McCain, on Saturday, July 26, a call for national resentment:

 

In his weekly radio address, McCain said, “this week the presidential contest was a long-distance affair, with my opponent touring various continents and arriving yesterday in Paris. With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to ‘the people of the world,’ I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too.”

 

Susan G at Daily Kos captures the essence nicely:

 

Now if only the American people voted based on who sounds more like a pouting, jilted high-schooler stood up for the prom, John McCain would have a lock on the presidency.

 

At Hullabaloo, Digby digs a little deeper:

 

First, he’s tweaking the “breathless” press, who are responding predictably, judging from the headlines I’m seeing this morning: Obama Disputes He’s on a “Premature Victory Lap.”

 

Second he’s saying that Obama is more interested in “others” than he is Real Americans. Typical elite. Uppity at that. It’s hard to know if this approach will work, but it makes a certain amount of sense for Republicans. People are in a sour mood. They want to blame somebody. Why not a young, black guy? Not much a stretch for a lot of these folks.

 

But she says that the good news is that Obama has probably done all he can to show that he looks presidential, and the media just ate it up, so Obama “can now come back and enlarge the agenda.”

 

Here’s the deal:

 

Iraq and Afghanistan are important, but I don’t think this election will be fought on foreign policy turf – at least I hope not. I suspect that is where Obama’s heart really lies, and I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t. But my sense is that people are really concerned about domestic issues (some of which do relate to foreign policy, like energy.) Democrats have a lot more to offer – and speak the right language of economic angst — and should be able to control the agenda at a time like this. Foreign policy and national security must be dealt with, but this is one time when the domestic agenda should be front and center and Obama should be able to capitalize on that.

 

The trip was fine but not that important:

 

Obama needs to shift this election on to domestic ground. The Republicans have got nothing to offer but tax cuts for rich people and I don’t think that’s going to cut it this time. There’s no reason to be playing on John McCain’s field.

 

Even if he is muddled and confused and highly overrated, people still seem to think he knows something about national security. But I don’t think anyone thinks he has a clue about domestic issues. He can only rely on the old fashioned conservative politics of resentment and that doesn’t play to his strength as a maverick “man of honor.” It just makes him look like a mean old man and that’s not a winning image, even for Republicans, who are all mean old men at heart.

 

But McCain – even if he comes off as a mean old man – did have an ace up his sleeve:

 

Republican John McCain’s campaign on Saturday sharply criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama for canceling a visit to wounded troops in Germany, contending Obama chose foreign leaders and cheering Europeans over “injured American heroes.”

 

Obama’s campaign called the accusation “wildly inappropriate.” His spokesman has claimed that the visit to a military hospital in Germany was scrapped after the Pentagon raised concerns about political activity on a military base. Earlier, though, the campaign had said Obama decided the visit might be seen as inappropriate politicking. However, the Pentagon said the senator was never told not to visit.

 

It’s a muddle. Many think the Pentagon sandbagged Obama – after his Senate delegation disbanded and all he had left was the campaign staff, telling him only then a visit would be inappropriate with any of them around. But the Obama staff should have anticipated that. To have someone running for office use wounded troops as campaign props is a disgusting idea – and had he gone to see them, as a Senator or a candidate, he’d catch hell. Of course it looks awful not to make the visit. It would look even worse to make the visit – ghoulish and beyond cynical. It was a no-win situation. He decided he wouldn’t use the troops, or even appear to be using them.

 

But McCain pounced:

 

McCain himself joined in the rebuke, saying in an interview to be aired Sunday by ABC’s “This Week” that “if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn’t visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event.”

 

McCain added, “He certainly found time to do other things.”

 

The rap is that Obama followed the Pentagon’s advice. Obama couldn’t win this one.

 

And it got worse:

 

Obama was flying from London to Chicago on Saturday when the McCain campaign issued a statement from Joe Repya, a retired Army colonel who said Obama had broken a commitment to visit the wounded Americans, “instead flitting from one European capital to the next.”

 

“Several explanations were offered, none was convincing and each was at odds with the statements of American military leaders in Germany and Washington,” Repya said. “For a young man so apt at playing president, Barack Obama badly misjudged the important demands of the office he seeks. Visits with world leaders and speeches to cheering Europeans shouldn’t be a substitute for comforting injured American heroes.”

 

The Obama campaign noted that Obama had visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and had made many unpublicized trips to Walter Reed Army Medical Center – he just didn’t want injured soldiers “pulled into the back-and-forth of a political campaign” – and that was what McCain seemed eager to do.

