If an alien somewhere out there is tuning in just to the presidential debates, and paying no attention to the tactical reasons behind the candidates' shifting demeanors, he might suspect the poor devils are suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, or, at the very least, a serious case of bipolar disorder.
One week they're all smiles, the next they're pulling knives, then they're back to honoring National Brotherhood Week. Should the alien ever decide to visit and stay a while, he will no doubt come loaded with otherworldly Thorazine and Lithium. These Earthlings are a strange and moody breed.
But, as we know, there's a calculated method behind the candidates' madcap moodiness. And last night, both had calculated -- or gambled -- that for now they're sitting pretty. Mrs. Clinton feels assured of widely scattered leads in the run-up to next week, and Mr. Obama is banking on a timely Big Mo. Best not stir the seemingly favorable waters.
But last night still leaves the question: Who won?
Answer: Wolf Blitzer.
I'd love to see his email inbox this morning, although Wolf will need to approach it wearing asbestos. For I have no doubt it's overflowing with Molotov-cocktail constructions from the Clinton crowd, burning with rage over what they'll claim was Wolf's singularly rude, mean-spirited, subjective interjection last night in the form of a rude, mean-spirited and subjective interrogatory.
But it was none of those descriptions. It was, rather, a simple, straightforward and immensely fair question.
Following another tortured, evasive exegesis from Mrs. Clinton about her 2002 war vote -- it was all an innocent misunderstanding, you see; she passionately favored diplomacy and inspection, but gosh darn it, "no one could have fully appreciated ... how obsessed this president was with this particular mission" -- Wolf came back with the granddaddy of all logically permissible, wholesale-humbug-stopping body slams: "So, what I hear you saying -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- is that you were naive in trusting President Bush?"
Riddle me this: Is that not what she just said? -- that she got snowed while 300 million other Americans understood perfectly well what the 2002 vote was about and where it would lead?
Her follow-up response merely compounded the humbuggery: "I believe that it is abundantly clear that the case that was outlined on behalf of going to the resolution -- not going to war, but going to the resolution -- was a credible case." Why of course. How ever could a United States senator have known that military force might proceed from a joint resolution explicitly authorizing "military force"?
Having breached her flank, Wolf's question then opened Obama's well-worn path to raising the issue of judgment: "The question is, can we make an argument that this was a conceptually flawed mission from the start, and that we need better judgment when we decide to send our young men and women into war?"
Yet I take exception to the matter's transmogrification into one of mere judgment. I understand that Mr. Obama cannot say for political reasons what progressive concerns are really about, but I can. And they are twofold.
One, it's about lying. There's not a man or woman alive who believes the real "fairy tale" in this campaign; that Mrs. Clinton, that is, somehow got snowed. She knew exactly what she was doing -- bolstering her national-security credentials with others' lives -- and now brusquely refuses to come clean. I can take a little lying here and there from any politician. It's what they do. But not on a matter of these life-and-death proportions.
Second, it's about Mrs. Clinton's less than subtle request to progressives that they momentarily cancel their long-stated -- and what I and many others thought were their deeply heartfelt -- convictions. Which are fundamentally reasoned, pacific ones -- you don't go to war except as a last resort, you don't go to war in the utter absence of provocation, and you sure as hell don't go to war as a neoconning, "preventive" measure.
No, at it's core it is not about judgment. It's not even about Hillary Clinton, really. It is, rather, about progressives and their self-averred values.
Should they reward any progressive politician in open and brazen violation of a chief and organic tenet within those values, they will have sold their souls. They will have foolishly dispossessed themselves of political nobility -- of any right to tutor anyone, about anything, ever again.
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to P.M. Carpenter's Commentary -- because, to be blunt about it, things are rather desperate here. I am not, as some readers have assumed, of the professorial class who lives off the fat of the ivory tower, though I do hold a doctorate in American political history. Rather, I am but a typically impoverished public scribe who relies on a substitute-teaching income as a too-meager base for this daily column. I therefore must also rely on you, the regular reader, to supplement the production of what you regularly enjoy, or, on occasion, become enraged at. The purpose is merely to stimulate thought and challenge the conventional. So, if at all possible, please click the button above and make a contribution. And then enjoy. Thank you -- P.M.