I'm trying to take Howard Wolfson's advice to the McCain Campaign gurus and take a "long vacation"-- a figurative one, this!-- from reading the papers and following the news.  The spirit has its demands, and there'll be time enough to start fighting January's battles-- even before January . . . 

 

     That said, I'll offer the incoming administration one piece of friendly advice, and well-intentioned too.  Sen. Chuck Hagel is a disgrace to his profession.  The recent glowing tribute to him that appeared in The New Yorker really tells us nothing new; rather it serves to handily remind us of all that is most disgraceful about him in one handy serving.  I'm not complaining about Hagel's intelligence, or even his positions per se.  It is the man's character that galls me-- the ambition that is not only shameless but downright shameful.

 

     It is simply offensive for any politician to so blatantly advertise-- nay, self-promote-- his "willingness" to accept offices that have not been offered (not even under the table, apparently) to him by anyone.  I can at least forgive a politician for making it formally clear that he or she might be willing to consider a nod as running-mate, provided that the language used is appropriately diplomatic.  But Chuck Hagel uses no such discretion-- he is nakedly blunt.  Moreover, he didn't just talk about being Veep-- he'd be willing to be Secretary of State too!  And, of course, it's not even just about his own party-- he was expressly pandering to Obama!!

 

     It's not the ideological "shift" that galls me:  if Robert Gates is invited to stay on at Defense I would have no objection, either to the invitation or the acceptance.   And that should go for other Republicans who are asked in good faith and who believe they can serve the country by faithfully administering an agency, or providing advice, with the assurance that Obama will will make his expectations clear and will abide by them.  Rather, it is that Chuck Hagel quite desperately wants to be a Big Shot, and is absolutely unreserved about the fact.

 

     Evidently he long ago decided his best chances would lie with Obama.  Again, within certain respectful perimeters it is fully appropriate for him to discuss divergences of opinion with his party's candidate.  In this case, however, I hardly feel it was kind of him to make them so open.  Hagel has not given McCain due credit for the Iraq Surge strategy, and he has caricatured McCain's foreign policy outlook by trying to convert his long-time colleague into some sort of fearful warmonger. 

 

     Like Dick Lugar, Hagel has apparently fallen ill with the Foggy Bottom-centric view that diplomacy, right or wrong, is the only legitimate avenue to take in securing America's interests.  As a Mid-Westerner, perhaps this sort of William Jennings Bryan-esque naivete is understandable, a sort of too-good-hearted folksiness that makes the mistake of thinking that everyone in the world  is gentle folk, too.  But at least the telegenic Luger has the decency not to make such a discreditable noise on his own behalf.  Hagel's wild self-salesmanship is a disgusting display; and moreover, it does little credit to the notion that he possesses the sort of "judgment" necessary for the job.  President-Elect Obama would better serve himself, and his country, by choosing the more careful, cerebral and experienced Sens. Kerry or Lugar to represent his administration at the State Department.  Ideology aside, either man would bring better qualities of discretion to the office than Hagel has displayed, and both men are apparently willing to treat the office as a career-capstone than as a springboard for an apparently bottomless ambition.

 

     As to what a disaster Bill Richardson would be in the office, well . . . .  that is just too much to consider.

     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.

Friends, I've spent so much time arguing these debates up and down, in emails and on "Blackboard" for a government seminar, that I'm afraid I'm in an observation deficit.  However, at the risk of pumping worthless paper on fiat, let's try to rehearse a few points:

 

     The MSM refuses to analyze these debates on any kind of point-by-point logical basis.  Now, in one sense that's no scandal, since even the best debates are liable to produce much less in the way of truly rational argument than one could easily produce by way of a speech, a White Paper, or even through a humble blog.  That said, the debates are being treated like one of those childish games, "Paper, Scissors, What's the Other Thing?" let's say, where the slightly older, rather a bit of a jerk player always has the best of it against whatever clod he manipulates into playing a rigged game.  Thus they can magnanimously call the debates  a "draw" (what nonpartisan objectivity!!!) while immediately telling you that "Obama won.  He's your next President.  Say it already!!!"  Thus are the viewers' elbows twisted till they cry "uncle."

 

     I'm happy to respect Joe Biden's knowledge and experience-- he's done some very good things for law enforcement, and his idea of partitioning Iraq at least had the boldness to lay out a real game-plan, even if, in hindsight, it probably would have produced a humanitarian crisis on par with what repatriating the freed slaves en masse back to Africa would have meant.  He would have been a better candidate than Mike Dukakis, and he's more deserving of the present Democratic nomination than Barack Obama.  That said, he positively reveled in doom and gloom during his debate with Palin.  I don't hold it against him that he knows all the doings of the Senate back and forth like a chess champion-- no governor, not Palin, Bill Clinton, Carter, Reagan, whoever, could go into a debate with a gazillion-term senator (like the cad in Legally Blonde, he's been a Senator since he was thirty!) and be able to play catch-up or call out all his bluffs.  And bluff he certainly did.  That bombshell about Obama's spending priorities:  we might have to-- not cut!-- but slow down the increase of foreign aid!  --After an $800 billion bailout!  In a recession!  Oh, and we're not going to raise middle-class taxes!  Dear Lord, that takes the cake.  Biden tried to coast through the debate on the grounds that all eyes were on Palin, and that her critics (now, thanks to endless media manipulation, a large swatch of the general population) were expecting her to freeze like a deer (naw naw, say the MSM:  you have to say "moose"!  hehe, that's so clever and transgressive!  We liberals are so funny!!)-- a "moose" caught in the headlights.  [Do mooses freeze in the headlights?  oh, what would a liberal know!].  She didn't, of course, but Biden, simply by being a low-cal version of his usual gaseous self (he didn't go over time! he didn't tear Palin to shreds! the MSM cheerleaders chant) somehow "won."

 

     The Obama-McCain debates haven't exactly been great theatre, but I'm still marveling at some of the items that don't get mulled over.  For instance:

 

     I.  Does Obama truly believe that, because Iraq has some kind of a "budget surplus" (in such a questionable and corrupt environment as the Iraqi government, I wonder what, in practical terms, this actually amounts to-- a Swiss bank account that collects the Live Abroad Fund for the Oil Ministry?) the Iraqis are instantly capable of asking the US forces to stand-down and putting Free Iraqi brigades in their place?  If this is what Obama means-- if this is what he draws from a "budget surplus"-- then why wait "sixteen months" for a full withdrawal?  Why not go all McGovern style and pull out in-- what was it, sixty days McG said?  Hmm.  Obama's hurled this chestnut into the fire twice now, yet I've never heard any crackle or pop.  Somebody needs to ask him just what he thinks this means.

