Sitting in my parked car, watching the rain pelter down while listening to the candidates debate, I had a rather shocking experience.  Much as I've accused Barack Obama of being too fond of the sound of his own voice, I realized:  heck, even I like the sound of his voice!

 

     But this debate was much too "substantive" an occasion to be swayed merely by timbres and inflections.  Nor is John McCain deficient in his own pleasures for his auditors, nor are they restricted to the comforting and familiar cadences of his speaking voice.

 

     I just want to make a couple of (hopefully brief) points.  Firstly:  Barack Obama needs to cut himself loose from this albatross of his, the infamous comment about meeting with foreign tyrants "without preconditions."

 

     When Sen. Obama made those comments, oh, eons ago, before the distant and dreary Medieval battle called "The Caucus of Iowa", I have no doubt at all that, bless his heart, he actually meant them to mean exactly like what they sound like they mean.  Which is as good a reason as any, in a nutshell, why he should not be elected President.

 

     Sen. Clinton understood perfectly well what he meant-- Biden too, though see if you can get him to admit that now (but, in his breathless torrents of words, who knows?  maybe he will!).  Playing to the moveon.org crowd, his natural constituency and his natural fit, Obama spoke what he truly believed-- that all these hopeless fuddy-duddy pols, be they Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, or Jacksonians in their view, had never bothered to ask their benighted selves this earth-shattering question:  'Can't we just, like-- you know?-- TALK to them?!'  And then everything would be solved!  Why, Obama had the answer to the world's problems!  Why hadn't anyone ever thought of just talking to Ahmadinejad, Castro, Saddam, Hitler-- we can just sort things right out!

 

     Now I'm sure that, the minute he got off that stage, half a dozen well-meaning and smart people in his campaign sat him down and said:  "Look!  I know you mean well, and you're a smart guy and you can't be expected to know everything, but let me explain something to you-- YOU CANNOT TALK TO THESE PEOPLE WITHOUT PRECONDITIONS!!!  Here's why . . . "  And Obama dutifully listened and, lesson took, understood that he had not just solved one of the mysteries of life, oh no, he wasn't right about that at all.

 

     Except now:  Obama tries to act as if 'Of course what I meant when I said that I would speak to them without preconditions is that, of course, I WON'T speak to them without preconditions!'  And then he tries to act like this pet phrase about "preconditions" is used by every elder statesman in the book, and that they mean by it the same thing that he wants to be understood to have meant by it.  Rubbish.  This is outright prevarication-- it's both false, and an insult to everyone's intelligence.  Bonus negative points for trying to put words into Henry Kissinger's mouth.

 

     But, more importantly, there's the disturbing fact that this neophyte  believed in his heart of hearts that, by personal speech with Ahmadinejad or your petty tyrant of choice, he could patch up all the world's difficulties.  That is both uncommonly naive and, morover, almost messianically arrogant.  Barack Obama doesn't believe he's the Second Coming (it's just some of his converts who do).  But like some other gifted but errant hotshots in human history, he displays a disturbing tendency to believe that, by sheer willpower or, in his case, by dint of his personal charisma and persuasiveness, he can untie thorny Gordian Knots that have defied the best efforts of those more experienced and sober-minded than himself by a quick swing of his rapier.  And does Obama not still believe, even now, that Presidents should go abroad on 'fact-finding' fishing expeditions?  Many a new President is seduced by the pomp and purported glamour of summits and overseas journeys, only to humiliate themselves and land their nation in  hot water (Reagan and the elder Bush were welcome exceptions to these habitual pratfalls).  A President Obama is, even now, almost guaranteed to go abroad in quest of some Kennedy-in-Vienna shakedown waiting to happen.  McCain, wielding his George Schultz aphorism, made plain that he will not be taken in by these foolish games.

 

     And, on another important note:  Does Obama not realize that, if elected, he's doomed to perform the Bill Clinton 1993 Redux?  Especially now with the Wall Street meltdown/bailout, there's not an inch of stretch in any imaginable federal budget next year.  His reams of new spending?:  impossible, unthinkable.  His promise not to raise taxes on the middle class?--c'mon!  There are two kinds of people in this world:  those who insist that something about a person can't be true because they SAID it wasn't true, and then-- those who know better!  Obama says he won't raise middle-class taxes?  Oh, but he's going to want some new revenue when he should assume office, and then, he'll find, the Rich are not the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so then . . .  well, it'd only be fair to raise middle class taxes SOME, right-- I mean, when you've got so much beautiful new legislation, shining with the gilt of Social Justice, and it's what people really elected him to do, so, yeah, hey, the middle class will understand.  I mean, everyone knows the price of arugula!

 

     So any liberal pundit who tells you that Obama won't raise your taxes is-- well, just you wait.  Clinton did it, but at least he did it with a budget hawk's axe on some other spending.  But Obama ain't your Concord Coalition type Democrat.

 

      John McCain, on the other hand:  well, he's the Concord Coalition on steroids, the Concord Coalition gone D-Day, gone Gulf War I.  It'll be a bloodbath on runaway spending.  What the budget needs isn't a looser belt, it's a slimmer waistline.  I'm asking Americans to let John McCain and Sarah Palin go all "The Biggest Loser" on the budget.  Hey, it means the opposite of what it sounds like it means, Obama-style:  in reality, we'll be the biggest winners . . . .