Our local paper carries an advice columnist named Carolyn Hax, who is actually quite good, almost always putting the question in a larger perspective, going into issues that lurk beneath the surface of the person’s questions. Today’s column handled a question about the difference between ego and self-esteem. The response starts from the perspective that ego and self-esteem can be synonyms, but then widens the issue. If one has high self-esteem, a healthy sense of self, then one faces life with a high sense of self-assurance and the protective aspects of the ego need not come into play. However, if one has low self-esteem, then one’s life can revolve around protecting one’s ego.
This line of thought leads to some interesting conclusions when one applies it to the Presidential Race.
Senator Obama faces life with a high sense of self-assurance, especially so given how disrupted his childhood was: left by his father, his move to Indonesia, his leaving his Mother to be raised by his Grandparents. One has to wonder at how he pulled everything together and be understanding if there is a certain level of self-detachment, a coolness that may the residuals of self-protecting mechanisms.
Senator McCain, on the other hand, contrary to what one would expect, given his military background and subsequent experience, seems to lack self-assurance, to need his ego stroked and calmed a bit. His feelings are genuinely hurt that Barack Obama did not sit down with him to discuss campaign financing or the town hall debates.
When McCain perceives that someone is leveling political attacks at him, most recently in the case of Rep. John Lewis, it is more than simply a campaign tactic to implore Barack Obama to somehow censure the person. At Saddleback Mountain, John McCain named Lewis as one of the three most important mentors in his life, as someone to whom he would go for advice. Why should McCain need Obama to intercede in a disagreement between McCain and one of his three most important mentors?
So one is left with a perception that Obama has a self-assurance that allows him to maneuver through stormy weather, the intelligence and intellectual curiosity to approach complex problems and the leadership skills necessary to assemble the right team to address the problem at hand and to work comfortably with them to make and implement the right decisions.
One is left with a perception that John McCain shoots from the hip when making decisions, is inarticulate to the point that one must question his thought process and level of understanding, and he lacks the level of self-assurance necessary to being a clam, decisive leader.
I would not have written or even suspected all this at the beginning of the year, but we now have a lot of information on which to make our voting decision this election year.
If Shakespeare could return to life for one last tragedy, John McCain would provide a worthy subject, conflicted as he has been between the better angels of his nature and the compulsion to win at any cost. As he descended into a hell of his own making, he plaintively cried out, “if only Barack Obama had agreed to town meetings, then we as a nation would have been spared the ugliness of this campaign!” Of his own making, because he was the one who hired the three thugs who represent everything that was reprehensible in the Bush 2000 Primary Team, which painted McCain as unbalanced because of his POW experience, and which issued an ad claiming that his adopted daughter from India was a black child whom he had had out of wedlock.
The strain of submitting to their direction caused many miscues, similar to the almost comedic one in the Obama camp, when Joe Biden condemned an ad that Obama had approved. But if Obama’s ads were counterpunches, the nastiness of the McCain campaign, once it had subdued McCain, took on such unrelenting ugliness that the rallies attracted supporters who were more and more caught up in the all consuming hatred. Sarah Palin was hopefully oblivious to the venom, which she unleashed, and in one of the most bizarre turns of the screw, Cindy McCain took on her own role in stoking the crowd’s passions. Finally, almost inevitably, John McCain joined the chorus, caught up in the crowd’s enthusiasm, either not hearing or not truly incorporating the more hate-crazed threats against Obama.
And then it all unraveled. The passions that so enraptured the fringe of the party scared less impassioned Republicans and most Independents. The shift of the polls to Obama became a torrent. McCain saw blue states move out of range and formerly red states favor Obama. Responsible Republicans let McCain know, either directly or through the press, that they could no longer support the direction that his campaign had taken, that they were repulsed by the anti-Obama ads. Republican Candidates for the House and Senate had to reevaluate whether they wanted to be seen with either Sarah Palin or John McCain.