 

     II.  As an NRO contributor (the Harvard economist in training, I forget her name!) points out:  will Obama ever stop announcing to other countries what he's going to do?  Yes, Osama bin Laden deserves a fistful of Tomahawk missiles aimed at his head wherever it rears, followed by three battalions of Special Forces, but-- do you have to tell the whole world, every Islamist and every pro-Taliban mole in the Pakistani Army and Ministries your intentions?  Obama's in some weird psychical space:  on domestic policy, along with all the "cultural issues" he does nothing but equivocate.  Lord knows how the definition of the word "terrorist" would unravel if you sat him down and asked him up front about Bill Ayers.  Yet on foreign affairs he wants to tell you exactly what "he'll do":  he's got time-tables, he's got threats, he's got teatime with dictators; he's busy like a train schedule.   Let the American voter try to read his mind, he says in effect; but he'll tell every single foreigner exactly what he's going to do for, or against, him.  How refreshing it must be to be a foreigner.

 

     III.  For a Democrat who's made his gestures at "praising" Reagan (but then, who doesn't he praise?) has Obama observed nothing about the importance of priorities?  He still promises he'll go to work on everything at once-- presumably with a legal pad and a head full of daydreams, since there isn't a quarter left in the treasury to dampen even the frilliest specimen in his delicates bag of laundry items.  Even the Clintons in their wildest days of hubris were only shooting for "the Budget" and "Healthcare"-- and in that order.  We could all do with a little reviving in the Jeffersonian gospel of government transparency today-- shame the Democrats can't ask their nominee to focus on a concrete objective besides sliding over the finish-line first.  If the American people are going to buy themselves a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate, with a comparable lock in the House, they might want some idea of what kind of legislation they'll be getting for the next two years.  Of course, they want somebody to save them from the economy.  With any luck, that problem's already been taken care of.  But now they'll race to do more than what's necessary, oh so much more . . . .

     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 . . . .

     The savants at ABC edited their Palin-Gibson interviews so many different ways, the various incarnations of them now (on two "World News Tonight" broadcasts, "Nightline" and "20/20") that it's impossible for me to sort out which parts I've seen once and which three or four times.

 

     If I haven't made it clear before, let me frankly admit that Gibson stumped me too the second he delivered the "Bush Doctrine" question.  Obviously, no matter what you once understood that term to mean, it's inoperable today, unless you're counting the Surge as Doctrine, and I don't think anyone's ever made that attribution (though it might be reasonable enough at this stage).

 

     Personally, my mind was leaning towards the "states that harbor terrorists [who attack us] will be treated the same as the terrorists themselves" interpretation.  Then you have to put the brackets in, because obviously we weren't going to bomb Ireland to take out the remnants of the IRA, though the times I remember the Administration going through its talking points you might have thought we were going to attack Hamas, Hezbollah, and maybe the occasional Maoist guerilla group in the Himalayas.

 

     I think enough analysis has been given of Gibson's literal-minded notion that there has been one and only one inviolable "Bush Doctrine" for me to need to rehash it further.  What I lean to thinking about now is this:  for those of us who, say, have never been diplomats or statesmen, but who are interested in world affairs in a serious way, what constitutes the exact level of knowledge and skills necessary to traverse a challenge like the Gibson interview?

 

     What I mean is this:  if you read the A-section of "The Wall Street Journal" every morning, how well would you do?  Some people are implying that Gov. Palin simply is someone who has not, in her prior life, ever taken a real interest in these things.  That may after all be true, though obviously she is the first person who knows that, if so,  now that changes.

 

     But then, Obama has a purported major in International Relations in his background, and Bill Clinton apparently had always been an impressive savant on any governmental topic long before he made it to the White House.  Yet Obama has made his (less fretted over in the MSM) gaffes through this campaign (remember how his Detroit speech flubbed fuel efficiency standards?), and James Fallows took him to task for his "crude" views on China and the roteness of his AIPAC speech on US-Israeli relations.  I don't think it's fair to imply that Palin lives in some cocoon, never having once given a thought to the world outside of Alaska, just because she had to manuever around in the vacuum of Gibson's questions.  What, really, was he looking for?  Some staggering recital of data like the devil-child in "Damien:  Omen II"?  For Palin to whip out her photo book from last year's family trip to South Ossettia?  Or should she name-drop an editorial writer from "The Economist" magazine?  If she had done any of these things, she might have appeared 'smart'-- and then gotten raked over the coals for sounding pretentious, or being too fact-driven, or some kind of robot.  Even Secretaries of State don't sit down with the press and talk like they're reading aloud from a foreign policy review.

 

     What occurs to me in reviewing the Gibson-Palin interviews is that Gov. Palin suffered the same problem anyone gets when the teacher calls on them with a question that is both a)obviously open-ended, or else capable of multiple interpretations; and b) has only one 'correct' answer for the instructor's purposes.  As, for instance:  "Now, Kaisersculture, what was the one thing Socrates had to say to avoid being put to death by the Athenians?"  Ah, gee:  you mean during his trial?  or just saying 'Yeah, get me outta here!' to Crito?  or standing up after the premiere of Aristophanes' The Clouds and yelling, 'Lies, all lies!'  Are we talking about something honest, or are you suggesting Socrates use a 'noble lie'?  Or is it a trick question, since Socrates was obviously content-- and Plato leaves us content-- that every just means of persuasion was exhausted and thus Socrates had to nobly submit to his unjust fate?  Which answer are you looking for?

 

     This reminds us how very well Palin handled the "social issues" questions, upon which she has given a good deal of theological and moral reflection.  On fiscal issues, Palin was bound, just as she was on foreign policy, by the need to do no damage to the ticket, particularly when trying to anticipate what kind of budget McCain will try to force upon Congress.  Obviously most of us supporting McCain-Palin are looking towards major "reform" on national spending, and Gibson was wrong to flick his hand at the issue of reforming bureaucracy.  If I parse Palin's comments correctly, she seems clearly open to the Defense Department's need for a firmer hand on its own internal waste; even without chopping major weapons programs, there are clearly plenty of quarters lost in the Pentagon that can be shaken out and returned to the taxpayers.  Ditto with all the other agencies.  Indeed, if anyone can roll back some of our superfluous enlargements of the Cabinet over the years, it should be these guys.  This is why I'm especially miffed at Gibson for not taking Gov. Palin's  work in taking down Murkowski from office and dealing with corruption in the state's energy commision seriously.  It makes all the difference whether you run a tight ship or not; the tragedy of George W. Bush, I think it can be agreed, is that, for all the initial outward veneer of competence in his administration, that quality wasn't there or else it eroded rapidly. 

