http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/161THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
Saturday night, at holy man Rick Warren's Saddleback megachurch, Barack Obama was circumspect, nuanced and informed. John McCain, by comparison, was blustering, simplistic and shallow -- as well as the clear winner. It was a cringe-worthy two hours, both of which demonstrated why Republicans, despite all their liabilities, win national elections. While the Democrat is loquaciously appealing to reason, the other guy is busy with concise pandering and the amputation of logic. Accordingly, McCain was in top demagogic form Saturday night, while Obama seemed to have learned little about the importance of occasionally stooping low, and being brief about it. Voters -- most voters, anyway -- don't want a parade of circumspection, which is what Obama too often offered. They want self-confident action, which is what McCain offered. And never mind how his empirical record of manly action has actually unfolded. For instance while McCain was thrilling both the Saddleback folks and at-home audience with stirring rhetoric about how successfully perspicacious his aggressive attitude would be in the years to come, the New York Times was reviewing just how abysmally perspicacious it has, in fact, been.
From his immediate post-9/11 declaration that "Very obviously Iraq is the first country" among a broader, terrorist-supporting "network
is going to have to be attacked"; to the time when he "seized as something close to a smoking gun"; to the time that he wildly speculated on David Letterman's show that "Some of this anthrax may -- and I emphasize may -- have come from Iraq"; to the times "He lauded the war planners … including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney" -- virtually all of McCain's judgments were wrong. But you know what? He laid them on the public with forceful self-confidence and precise reassurances that he knows thine enemy. And that -- not the actual record -- is what enthralls the electorate. "He has the personality of a fighter pilot: when somebody stings you, you want to strike out," related retired and former McCain-supporter Gen. John H. Johns to the Times. "Just like the American people, his reaction was: show me somebody to hit." It was that aggressive attitude in McCain's performance Saturday night that eclipsed Obama's performance. The latter may have been right, but the former was unabashedly certain -- and equally important, he was rhetorically crisp about it.
On what issue or in what manner, asked Warren, had each candidate's thinking transformed in the last 10 years? Obama replied at length that welfare reform had worked better than he expected, while McCain's response hammered with soundbite electricity what he's selling as a contemporary urgency: "We gotta drill now; we gotta drill here." Simple as that; the energy crisis as history in the making....Or how about this? When, Warren asked both gentlemen, does "a baby get human rights"? Yes, that's indeed a tough one, an issue involving complex and conflicting arguments from science, medicine, law, ethics, philosophy and party politics -- all of which Obama reflected in his meandering response that the whole miserable controversy is "above my pay grade." McCain's answer? "At the moment of conception." Period. Again, as simple -- and certain -- as that.
But there were also softballs lobbed by Warren in Saturday night's game, and the softest of them all was the one that any pol should be able to slam clean over the megacurch's rafters. It was the question about evil: Do we tolerate it, do we negotiate with it, or do we defeat it? asked Warren. Again, Obama gave a reasoned, balanced, intellectual response that spanned the philosophical universe from Aristotle to Kierkegaard to Zoroastrianism. McCain's reply? "Defeat it" -- a nice, tidy, phallocentric approach that however realistically impossible is at least electorally understandable, which means it gets votes...I am not suggesting that Sen. Obama convert himself into a maven of imitative oversimplification and soaring demagoguery. But in expressing his convictions, it is essential that he sound every bit as absolutely certain of himself -- whether he is or not -- as John McCain. Furthermore, he must train himself to express that certainty with the economy of soundbite crispness. That may not be what voters need, but it's what they want -- and no amount of merchandised 'new politics' is going to change that.
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