More debate axing

Wilkinson and IOZ are scared of both:

Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must "take him out"; warbling around about "main street" while, in a lawerly, circumlocutory way signaling that he’s ultimately going to get behind hundred-billion-dollar cash bailouts to institutions that ought to be dismantled, destroyed, scattered to the wind. He wants GM to make electric cars. He wants the American people to know that he will appear before them to make extravagant xenophobic declarations in order to assuage their insecurity about the rise of other competing economies. He does this all in a calm, perfectly reasonable manner, with a convincing boardroom demeanor, and judging by the reactions of my liberal friends, with whom I listened, this was basically pleasing to them.

McCain is of course out of his mind: forgetful, vicious, reactionary. And his ideas are even crazier than BO’s, but there’s a certain comfort in the fact that their insanity is laid so plainly and mercilessly bare by the grinning psychopath’s delivery. He provides no quarter for those who want to convince themselves that by Killing People for Their Own Good we are not actually killing them, or that by suborning corporate malfeasance we are combating it, or that by desperately seeking to maintain the geography of radial sprawl and the automobile we are seeking "energy independence."

Shorter version:

Barack Obama: warmonger and xenophobe who pleased liberals with such talk (!!)

John McCain: psychopathic, vicious, reactionary.

If you analyze the debate literally, you can come to some of those conclusions, but they are not very telling.

To the degree to which Obama may be characterized as a xeonophobic hawk, liberals are pleased because that's what you have to do to get elected in this country. Kerry was more hawkish than Obama, but he tried to hide it. He dissembled. People didn't feel safe voting for him. They didn't feel like he would "protect" them enough from those evil terrorists, and it cost Kerry the election even though he was obviously much more intelligent than Bush and "won" their debates handily on the substance.

McCain I'm not so sure what to say about because we can no longer be sure who the real McCain is. He does strike me as a hysterical reactionary, but psychopathic? Nah. He's just very sure he's right, even when he's wrong, just like George W. Bush and all the neocons.

Remember in this debate McCain jested about Obama that it is "hard to reach across the aisle when you're so far to the left". Obama is said to have one of the most "liberal" voting records in the Senate. If you read NRO's corner, neocons are desperately trying to paint him as an extreme liberal in order to scare centrists away from voting for him.

So Obama is an extreme leftist warmonger? Come on. That doesn't make any sense in U.S. politics.

Here's what's really going on: Obama is a student of Kerry and Gore's defeats and has learned from them. He realizes the American people need a touch of xenophobia and hawkishness in order to feel safe. So he's talking the talk in these debates, and doing an excellent job if flash polls are any indicator.

About the voting record: Obama is the junior democratic Senator from Illinois. He did not come to the Senate to make legislative waves in his first term. Not yet. If he loses this election and gets some seniority, he'll make a few waves. But as the newcomer that he was, it was not his place to vote against the rest of the democratic party. Had he done so, HRC would have destroyed him in the primaries.

If you put this together, you'll see that the "real" Obama lies somewhere in between. Combine that with his intelligence and pragmatism, and you can be reasonably confident that he's not going to blow up Pakistan, bog us down in a new Afghanistan quagmire, or create vast new socialist programs. Give the man some credit, he's obviously way smarter then that.

McCain I don't know what to say about other than he is hysterical, unpredictable, and capable of going off in many different directions except for a few core issues that define him. This is the essence of being a maverick. With the way he has conducted his campaign -- back to and including the selection of Mrs. Nonsense -- I would not feel at all comfortable with him in the White House, but we'll see what voters think...