 

     Palin declined to offer to tone-up Bush's domestic ideas on the economy, which of course have some superficial resemblance to the McCain ideas.  I think Gibson wanted to catch her on this--i.e. imply, aren't all Republican economic packages the same?  Well, no, Charlie.  But selling the ticket's economic package is not Job Description No. 1 for Palin right now.  Right now, she's the Attack Dog, and the way she handled that Hilary question shows how darned good she is at it.  She made Obama seem arrogant and out-of-it, all the while pitching to the PUMAs.  Job well done.

A brief thought or two after the "Nightline" continuation with Gov. Palin and Charles Gibson . . .

 

     First, Palin was very free and natural in her response to the ANWAR question, and was able to graciously say something that few, if any, Veeps have ever allowed themselves to do:  her and McCain have agreed to disagree about drilling there, and she's going to continue to work him over on the subject.  This suggests an easy and open relationship between the pair, and indicates that there will be a real exchange of ideas within a McCain-Palin administration. 

 

     The exchange also shows Palin's fundamental confidence in her own role as McCain's running-mate.  Whatever her learning-curve, she's not going to stand in silent awe of McCain or serve as window-dressing for the ticket in the way so many liberal antagonists suggest.  She will be a voice, at least in private, that offers its own candid views and works to be helpful on important policy.

 

     Gibson made himself a tad ridiculous in his efforts to underplay the significance of energy in our foreign policy.  If Hitler suffered repeated nightmares about his prized Ploesti oilfields burning in the night, that should remind us something about how energy is an absolute necessity in our security, in our very warmaking-capabilities, and by virtue of her familiarity with energy issues (which as governor of Alaska is a forthright part of her job description) she will be an important voice on national security. 

 

     Likewise, the Pakistan question is the kind of thing that no public servant can give an up-or-down answer on.  Palin has never been called on before to train herself in the Diplomatese that every ambassador, State Department official, or member of a Senate committee that has dealings abroad must observe.  She understands that her comments are already fair game for parsing by foreign leaders as a way of interpreting what could be official American policy in the months and years to come.  That struggle to put things into the properly ambiguous terms must be a constant struggle for any public figure-- and historians continue to parse the possible errors of nuance in official statements that might have encouraged, for instance, the Kaiser's prosecution of World War I.  Palin did what she had to do, and we saw her tires spinning as a result.  She cannot be faulted for declining to commit herself in black-and-white terms over what to do about removing Russian 'peacekeepers' from South Ossetia or going after Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.  To do so would be folly, as well as being, in Obama's inimitable trope, "above her pay-grade."

On the first installment of the Gibson-Palin "conversation":

 

     This is not Palin's finest moment, and plenty of liberal gawkers are going to jump all over it, but it's no kind of irretrievable disaster either.  Let's consider . . .

 

     Gov. Palin, in the first installment opening the 6:30 broadcast, was clearly in the opening moments of the first of what will be (win or lose in November) very many such conversations.  If we can find the footage for Obama, Biden, or John McCain's first stabs at "Meet the Idiots" (as a gentleman-professor of mine calls it!) or "Face the Nation" I'm sure we can find similar bouts of awkwardness.  Come to think of it, Sen. Obama has taken plenty of sweet time getting around to a lot of the "hurdles" expected to be run by a national figure.

 

     Now, Charles Gibson didn't condescend to ask nakedly "gotcha" questions at the reductio ad absurdum level ("Can you name the capital of Uzbekistan?"), but then-- when was the last time the Bush Administration invoked the "Bush Doctrine" by name?  Was Palin paling in the headlights?  well, so was I.  If Gibson wants to talk about preemptive war, pro or con?  why not simply ask, "Do you support the current President's doctrine of preemptive war?"  And does anyone doubt the answer to that?  You don't have to pick up the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs to know that McCain is going to uphold the idea that preemptive war can be justified on actionable intelligence about imminent threats to the United States.  And I don't think anyone seriously wonders that Sarah Palin disagrees on that one either.  At any rate, I'm sure she's gotten the memo about upholding her running-mate's policies.  And finally, when McCain's in office it's not going to be the "Bush Doctrine" any longer (did George H. W. Bush invoke the "Carter Doctrine" when Saddam invaded Kuwait, hum?).

 

     In short, asking about "the Bush Doctrine" is being rather pretentious in 2008-- and it's playing "Gotcha!"

 

     On the NATO front, Gibson seemed to be wondering if Palin understood the obligations of the treaty.  Again, I don't think anyone can imagine she doesn't understand the single thing that EVERYONE understands about the NATO treaty.  And since Ukraine and Georgia's entrance into NATO has been an idea long under discussion (Thatcher in her 2002 book "Statecraft" weighs in con-- which  personally I agree with, but that's negotiable!).  Certainly Palin showed her awareness of their membership-track status, and there's nothing inherently controversial about supporting their admission, as the Bush Administration and a goodly majority of the foreign policy establishment back that idea.  And the way she affirmed "Ukraine-- and Georgia" demonstrates some awarness of Ukraine's greater geographic proximity to the European heartland and its priority as a potential power and allie.  And I think she warmed into the question by insinuating (though she would have won the engagement had she quietly and overtly insisted upon the point) that one of the perks of Georgia's membership would be stability-- Russia can't mess with them precisely because we WOULD go to war for them.

 

     Insofar as she equivocated on whether we really would go to war for Georgia-- well, that's an equivocation that's patently more and more warranted as NATO expands.  Implicitely, I would argue, that's already become the case as the prospect of fighting World War III becomes increasingly less urgent the further removed the conflict would be from the English Channel.

 

     On the veepstakes question itself, right off the bat:  very strong, appropriate message about "not batting an eye."  Gov. Palin sends the signal of readiness, willingness, and a sense of moral clarity about the "mission."  All of which is clearly spontaneous and felt, and will make a connection with her viewers.  Also, it's exactly the kind of thing that bodes so well for her incumbency and her power to learn and wield authority on the national and international stage. 