 

Of course this all become absurd quickly. Some might say Obama saw the trap he was in and took the high road – leave the wounded soldiers out the spat, as they have enough to deal with. McCain quickly produced a nasty attack ad blasted out everywhere.

 

Regarding that, see Allahpundit:

 

McCain’s newest attack ad is sequel of sorts to the “Pump” ad from a few days ago suggesting that Obama uniquely was somehow to blame for soaring gas prices; anyone who believes that will, I guess, also believe that he’d torpedo a visit to see wounded troops because there’d be no flashbulbs popping in his face.

 

Not only does that not fit the facts – he left his pool reporters outside when he visited Walter Reed a few weeks ago, and as I noted last night, his spokesman says the plan at Landstuhl was to keep the press on the plane – but even under the worst assumptions, it makes no sense.

 

If you think (and I do not) that Obama’s a sociopath who sees wounded soldiers as nothing but political chips to be played in an election card game, surely we can agree that he’s nevertheless savvy enough to grasp how horribly bad it would look to have photographers with him on a hospital visit in the middle of a campaign. If there were pictures on the wires of him shaking hands with bedridden vets while media vultures crowded around for close-ups, conservatives would have ripped him for it properly and mercilessly and he knows it. Why not stick with the “he went to the gym but not the hospital” point, which is at least factually correct? Why go here?

 

See Chris Bodenner here:

 

I predict these nasty, petty, and desperate attacks will only grow as Obama soars into November. What else does McCain have to run on? It’s the same approach Clinton took after Feb. 5: If I can’t beat him, I’ll drag him down to my level and hope he hits back, besmirching his image as a “new politician.” It wasn’t exactly a winning strategy.

 

What else can he run on? Maliki cut him off at the knees, but then on CNN you got this:

 

Blitzer: So why do you think he said that 16 months is basically a pretty good timetable?

 

McCain: He said it’s a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground. I think it’s a pretty good timetable, as we should – or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground.

 

What? Let’s see. Obama is wrong to suggest a timetable, but Maliki says he’s right, and McCain says he agrees with Maliki, but not Obama. Is that it?

 

Mark Murray says that “calling 16 months a ‘good timetable’ is something McCain hasn’t said before – and probably never would have said a week ago.”

 

Obama welcomes the change:

 

In terms of his comment about – that maybe 16 months sounds good – we are pleased to see that there has been some convergence around proposals that we’ve been making for a year and a half. The fact that John McCain now thinks that we should put more troops into Afghanistan I think is a good thing and that the Bush administration acknowledges that as well…

 

The fact that John McCain now thinks that it’s possible for us to execute a phased withdrawal – I think that’s a positive thing and if the administration believes that as well, then I will, I will be fully supportive.

 

He’s just reminding everyone that everyone else is finally coming around to his point of view. Touché – as they say in fencing. Actually that’s like being run through with a pike.

 

McCain of course was saying that any withdrawal depends on the conditions on the ground, and that is the big difference in their positions. Obama of course never said it didn’t, and on Saturday, July 26, reminded everyone – Obama Says Conditions to Dictate Final Iraq Force. So the angry old man is arguing about something that isn’t there, and never was there. That’s interesting – and it’s no wonder the Australian woman from Paris is puzzled.

 

But most conservatives cannot get over Maliki’s endorsement of any timeline for withdrawal. The cannot understand why the Iraqis wouldn’t want is there – and least that’s what you seen in the Washington Post in Charles Krauthammer’s column in reaction to the very idea we should eventually leave.

 

Matthew Yglesias deconstructs that argument:

 

Now Krauthammer is willing to more-or-less squarely put the issue on the table – he wants an imperial relationship with Iraq, Bush wants an imperial relationship with Iraq, and McCain wants an imperial relationship with Iraq, but Iraqis don’t and thus Maliki prefers Obama, the American candidate who doesn’t favor an imperial relationship with Iraq.

 

Of course Krauthammer doesn’t quite put it that way, but that’s what he’s saying – we ought to vote for McCain because McCain will do a better job of strong-arming the Iraqis into accepting a relationship they find repugnant.

 

The trouble here is that any such strong-arming only guarantees that we’ll prolong the Iraq operation. Newfound allies, for example, who decided to side with us against al-Qaeda may think again if they decide that U.S. policy is being animated by the Krauthammer-style sentiments. And across the Arab world, everyone’s worst impressions of American power will be reconfirmed.

 

And for what? To mitigate political risk for western oil companies? To provide a convenient base of operations for attacks on Iran that we shouldn’t launch anyway?

 

Of course it’s absurd. But that’s the choice, the angry old man or the young narcissistic sociopath. From the outside looking in it must seem quite mad.