Matching political rhetoric with reality.

When I was in my twenties, I sat in the leftfield bleachers at Comiskey Park watching the Chicago White Sox lose yet another game.  Somewhere around the bottom of the fifth Richie Zisk popped a lazy, looping foul ball behind home plate and I watched, amused, as a number of children and adults alike scrambled to catch it barehanded.  Turning to my friend I remarked, “what kind of an idiot would actually try to catch a ball without a glove?”  Not more than ten seconds later Zisk smashed a line drive into the left field seats about three rows below where I was sitting.  Without a second thought I was on my feet, diving over empty chairs and little kids alike to try and catch that ball.

After my friend and I both stopped laughing at the patently absurd way I had conducted myself, particularly after lecturing anyone within earshot about the irrationality of the very action I had just eagerly engaged in, I began to think about the whole incident.  There’s a tendency in all of us to pontificate about what we would or wouldn’t do as we sit in the comfort of our own homes, feet up with a cold beer in hand, watching the latest idiocy reveal itself on the nightly news.  We’re all heroes when it comes to defending our families against a hoard of knife-wielding, club-waving thugs; we’d never gamble the rent money on a risky get-rich-quick scheme; and no amount of temptation would cause us to abandon the morals and principles that define our basic character.

Fortunately, my home has never been invaded, I’ve never been much of a gambler, and as for the kind of temptations that would cause me to leave my wife and run off to Tahiti with a long-legged 20-year-old blonde, that hasn’t happened yet either (and at my age isn’t likely to).  So like the young man of my youth, I can feel safe to pontificate about life all I want without having to put those words to the test. 

But not so Hillary, Obama, or any other of the mental giants vying for the Democrat Party nomination.  Unlike us, they are likely to face threats and temptations every bit as real — on a national level — as the ones I described above.  There is obviously no way to know exactly how someone will act until that time comes, but character does provide a few clues.  And unlike us, failing the test won’t simply provide an amusing anecdote to begin an opinion piece a few decades later.  It could mean the difference between poverty or prosperity, progress or retrenchment, victory or defeat.

And so it is President-to-Be Obama has told us that he’d nuke Pakistan if need be to kill Osama Bin Laden, who hasn’t actually been seen in about three years and may already be dead.  Well, not nuke Pakistan, because he later announced that he’s not the kind of guy to use nuclear weapons after all; but he’d still bomb the living hell out of the area he’s hiding in if necessary.  Well, maybe not bomb the living hell out of OBL’s hiding place, because that might kill a lot of innocent people protecting the terrorist who killed 3000 of our innocent people; but he’d do something — a lot more, anyway, than George Bush!  And he’d do it whether Pakistan gave him permission to invade their territory, or whether the UN agreed with his actions.  Well, maybe not act completely unilaterally, because after all Obama has great respect for international law and has already criticized the current administration for acting unilaterally (with only 60 or so foreign partners) when it invaded Iraq.  But you get the idea.  Unlike Bush, Obama means business when it comes to fighting the war on terror.

The Obama strategy is fairly clear in this regard.  Say anything you want, on any occasion, retracting or expanding those remarks on any subsequent occasion, and when elected start your thought process all over again.  This has the advantage of allowing Obama to be perceived as a strong, vigorous leader to those who seek a strong, vigorous leader; and to be seen as a compassionate global-sexual (the elevation of metro-sexual) kind of guy to those for whom the United Nations is the paragon of morality and virtue.  In short, like the empty suit his candidacy is, he is everything to everyone, as long as you don’t look behind the curtain and examine him too closely.

Hillary, on the other hand, has the opposite problem.  Thanks to eight years in the White House we already have a fairly clear idea of who and what she is.  We know that she wants to socialize medicine, raise our kids by a village, and shut down the vast right wing conspiracy that made a twenty-year-old intern perform oral sex on her husband.  We also know that, as a Clinton, the truth is a somewhat fungible commodity.  Like all precious jewels, it is trotted out and displayed only on rare public occasions.  Otherwise, the costume jewelry pearls will do fine for every day use.  

This is why President-to-Be Rodham-Clinton will not renounce her vote to support the invasion of Iraq, even though she rails against the war every chance she gets.  Like your brother-in-law who constantly sneaks smokes in the woods out back while professing that he kicked the habit a few years back, you know he/she is lying through their nicotine-stained teeth.  But since you haven’t actually caught him with a lighted cigarette in his hands, he can still maintain what the Nixon Administration once called “plausible deniability.”

Hillary also will not reject the possible use of nuclear weapons if the occasion warrants, nor give up the right to take unilateral action to defend/promote the national interest.  This isn’t because down deep she’s George Patton in drag.  Quite the opposite; Hillary is no more interested in using the military to blow up and break things than her husband was during his term in office.  The military, to the Clintons, is an instrument of social policy.  It undertakes humanitarian missions overseas to make the Clintons look benevolent, and provides a snappy background for photographers to capture when the President exits the helicopter landing on the White House grounds.  Oh, and in a crunch, the Marines can provide an extra waiter or two for those special White House dinner parties.

Hillary won’t take the military option off the table because she’s smart enough to recognize that the Democrat primary voter is a teeny bit different from the ones she’ll face in the general election.  While the enlightened elites of San Francisco might be very happy with scrapping our nukes and seeking common ground with the jihaddists, the pig farmer in Iowa and the salesman in Kansas doen’t necessarily share this view.  The United States will not elect a pacifist during a time of war, even a supposedly unpopular one (remember George McGovern?).  If Hillary is to have a chance in November ‘08, she can’t be perceived as a weak sister to Rudy/Fred/Mitt’s strong brother.  

I make no predictions about whether Hillary or Obama will get the Democrat nomination, though I think it’s logical that the race is coming down to these two.  The hard-core partisans are the ones who actually vote in primaries, and Obama’s muddled Kumbaya philosophy appeals to them the most.  Hillary, on the other hand, has the negatives from last year’s Christmas party to use as a blunt instrument to marshall her resources, and this can be a powerful incentive to help skew the primary votes in her direction.  If Chicago, Boston, New York and other Democrat strongholds can hold back the tally on election nights to see how many votes are still needed to win, there’s no substantive difference when a primary election is the focus.

Assuming that Hillary survives the primary process, she is well positioned to become a pistol-toting mama in the South, and a brie-eating socialite in the North.  Because she never renounced her vote on the Iraq war authorization, she’ll claim that she’s prepared to use force if necessary.  Because she has bad-mouthed the war from the moment she cast that vote, she can claim to be at one with the kindred spirits of peace and harmony. 

It’s a tough sell for anyone who has more than half a brain and can easily see through this charade, but it’s at least a theoretical leg to stand on.  As for Obama, despite his now-I’ll-nuke-you, now-I-won’t bravado, he’s seen essentially as anti-war, anti-military, anti-everything-Bush-is.  It will be a lot harder for him to do the Hillary two-step in different parts of the country, and thus he will be a lot easier for any grown-up nominated by the Republican Party to beat.