 

     In the interview's 2nd installment, I think Palin handled very well the potentially much-more inflamatory question about her providential beliefs.  Now, philosophically and theologically speaking, many people, both today and among the great thinkers of the past, have held some version of a providential theory of history.  I think Palin made clear enough that her version does not deny man's free will, nor does it assure us of the confidence that we can act "with God on our side."  She avoided that kind of hubris staunchly, and made her case forcefully that the goal is for us to act "on God's side" and also to hope that our actions (in Iraq, specifically) work toward the end of achieving the Greater Good.  What she said, in fact, would have resonated quite well with the deistic philosophy of many of the Founding Fathers as well as with the views of evangelical Christians today.  Everyone's going to be tearing into this segment of the interview, and I think it was both potentially much more damaging for Palin, and much more successful for her.  Also, she had clearly warmed into the interview surroundings and was speaking more naturally and begining to find her thrust in the conversation. 

 

     And since Gibson was assuming the grim manner of an MIT prof on doctoral examination duty, it's not like his own "performance" will be free of criticism, and caricature.  If Palin sounded too academically insistant upon her allusion to Abraham Lincoln, well,  I assume she knows her Lincoln.  In a pinch, that sure works better for me than knowing your JFK!

 

     --Also, she was effectively insistent in her comments about her son's deployment to Iraq with his Stryker brigade.  And that underscores, too, that this is a very emotional and difficult day for her!  She can fairly respond to criticism by humanizing this little mini-ordeal, as is only fair, and underline the points she wants to come back to from her on-air responses.

 

     Last night I walked into a hotbed of smoldering liberal libel and anger-- a graduate seminar, no less!

 

     Now, many of these good people are adult learners who've come in from the world of grown-up responsibilities in order to pick up a little learning or tone up their resume in our current degree-obsessed Paperocracy.  Not your typical "Theory"-consuming, Marxist pseudo-intellectual types, certainly.  And yet, based upon class discussion,  not necessarily very bright either.

 

     At the suggestion of Gov. Palin's name, they let in with a veritable chorus (no, make that cacophony, since choruses need to harmonize) of the latest innuendos and smears:  HAVE YOU HEARD that . . .  Sarah Palin banned books?!?  Sarah Palin teaches creationism?!?  Sarah Palin is a control-freak mom?!?  A sexist stunt from McCain?!?  Oh, but aren't we WORRIED:  worried about-- How women might be taken in by Palin?  About how people don't understand their economic interests?  About how many closet racists we have who just won't make themselves vote for Obama, even though they should/need to/desperately want to/must/MUST BE MADE TO?!?

 

     One schoolteacher, a rather dead-on-arrival looking sort, complained about how she had sought out Obama materials from the local campaign office "for her school"--but they had nothing left!  (This was perhaps the first occasion I've had to sigh with relief over Obama's popularity)  Another student worried cryptically over the presence of a large Mark Warner display somewhere roundabouts-- "But where was Obama's name?"  Many a time was it lamented that McCain and Palin "just think we're stupid!"-- to try to take them in with all that fearmongering and crypto-sexism/racism/fascism!

 

     One particularly emotional sort weighed in with a refreshing narrative of conversion, to lighten the mood of glum that had descended upon this monolingual Pentecost of Obama-witnessing.  She had taken her mother (some kind of closet racist, apparently?) in hand and explained to her:  "Now, you cannot tell me that you can look at these candidates on paper, never mind which one is black and which one is white, and not vote for Obama.  I gave her a copy of his speech and said, Read this! [spread that Gospel!].  Don't pay attention to who wrote it, just see if you don't agree with it and then tell me you're not going to vote for him ! . . ."

 

     The good mother relented.  Kids, learn a valuable lesson:  once in a blue moon, hectoring your parents and accusing them of secret guilt actually WORKS.  Then again, just ask the Red Guards.

 

     But let me take this lady at a more serious level than she aspires to.  Even James Fallows (who I find usually very sensible and penetrating) writes in "The Atlantic" that Obama's speeches are crafted not only to be listened to but to be read, to linger on afterwards as documents that contain real thought and embody Obama's thinking.

 

     Well, I can believe that last bit.  But as a retired high school amateur of forensic oratory, let me say that I've never found Obama's speeches the least bit engaging or persuasive.  Passionate?  I think the blinders are finally coming off the MSM and its pundits, if we can judge by Howard Fineman's new digs against Obama's "pride" or Friedman's admonishments about the guy who 'slipped a valium' in Obama's coffee [note to Thomas the Globalization Engine-- that valium's always been in Obama's bloodstream].  No, the passion has never come out of Obama-- it's radiated towards him from his adulating legions.  As for the "thoughtful" bit, let's consider it more carefully.

 

     It is often bragged on Obama's behalf that his speeches show "nuance" and offer proof of how he would lead-- by (so the blandishments go) 'considering every angle of a problem carefully.'  This cliche in particular disturbs me.  It goes to the heart of the intellectual weakness I find in my fellow students.  This is the kind of Socratism for the Masses that self-consciously "hip" (to say nothing of "liberal"!) high school teachers and college professors expose their students to, often with allusions to great second-rate minds and raconteurs like Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Thoreau.  But what kind of "reason" is it exactly that must consider every single problem in the round-- since when is that the definition of rationality?  Where in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Leibniz, Tarski, or Mill is this enforced cliche about a limitless, supine perspectivism forever in suspense to find another "opinion", another "angle"-- and then pawning it off as "Logic"!

 

     And if Obama's thinking approach is bad thinking, it's positively atrocious as a leadership model.  What in the Lord's name have Democrats learned from their experiences with Carter and Clinton?  As if those gentlemen weren't indecisive enough with their collegiate bull-sessions and grown-up Show-and-Tell masquerading as Cabinet meetings and "policy discussions"-- now they've gone and nominated an actual (if not quite full-time) college professor!!

 

     The Obama phenomenon exposes the heart of the upper-middle class liberal electorate.  These are people with very set, wishful notions about what it means to be "smart."  They have playlists on their I-Pods that are considered "hip" (is there any Bach, Bruckner, Mozart or Ellington on these playlists?  Take a wild wager).  They have what is euphemistically called "nice furniture" (in ten years it'll be laughed off as a monstrosity, even though their children have never once sat on it). They took a brief stab at a couple of classic novels during an introductory course freshman year; maybe they did some highlighting in a Routledge secondary-source primer on Lacan in a graduate seminar.  They've never actually read "War and Peace", but they're certain all the Kennedys have.  If you can't find a copy of it at Kennebunkport, well, you know all the Bushes are illiterates.  And the yokels in the mountains and the Confederacy have never even heard of it, so what do they know?  Wasn't Tolstoy into some kind of Christianity, touting living with little or somesuch?  Well, he's famous anyway.  Just, like, you'd have to be really insightful to have ever heard his name though.

