Getting to know Obama
She threw the kitchen sink at him. Accused Barack Obama of plagiarism. Mocked his eloquence. Questioned his truthfulness about NAFTA.The ad did what Obama's incoherent foreign policy positions could not do. It forced people to look through the glitz of his message of unit and hope and into his soul. It finally exposed the emptiness of his campaign.Wasn't enough. Hillary Clinton still faced extinction in Ohio and Texas. So what do you do when you have thrown the kitchen sink? Drop the atomic bomb.
Hence that brilliant "phone call at the White House at 3 a.m." commercial. In the great tradition of Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad, it was not subtle -- though in 2008 you don't actually show the nuclear explosion. It's enough just to suggest an apocalyptic crisis.
Ostensibly the ad was about experience. It wasn't. It was about familiarity. After all, as Obama pointed out, what exactly is the experience that prepares Hillary to answer the red phone at 3 a.m.?
She was raising a deeper question: Do you really know who this guy is? After a whirlwind courtship with this elegant man who rode into town just yesterday, are you really prepared to entrust him with your children, the major props in the ad?
After months of fruitlessly shadowboxing an ethereal opponent made up of equal parts hope, rhetoric and enthusiasm, Clinton had finally made contact with the enemy. The doubts she raised created just enough buyer's remorse to convince Democrats on Tuesday to not yet close the sale on the mysterious stranger.
The only way either Clinton or John McCain can defeat an opponent as dazzlingly new and fresh as Obama is to ask: Do you really know this guy?
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The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. But these are small-bore items of almost no controversy -- more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.
On the difficult compromises that required the political courage to challenge one's own political constituency, Obama flinched: the "gang of 14" compromise on judicial appointments, the immigration compromise to which Obama tried to append union-backed killer amendments, and, just last month, the compromise on warrantless eavesdropping that garnered 68 votes in the Senate. But not Obama's.
Who, in fact, supported all of these bipartisan deals, was a central player in two of them, and brokered the even more notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? John McCain, of course.
Yes, John McCain -- intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.
The guy who did not understand what caused the Anbar awakening which helped turn things around against al Qaeda in Iraq, and he is not sure al Qaeda is in Iraq, and if they are it is because of Bush and McCain and not because of al Qaeda. And, the guy who will send the troops back in if al Qaeda establishes a base in Iraq, but he will use the failed whack a mole tactics of the past rather than the protect the people counterinsurgency strategy that has worked. Yeah that Obama. The one who will talk with our enemies and abandon our friends.
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