First McCain-Obama match: advantage McCain

The first Presidential debate didn’t have one of those zinger revelations, when you look at your candidate and yell the same way you do when your favorite football team intercepts the ball and heads for the uprights. But there was a memorable moment—Sen. John McCain’s dry humor on Iran. After a back-and-forth with Sen. Barack Obama about preconditions, McCain said, “So we just sit down with Ahmadinejad and he says we’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and we say no you’re not?” McCain also suggested Obama had misconstrued former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s advice on meeting with Iran, and it’s a sure thing Kissinger will clarify that. I think one of McCain’s best foreign policy ideas is a league of democracies. Frankly, I think our resources would be better applied than some of the wheel spinning we do with the UN. If you spend any time on the UN website, you’ll begin to see the U.S. is basically a checkbook as well as a political target.

 Both candidates agree on the admission of Georgia to NATO. Obama tried to dodge his first response to Russia’s incursion—“restraint”—but it was so widely reported on the news I think he lost points on that.

Another big gaffe, and I’m not sure why Obama continues to make it, is trying to brand McCain with the Bush logo. Anyone who knows anything about politics and is over the age of 30 knows about McCain’s dustups with Bush, and how different they have been on everything from climate change to the 9/11 commission. Whether Obama supporters will care about the actual facts is another matter perhaps best debated by that senator’s fans. It might also be argued that Obama follows his own party’s lead most of the time.

McCain also brought up the issue of how we dealt with the Afghan freedom fighters after we helped them defeat Russia. When Obama talked about Pakistan, explaining in so many words that we’d respond with force to threats from that country in border areas if we have to, he came up short on understanding our association with Pakistan that reaches to a time long before 9/11. Without that country’s help and conduit for our arms to the fighters, we would not have seen the Russians defeated in Afghanistan.

What neither candidate gets but should and I hope they’ll be asked in the future is how media impacts a presidency. Advances in technology put information on screens around the globe. I’ve often wondered how what I write affects what someone else thinks of our country, especially if they don’t live in a country with freedom of the press.

Our own media relentlessly covers politics, and the worst stories make the best headlines. There can be damage if reportage is unfair or inaccurate, as it has been for instance over Haditha. How many people, I wonder, know the actual outcome? How many know lawsuits are pending against the Democratic congressman who convicted those troops publicly before the trials even began? I often wish our public figures would think about what they are saying to media. It’s one thing for a member of the “tinselati” as I call celebs to stand on a stage and criticize the country. It’s quite another for a congressman to condemn our troops without benefit of fact or trial. The world listens.

Neither candidate has thought about that aspect of our reputation around the world. Presidents have been promising to improve our image for a very long time. Anger towards us is nothing new. Awareness of it is because we have access to more information from faraway places than ever before. Within the UN, Russia has harmed our standing. It’s important I think for a president to think carefully rather than saying to himself, well, they hate us because we went into Iraq. Or they hate us because of George Bush. That just isn’t accurate and a jaunt through history, even a brief one, will enlighten on that matter.

Both the media and entertainment industries have a great deal to do with our reputation. Both industries are supportive of Obama. My problem with that is, considering the non-reportage on several matters I’ve written about, such as some seriously questionable earmarks, that our own media would give the Democratic senator a pass and rarely ask the hard questions they have asked Bush. I base that on the fact that portions of the Kennedy brothers' papers have yet to be released. Seymour Hersh described this in his book 'The Dark Side of Camelot.' When I read that book, I was horrified at what we were not told, even when some of the top publications in the country knew the truth. I was very young, but Camelot certainly had an impact on my generation.

I had to admit to myself tonight that maybe the presidency does come down to perceptions of character. And branding. McCain has had to campaign against not only his opponent, but at times various powerful media outlets enamored of Obama. McCain is a persevering sort, and I think we will need that in the next few years. He also knows a great deal about spending and I think he is so right. Spending will take us down before any enemy will. It absolutely must be curtailed.

 When I hear the Illinois senator talk, I am impressed by his ability with words, just as I was when I read both his books. He is a fine speaker and a fine writer, a man with the mind of a philosopher and the soul of a dreamer.

But I can’t see a dreamer as commander-in-chief, especially one with a massive spending plan, a goal to socialize medicine despite billions of dollars in fraud in Medicare and Medicaid,  and too little experience in navigating the political currents in Washington and around the globe. There is also the troublesome matter of class warfare, something encouraged by strategists and operatives in the Democratic Party. Right now the American Dream is something you should be guilty about. I find that offensive.

I think Obama would make a great professor. After charisma, a great deal of his appeal to his constituency rests on spending and entitlements, and it's my opinion we just don't have the bucks. There’s also the matter of the current leadership in Congress. On that subject, I could write a very uncomplimentary book.