 

     So the upper-middle class liberal knows an awful lot about what it means to be "smart" and what it takes to govern.  Partly, it takes a lot of symbolism, but the right kind.  America is a frightfully racist society so being black and in office will do a lot of "healing."  Dressing sharply and working out a lot (going out in the wilderness to hunt or even just tramp about obviously does NOT count!) proves "character".  "Women's issues" are important, but women--eh, not so much.  --Actually, it seems, as long as libertine male politicians ensure abortion-on-demand and maternity leave and provide for outside-the-home childcare, there's no reason for women politicians at all.  --In any event, nominating women is a kind of pandering, and also somehow inexplicably unpleasant.  But a man who speaks well (ie. drones on in dispassionate academese) is clearly what's needed, and if he's indecisive ("thoughtful"), rootless ("a global citizen"), a moral blank ("change we can believe in"), preternaturally grasping ("the audacity of hope"), and shockingly inexperienced ("an outsider")-- then clearly he's the Second Coming of something, except that since you're secular it can't be Christ and since you know very little history you can't come up with anyone more impressive than that polished mediocrity, JFK.

 

     You'd think that people so conscious of literary allusions (Literature itself, it seems, is rather too much work) might be clued-up to the refreshingly Whitmanian energies that emanate from Sarah Palin and (in an admittedly different register) John McCain.  But apparently the Social Democrats among us have little stamina for the bracing project of building, or even just keeping up, the American Character that Emerson, Whitman, and the Founders before them, talked about and extolled.  And American Exceptionalism?  Oh, you must be a Nazi!  Anyway, the conquests of the Assyrians were a work of mercy compared to what the Supreme Court will do with our most cherished rights when McCain stiffens the conservative majority.  Not to mention, he'll start World War III.  Or else he'll have a heart attack and Palin will be President, in which case the Earth will slide out of its orbit and wander the asteroid belt.  No, only one man can save the world-- though his biggest concrete achievement has been winning a spoken-word Grammy.  Only one man has the dedicated followers who can redeem us from irremediable failures-- though so far all they've done is shown up to vote in a caucus.  Only one man has the ideas that will bring justice and prosperity-- though his big idea is "thinking."  Only one man can win our war, though he's never been in one, has no legislative background in defense, forestalled his fact-finding mission until he had every news anchor in tow, opposed the war before he was for it, yet still depends upon the support of those who want to end it.  But off course here "winning" it actually means losing it.

 

     Yep, I reckon that's why the pink collar mandarins of my seminar will vote for Barack Obama.  And that's why I'm voting for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

 

 

     I regret that I had not previously put into full form here the thoughts I had been emailing around to some old mentors, some weeks ago, about a Sarah Palin spot on the Republican ticket.  Well, I have only private emails to assert my claim to history to having "got there" before most everyone else did, but I won't bother to stop to revel in the distinction.

 

     Instead, I'm reveling in the excitement of this truly Out-of-the-Box choice on Sen. McCain's part, a choice that actually makes great sense for his ticket-- and the governance of this nation in 2009 and beyond.

 

     This is one of those beautiful times when a non-cynical position nevertheless has the delightful quality of fulfilling all sorts of goals a cynic would, standing in McCain's shoes, hope to accomplish.  It dropped a bomb on top of Obama's acceptance speech in Denver.  It changes the whole "mandate" of diversity that the Obama Democrats and their media enablers have assumed and promoted throughout this campaign.  It makes a possibly irresisitible pitch to millions of disaffected "PUMAs" in the Democratic party who are furious at the cavalier treatment Hillary Clinton received from so many pundits and activists who should fairly, given their policy goals and principles, have been at least understandingly supportive of Sen. Clinton's bid for the nomination-- but who instead seemed bent from the start on sabotaging it.  Palin's selection simultaneously changes the whole narrative of "change", putting a fresh, youthful face on the ticket who  radiates an authentic folksiness miles away from Obama's arugula-chomping upper-middle-class  elitism while also having a bearing (and the resume to back it up) that demonstrates real chops in the leadership department.

 

     I won't hesitate to admit that, nominally speaking, Palin's resume is "thin" by the usual requirements of the job-description.  If she were already into her second term as governor, it might be easier to immunize her, and McCain, from the charges that are coming in about her "inexperience."  But then, the Democrats are the ones who have thrown caution to the wind by nominating a man who began his Presidential campaign only two years flat into his Senate term.  By nominating Obama, they have changed the narrative, and the GOP can hardly be equitably blamed for putting someone of similar age and nominal years of service to Obama in the second slot on their ticket! 

 

     What's more, Palin's experience is executive, not only as governor but as mayor and, importantly, in her role as the state's oil commissioner.  Her road to the governor's mansion (if that's what they call it in Alaska!) was certainly harder than Obama's path to the US Senate, and her actions there have been more noteworthy.  She has demonstrated expertise in at least one area of policy that is of more vital interest-- and political viability-- than ever:  Energy.  On this topic alone her formidable background may grant her a decisive impact in her debate with Joe Biden. 

 

     Better still, her corruption-fighting and fiscal purging prove her to be a real soulmate for John McCain, in a way that Mitt Romney (whatever his charms) could never have been.  For all the advantages she brings to the ticket in terms of the ancillary excitements of her gender, youth, and outsider status, the best thing of all is that, shockingly, McCain has managed to put together a ticket that redoubles those qualities that are best in himself.  By selecting Palin, McCain proves anew that he is indeed the rule-breaking maverick who goes by his gut rather than by simple calculation.  That the pundits are acting more thunderstruck than they should be (Palin's name, after all, had at least been in early mention!) doesn't ruin the fun, though it's a nasty (if predictable) turn that some of them are taking up the Palin pick as sudden proof of "desperation" in the McCain campaign.  Rubbish.  Everyone knows the roll McCain has been on of late, and how increasingly sweaty the brows inside the Democratic fold are getting.  When all the stars are supposed to be aligned for the Democrats this fall, where's that big Mike Dukakis-style 17 point lead Barack's supposed to be basking in?

