As with so many final debates of a Presidential series, there's a panicked sense of "too little, too late" afield.  In 1992 by most reckonings George Bush found his groove against Clinton, but it did too little to staunch the damage.  People have made up their minds-- at least about the debates-- before candidates go into the now-semi-ubiquitous third debate.  Unlike the Bushes in either '92 or '04, McCain has suffered no comparable embarassments, yet thanks to the economic crisis he is now limping in the polls, and the moralistic press (abetted in this campaign by a now rather moralistic public) wants nothing to do with "negativity" of the sort McCain stirs by asking Obama about his association with Bill Ayers.  Glibness, on the other hand, they're plenty happy with.

 

     Just take "Senator Government"s free-wheeling response on CAFTA, Columbia, and free trade generally, which finally landed us, somehow, in some bizarre pastoral version of the Corporate State where vast factories span the continent, churning out automated armadas of green cars.  Unlike the homely John McCain, who cleaves to a couple of solid principles and hammers them home, Obama glided through-- goodness, how many dots did he paint upon the clouds there?  But more importantly:   how the devil were they connected?--if at all!  This wool-gathering ramble from Obama should alert the cautious to just how this "temperate" (read:  diffident!) man will govern from the White House:  Carter's idealism married to Clinton's bull sessions.  Talk of a second gathering New Deal from the mouths of neo-liberals who don't remember the first one [perhaps more correctly this would be a third New Deal, the Great Society qualifying easily as No. 2] probably don't amount to much-- in the long run.  A President Obama plus a Democratic supermajority would probably fall, like so many armies before who have overwhelmed the enemy's baggage, into plundering and looting on behalf of favorite constituencies:  card-check legislation for the unions, rollbacks on partial-birth abortion legislation for the "choice" lobby, amnesty for illegals, new affirmative action schemes-- rather than have the discipline to roll out a coherent suite of new comprehensive spending programs.  At least a few of the new Democrats on the hill will be technocrats, Bluedogs or  both, and some of these folks will probably help apply the brakes on at least some of the madness.  But the greatest danger of all, I fear, is in Obama's diffident, academic, on-theone-hand this; on-the-other-hand that approach to issues.  In the White House, he'll be dealing with more than just "issues" though-- he'll have to handle emergencies.  And that is something which has been, for his entire life now, "above his pay grade."

 

     Obama may not succeed in crafting a legislative agenda that makes serfs of the American people or which brings them to heel for some Democratic "permanent majority"-- no, my friends, I think he and his enablers will find the buyer's remorse of the American public rather difficult to curb!--but if elected he will prove deplorably facile at squandering their money, racking up their deficits and debt, raising their taxes across the board, promoting inefficiency both in markets and in government, frittering away strategic advantages on the geopolitical stage, stagnating our quest for energy independence, forfeiting our momentum in Iraq, and burdening our social services (both public and private) with a continued influx of illegal immigrants and with petty, divisive and intrusive mandates for various kinds of "diversity."  His campaign has profited handsomely from the unease and fearfulness of the electorate and has made grandiose promises that are patently unrealizable.  That he will absolutely raise taxes on the middle-class is a testament, not so much to his perverse idea of public-spiritedness (we will be told, a few months into his-- still hypothetical!--administration that "we elected him to make the hard choices, and we will appreciate being asked to make sacrifices") as to the unimaginative, unrepentantly paleo-liberal cast of his thinking.  His default approach to any "problem" will be a program, backed by a fistful of taxdollars; if elected, he will treat the current economic crisis as an excuse in perpetuity to pin up laundry lists to the wall.  Conceptually, they'll mostly slide down like jell-o; but dollar-wise they'll stick around the room like a herd of white elephants.

 

     Again, neither Carter nor Clinton managed to expand government after the manner of their Progressive and Liberal forebears; at heart, they may have had little stomach for the project, and with six years between them of solid majorities in Congress there was little determined collective action on the part of these Democratic regimes.  Obama won't succeed either, but that doesn't mean he'll be any less of a threat or an embarassment as a President.  Like Carter, he will prove weak, indecisive, and multiple-minded on a host of international issues.  Like Clinton, he will be distractable and incoherent.  He shows strong signs of wedding Carter's smug stubbornness with Clinton's lack of a personal center.  I remain unconvinced that Obama reads people well or truly "empathizes" with them, qualities that, in his better moments, may have helped Clinton revise his assumptions and become a more pragmatic leader.  Obama's fall campaign has strenuously sought to avoid the kind of attempts at "uplift" that are clearly his second nature-- he's trying not to 'weird people out', but if elected he will feel his messianic impulses to be vindicated.  The end result will be dangerous overreach, preening ego, and then preachy jeremiads delivered to the American people when they fail to enter into the spirit of his inflated "audacity."

 

     Now, we still have a choice in this matter.  There is another ticket, one that embodies the small-r republican ideals that founded the nation and spread it across the plains.  It is made of two individuals whose foundational assumptions-- about country, about character, about freedom-- are distinctly different from Obama's.  They are, if you like, "simpler" people than Obama:  they do not strain for self-definition, they do not "contain multitudes."  They are unitary personalities, after the proscription of Plato.  Like the Roman Empress Plotina (as described by Camille Paglia) they have sought, to remain in office who they were when they entered it.  Faced with tremendous existential hardships in their lives, they have not fretted their moral dilemmas into "Catch-22s."  John McCain did not brood in indecisiveness when confronted by the loaded options presented him by his totalitarian captors.  Sarah Palin did not fret over what having a Downs infant might do to her career.  They soldiered on.  Not many of us have this kind of life-force in such abundance that it makes something reflexive and easy out of harsh, demanding choices.  I would never pretend to possess this myself.  They are, indeed, larger-than-life personalities.  It is not fame or "first-of"idness that makes them so; they are more than the sum of their impressive resumes. They do not flaunt conspicuous cosmopolitanism as some sort of demonstration of a spurious superiority, though they are broad-hearted people who take the world's troubles seriously.  They have the audacity of personality while maintaining a cautious prudence about what is doable, and when.  They remember, too, that our current single-mindedness about "economic crisis" cannot be separated from our larger, longer-term problems with energy, enterprise, and global security; and they are mindful not to cast out the baby of American markets with the bathwater of Wall Street (and Main Street) irrational exuberance.  Though no Rousseauist pipe-dreamers and authoritarians, they know the Wordsworthian values of nature, family, and simple emotional spontaneity, nor do they meet the ideals of country and spirit with impiety.  They are natural-born conservatives, patriots and independents.  They promise the way to a more minimalist, streamlined government, and a more robust path to energy and security.  They will not ask for unlimited authority, rolling mandates or "undivided government."  They are not, and candidly admit so, undivided on every issue themselves.  John McCain and Sarah Palin are the sort of people who get a lot done without appearing to be busy; Barack Obama furrows his brows as though in Olympian labors, only to give birth to a mouse.  It is indeed the election of 1980 again, but this analogy has been abused.  It is not McCain who should be discarded; rather, it is Obama who fails to meet the test of readiness.