 

     The Republican Convention is suddenly going to be big.  America will tune in to learn something about this right-wing Tina Fey.  Suddenly, everyone finds, there's a real future for the Republicans in this election after all.  At first glance, it's because McCain is offering voters an alternate chance to "make history."  But upon deeper inspection, voters will find that they have the opportunity to put two radically individual people in the executive branch who will bring a level of independence, integrity, competence, and practicality to government that we truly have not seen in a very long time.  History making, indeed.

 

     Animation is not my cup of tea.  Neither, under usual circumstances, is what we might as well call "sentimental movies."  Let no one confuse cineastes, however snooty, with the "sensitive."  Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa will stir your feelings, your beliefs, your very soul like nothing else in film, but they don't go for "soft."  Neither, generally speaking, do Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Hawks, Ford, or other deities of classic Hollywood film.

 

     Still, I have to make allowances for films that elicit pure emotion through the combination of visual mastery and storytelling simplicity.  D. W. Griffith's movies are sentimental in the extreme, yet epically moving-- think Broken Blossoms or Orphans of the Storm.  The man knows how to touch, how to thrill a nerve in the most jaded viewer.  So do a handful of the best children's films (the ones for all ages) like Annaud's The Bear or Cuaron's A Little Princess.  Spielberg-- a problematic filmmaker if ever there was one!-- pulled it off with AI.  And Pixar has finally done it for me with Wall-E.

 

     I can't surrender to the temptation to call it an out-and-out masterpiece as Joe Morgenstern does, but I can heartily endorse his follow-up suggestion that it be shopped for a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars.  Rare would be the year that produces two commercial films to rival it in visual ambition and narrative charm.  If Wall-E makes a few concessions to entertaining the kiddies with its second half, they are neither so many nor so ill-advised as to dissipate the film's overall enchantment.  In fact, Spielberg's AI suffered a far more drastic decline in its second act and was shot through with inconsistency (to say nothing of implausibility) in its denouement, yet managed to be frighteningly immediate in its emotional resonance.  Sitting in the theatre, you knew already how haunted you would be.  And so it is with Wall-E, which always manages to introduce a new piece of comic invention or sweet reverie to console us for the loss of the haunted enchantment of its desert Earth.

 

     With all due respect to the many great Catholic thinkers, past and present, who have deeply influenced me, let me admit straight-up:  I absolutely refuse to deny characters like Wall-E or the robot-boy in AI their souls.  I'm not carrying over the metaphysics of the film-story into my waking universe, but neither will I be a Cartesian deadbeat and hold my heart aloof from these beings as though they were mere "machines."  Nor should the optimistic finale of Wall-E distract us from the fact that Wall-E has maintained his spirit far better than any of his human compatriots in their bovine exile.  Returning our planet to its lost organic splendor should be swell, but for the audience, it's the meek little robot who has truly inherited the earth.

 

     Wall-E is simply the great character of American movies in 2008 (Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrific performance, but the character, besides being obviously unlovable, even in a Nicholsonian way, is simply not as remarkable, unless you're one of those Flowers of Hell types who always thinks Evil is more fantastic than Good).  The Chaplin comparisons are apt; like the Tramp, Wall-E tugs at our hearts even as he delights us into laughter.  Smitten with the oddities he finds among humankind's detritus, he is curious and easily smitten, not only by EVE but with so many of the tokens of our own inventiveness, however banal they might seem to us.  From his lonely vantage, Hello, Dolly! functions much the way the Collected Shakespeare did for Huxley's John Savage, but with much more edifying results (perhaps in a cultural vacuum, musicals might give someone a more balanced and benign view of what it means to be human than the abysses of Othello and Lear, however alloyed by the comedies, the majority of which, after all, are rather tart?).  Wall-E tries so gamely to make a little garden of his blighted, lonely world, and it's clear how very much he deserves, as well as desires, to find his EVE.  That his quest to keep her takes him on a spirited odyssey full of heart-tugging reversals comes as no surprise; but thankfully, our suspense is repaid not only with a happy ending, but with so many stardust-sprinkles of lovely magic between these two along the way.

     Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Dark Knight has reignited the old "vigilante justice in movies" argument that has raged off and on since Dirty Harry and Death Wish.  Those visceral 70s films consciously provoked that argument, whatever the filmmakers real politics were.  But here, we're dealing with a comic-book hero blockbuster, a film awash in subtext, certainly, but can it carry all the significance critics claim to find in it?  Sure, it's a compelling entertainment that glows darkly upon the screen like a gem (one that swoops and swoons off of skyscrapers, that is!), but can it carry all the moral weight of a Thoughtful Drama?

 

     Nolan has carried the art-house gameiness of his breakout thriller Memento to his Batman pictures, investing them with a sober gravity far removed from the dark but campy aesthetic of the Tim Burton films with Michael Keaton.  Both sets of films are rather grim, but in very different ways.  The Burton films, if not exactly nihilistic, seem rather more preoccupied with their off-kilter villains and pop-Expressionist visuals than with crimefighting itself-- let alone the ethics of fighting crime.  Nolan has tried to ground his Batman, by contrast, in something recognizable as our lived-in reality, particularly with The Dark Knight which uses a basically unadorned Chicago as its stand-in for Gotham:  Gotham as Everymetropolis, USA.  Forget that high-rise Amtrak thing in Batman Begins.  This film is sleekly compelling to look at, all the more because it doesn't try to convince us we're looking at some kind of Blade Runner futuristic neverland.

 

     Both Liam Neeson in the first picture and, here, the late Heath Ledger, traffic in some kind of popcorn "Nietzschean" schtick.  Neeson's villain stood for a seemingly--aristocratic code gone bonkers, ready to torch Troy so that an Aeneid could get written.  Ledger's Joker has no similar notions of nobility, however spurious.  His war is not against "decadence" but the very notion of order itself.  He'd burn Aeneids so that, well, so he could carve up people's faces and/or make them do nasty things to each other.  As he insists himself, he's not that complicated.

 

     This presents an issue to be taken up with the screenplay by the freres Nolan.  The Joker's reign of terror (or should it be called a "rain of terror" in deference to the Joker's ambition to become some kind of asymmetrical force of nature?) seems to throw all kinds of moral connumdrums at the protagonists and the audience itself.  Yet the very philosophical blankness at the Joker's heart gives the film a representational headache.

 

     After all, how the devil is The Joker to keep his crime-spree running at all?  He always has available henchmen for whatever attack he has planned next; yet his wear-it-on-my-sleeve nihilism has to be off-putting to more than just his Mob frenemies, the guys who represent Old School crime-- the people who might be the Soviet Union to The Joker's Al Qaeda in the film's subtextual scheme.  If the opening bank heist is any indication, his hired help ought to catch on quickly to the fact that working for The Joker isn't really a career with prospects.  I mean, the guy burns money with impunity!-- you might have to wonder if his crew isn't composed of some kind of--

 

     Ideologues?  I wonder if Nolan means us to take that hint.  There's the hospital scene where The Joker completes Harvey Dent's moral transformation into Two Face.  There's the zonked-out guy with the sewn-in bomb and his incoherent babble about how The Joker promised to replace the pain with lights--Joker as cult-leader?  His shifting stories about his deformed face show him fishing around for psychologically impressive material-- mining fear and numb curiosity for an opening into the victim/opponent's psyche?  All of these methods indicate his status as terrorist (and the word itself gets bandied about a couple of times).  But while the real-world terrorists create chaos, they have (at least initially) 'reasons' for doing so.  One can argue very well that, in the end, any terrorist network that survives indefinitely will inevitably become something very like The Joker here-- bent on destruction for its own sake, out of habit, once the ostensible rationales for terrorism, whether religious, ethnic, or political, have been forgotten.  Look at the FARC, the IRA or the Khmer Rouge.  But if we can't know how The Joker started, at least we should have some sense of how he operates.  Burton's Batman, no marvel of plot-construction, at least gave us that.  His henchmen weren't required to behave as irrationally as Jack Nicholson did.  This Joker seems to have an endless sea of goons ready to line up to take his bullets in the back of the head.

 

      Alas, there's nothing to go on here.  For all of the tautness Nolan wishes to bring to his sprawling epic, it's undone by the fact that The Joker has to be everywhere and nowhere.  And that is facilitated by his ability to buy off or blackmail anyone into betraying the protagonists.  Which means, of course, that The Joker has to function in a much more "rational" way (however sub-basement the quality of this reason) than the film wants to credit him for.  We see Batman resorting to some kind of wiretapping/sonar-mapping McGuffin of dubious constitutionality in order to track The Joker down-- but what exactly made him so difficult to find in the first place?  I mean, how did he get so good at hiding?  Michael Mann would have found some way to show us how The Joker just couldn't be accessed by all the best footwork in the world.  Nolan demands we take it on faith.

 

     For all of its entertainment value, The Dark Knight isn't the morality play it aspires to be.  There's a diminishing of the film with every new "moral dilemma" it seeks to invent, reaching a sad low with the grimly underwhelming boats-and-bombs denoument.  If it's true that Spielberg can't resist using his editing rhythms to let the audience know when somebody is or isn't going to be killed in Schindler's List, then Nolan hasn't even begun to make the effort.  I'm not complaining about the overall outcome  [SPOILER ALERT:  both boats survive!]; rather, it's that there's little drama on the prisoner's ferry, and none at all on the civilian one.  If Nolan wanted to make us believe this moral crisis, he needed to turn those civvies on like the angry mobs that feared and loathed Christ or Socrates.  The prisoners-- well, I would've expected at least some of them to come on like Natural Born Killers.  Nolan can't just throw this thing in the audience's lap and then not be expected to turn up the suspense to a fever pitch.  Even if one accepts the exceptionally nominal sense of tension, anger and grief on the boats, Nolan still hasn't even worked to cross-cut the situation on the river with what's going on in the climactic duel between Batman and The Joker.  The noisy, incoherent finale is a waste of celluloid compared to the opening robbery, or the big chase sequence on the streets.

 

     As some critic has wisely pointed out, for all of The Joker's inanities about "chaos" and its "fair"ness, he's really a control-freak.  The average Janes, Joes, and Convicts on the boats abnegate his psychotic hypotheses as a social scientist by doing the 'boring'ly right thing.  That would be a heartening victory for normalicy, expect that, having  put the concept down on paper, Nolan seems so apathetic in bringing it to cinematic life.

 

     As for all the navel-gazing over "vigillanteism":  well, this has become such a kneejerk liberal bugbear that I'm immediately tempted to say, "Lighten up, people!  it's a comic book movie, for goshsakes!"  But, since the film clearly tries to summon the ghosts of Torture, Wiretapping, False Incrimination and whatnot, let's try to take the bait.  What is the film's judgment?:  certainly not, I think, that Batman is an illicit agent of fascism.  He assumes, in the end, the aspect of the Criminal in order to continue his quest for Justice, but we don't believe for a moment that he won't be vindicated in Gotham's eye in the sequel.  Nor, through the words of Gordon, does the film cast a negative glance upon Batman's retreating form at all.  I almost expected his boy to pull a Shane and run after him, so glowing and heroic are the words thrown upon our hero by the taciturn policeman.  Nolan clearly isn't so bent up about his duty to lecture the audience on constitutionality that he can't let Batman be Batman and do his thing, and for that, I'm grateful.

 

     If anything, The Dark Knight's bravest moral insight might lie in its treatment of Rachel's choice of men and her fate.  Her death, of course, is tragically undeserved, but there's also tragic irony in her making the choice of a man who would become, through madness or weakness, a villain bent on throwing all scruples, human or divine, out the window in deference to his awful worship of Chance over the man who would stand true to better convictions-- and must go on, remembering a woman who he believes was ready to give her love to him, who in fact had already decided to retract it in favor of another.  If there's one point on which The Dark Knight seems to justify deception over truth, it's in Alfred's burning of her letter.  To allow Rachel to break Batman/Bruce's spirit from beyond the grave would not only wound our crime-fighting hero, but forever marr her memory.   If Rachel ever gets to return from the grave, she's gonna feel like a lommox for that call.

 

     The essential problem for McCain in picking his veep has a dual nature:  on the one hand, because of a variety of factors, none necessarily a debit in itself-- McCain's age, his laconic manner, his perhaps rather stiff (understandably!) demeanor-- he really needs to find someone charismatic, high-energy:  the kind of person who could be an instantly plausible and palatable standard-bearer for the GOP in four years on the assumption that McCain elects to be a one-term president (or, to put it direly, on the assumption that Mac will lose).  All this is especially keen given the threat that Obama's charisma presents in the Presidential contest-- as well as the fact that, in four years, the Dems may have a strong hand, assuming either that Hillary takes a fallen Obama's place, or that Obama should prove a popular President.

 

     But then, there's the negative side of this proposition:  first, that a charismatic running-mate might accentuate McCain's vulnerabilties in terms of age and apparent energy; and second, that no matter WHO McCain chooses, the media is almost dead certain to find McCain-Blank underwhelming compared to the Obama ticket, unless both a) McCain can snag either Bono, a Roman demigod, or the revivified George Washington, Abe Lincoln, or Harry Truman; and b) Obama picks his grandmother.

 

     So what the devil's McCain to do?  In my view, there's an added factor here:  McCain has to pick someone he can be truly comfortable with, and that the media/public will believe he is comfortable with.  McCain is too obviously prickly and set-in-his-ways to make nice with somebody chosen for pure expediency, probably even if, all things being equal, that somebody hasn't already stood in the way of his ambitions before (i.e. Romney, Huckabee).   Win or lose, I believe McCain dearly wants to make this run his own, wants to do it his way.

 

     And while McCain's own ideological profile is sufficiently mixed  to allow him to plausibly pick someone who is not a perfect mesh with his own political views (and who coult that be?), he can't just pick someone who's an obvious opportunist or a patent ideologue.  Both his own profile and that of Obama with his dreary "change" mantra dictates the choice of someone who sells the idea of political adventure, of not doing things the "old way."

 

     Let me just break form and admit who seems best-suited to me:  I join David Frum in endorsing Rudy Giuliani.  Never mind the talking-points for a minute, just let me put it like this:  McCain-Giuliani = Rambo-Dirty Harry.  The Vietnam War Hero and the Crime-Fighting Crusader.  Two mad-as-hell I-did-it-my-way larger-than-life characters.

 

     I realize the hurdles here for the conservative base.  Some of them I agree with, some of them I do not.  However, if there are clearly two guys who are going to stand for national security, it is these two.  If any two Republicans can scream, 'We will do what it takes to keep this country alive, safe, and free' it's them.  The resumes are impeccable.  Their fundamental resolve under pressure is absolutely tested.  You can balk at their ideas, but to balk at their character is like demanded Coriolanus to show you his wounds.

 

     If McCain is to have a chance, he has to force an issue in the minds of American voters:  can you really trust an inexperienced academic like Obama to lead this country through war and recession?  Giuliani would redouble McCain's strengths on the war question, and  be an absolute plus on the economic side.  Rudy's  revitalizing New York City from a festering demilitarized zone on a permanent autopilot course from "The French Connection"s rot to "Escape from New York"s dystopia into something actually akin to the urban paradise of Woody Allen's films makes him the best political spokesperson for economic turnaround the GOP has got.  Romney may have business-smarts, but Giuliani is Adam Smith on steroids.

 

     Okay, Rudy ran a poor campaign, but what of that?  If Obama picks an also-ran like Biden, Edwards, or Hillary, what will be made of that?  Rudy's bad choices in the campaign were more strategic than tactical, which curiously carries less embarassment.  Faced with a run of early caucuses/primaries where one or another rival had something of a lock on the vote, he couldn't elbow his way in.  If he'd made some amazing gaffes it'd be different.  As it is, it's almost as if Giuliani is coming in fresh from retirement instead of back from the grave.

 

     I'm not saying I'll absolutely balk at another pick:  I hope to review a few potentials before McCain actually announces.  But for all the excitement a couple of "out of the box" contenders might bring, I think it's unreasonable to bank on any of them commanding the kind of respect Rudy could bring to the ticket.

     You can't blame John McCain for getting hot under the collar.  The MSM seems determined to transform Barack Obama's overseas sight-seeing tour into something with the combined resonance of Nixon in China, Reagan's "Tear down this wall", and Kennedy at Vienna (no, wait:  that one wasn't a keeper!).

 

     But he should ride this storm out rather than try to get ahead of himself by announcing his choice for Vice-President. 

 

     Yes, there are better reasons for doing it than just to change the media narrative.  You could argue that making a pick now would allow McCain to put more states and voters in play-- if he's gonna pick Crist, for example, you have to give Floridians a little time to get excited about it.  Better, if he picks someone who's going to activate enthusiasm in new corners of the GOP coaltion (or even excitement among Independents) then the sooner he makes that pick, the sooner the fires can get stoked, the fundraising accelerates, and the media labels start to get shuffled.

 

     But the fact is, McCain is not hurting too poorly in the polls at all; Rasmussen has placed him within as little as 2 points of Obama.  And so I hardly think it's a bad idea to let Obama's World Tour play itself out.

 

     Suppose Obama finally makes that longed-for gaffe.  Do you want it buried under news about McCain's Veepstakes?

 

     Suppose the public starts to feel nauseous after umpteen images of adoring crowds of foreigners chanting Obama's name-- as if the Germans get to decide for us who our President is going to be!  Why hand the viewers Drammamine just when their gills are starting to turn a justifiable shade of green?

 

     And really, it looks weak to announce your choice just because everyone knows you can't get any airtime.  The media is being grossly unfair.  Obama is really being shameless.  But right now, McCain isn't really flashing the kind of righteous, sarcastic grief he's capable of dishing out.  The media does know it, and they're not inclined to shed favors upon the heads of those they deem "weak"-- especially when there's an ideologically correct Golden One around like Obama.

 

     But not to despair.  The race is still tight, and I think there's some good chance that the narrative is going to change of its own accord.  There's still a long way to go before November.  And McCain can afford to hold the Veepstakes ammo for now.  At the worst, he can wait until his poll numbers are down.  Maybe he can even wait till his own convention.  It might help shift the narrative, just in case Obama  (and his running mate) gives 80,000 screaming fans in Denver that familiar feeling running up their leg.

      Senator John McCain's offer of a drawn-out series of ten townhall-style debates may have been disingenuous, an offer that might have been impossibly dumb to take up.  More to the point, the American public may not have the stomach for it, after the interminable debates of the Democratic primary contest that did so little to prove anything.  Yet at least McCain gave Obama a straight-up chance to hand the American media and public the kind of exhaustively "serious" campaign we've all (supposedly) been pining for these many years-- the sort of thing someone long ago anticipated of a 2000 match-up between Jack Kemp and Al Gore, a policy wonk's dream of civil debate and endless technocratic nerditry.  Obama could easily have refused the bait while rising to the challenge by conditionally accepting the McCain challenge while whittling down the number of actual debates, or mixing up the formats, or what have you.