As late as the afternoon of October 10, campaign officials were defending their ads and the tone of their rallies. They took a quote from Obama decrying the ugliness of the rallies and tried to turn it into an attack on the poor whites who had taken offence to Obama’s ill-chosen remark that when they felt alienated from their Government, they clutched their Religion and their guns. This time it fell flat.
Did McCain ultimately bow to the failure of his campaign’s tactics or was his natural decency appalled when he came face to face, not in a stadium, but in a town meeting, with impassioned supporters. A man painted an incredibly bleak picture of an Obama Presidency, and McCain reacted, saying that Obama was a decent man, who would be a decent President. As the crowd grumbled and hissed, he quickly added that he thought that he would make a much better President, or he wouldn’t be running. A woman, with her face inches from McCain’s, accused Obama of being an Arab. McCain recoiled and humanized the man that his campaign had worked so hard to dehumanize. Those acts of decency probably sounded the death knell to McCain’s Presidential ambitions.
Has negative advertising truly died, at least for this political season? How can McCain’s campaign or even the RNC continue the politics of fear now that the candidate himself has neutered it? Norm Coleman, the Republican Senator from Minnesota, was already pulling his negative ads before McCain’s town meeting and hopefully all the other political campaigns, on both sides, will follow suit.
The election is still a work in process. It is not over until it is over. However, it is highly unlikely that John McCain can recover at this point. Is this the stuff of which tragedy is written? Whether it is or not does not diminish the compassion that one ought to feel for this imperfect warrior.
I have a similar feeling when a respected conservative from the magazine founded by William F Buckley, Jr., another of my early favorites, supports Barack Obama:
http://www.dmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?nm=Core+Pages&type=gen&mod=Core+Pages&tier=3&gid=B33A5C6E2CF04C9596A3EF81822D9F8E
Good for him! The time is now! Barack Obama is the man! Onward to victory in November!!
We have a clear choice in this presidential election. McCain/Palin would restart the Cold War, provoke the Soviets until they launched a nuclear missile attack, and we would all die in a nuclear holocaust. Obama/Biden will create a safer world, where capitalism can thrive, where we will all live without fear, where alternative energies will replace fossil fuels and where the environment will be allowed to recover, guaranteeing future generations safe food to eat, clear water to drink and clean air to breath.
Yes, this is a bit over the top. It is intended as satire and was inspired by blogs of the nature: “Make no mistake; this election is Socialism vs. Capitalism”, where a McCain supporter expresses the most likely feigned fear that an Obama Presidency would usher in an era of socialism.
George Will’s most recent editorial hits Obama’s Energy Policy in his usual articulate style, and it would be imprudent for Obama not to respond. It is not just that the editorial poses a problem (it is pretty derisive), but also that it poses an opportunity. The McCain ads have already hit Obama for not considering nuclear power, which even the French use in large supply, and for not considering off-shore drilling. It becomes not an issue of choosing this or that alternative, but one of being open-minded enough to consider all possibilities.
Fine. When Obama touches on energy policy in his acceptance speech, he should state that as soon as he is sworn in as President, he will appoint an energy task force to do a cost/benefit analysis of all possibilities. He could perhaps check with Al Gore first to see if he would lead it. His speech should make clear that all options are on the table, even nuclear and off-shore drilling, but he should also make clear that he prefers solar to nuclear if the costs and time to availability are even close, and finally that the costs of off-shore drilling include the possibility of harming other industries (e.g. beach front or fishing related).
It is important to note that George Will’s editorial also hits the Obama tax policy. This section too should be analyzed and considered seriously in crafting the ways in which Obama and his surrogates articulate his tax policies.
George Will’s erudition limits his audience mostly to those who enjoy complex thought processes, and who are quite likely to interpret Obama’s energy and tax policies for themselves. However, the McCain ads are not only simplistic, but also scurrilous, in ways that appeal to the most mean spirited and oft-times hidden parts in all of us. It is there that the greatest danger lies.
P.S. I know that Obama has already said that he would consider offshore drilling, but for whatever reason, most likely those scurrilous McCain ads, neither the press nor the public have incorporated this fact.
There is a wonderful German Documentary of the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The background music is that of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony directed by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin, where the 4th movement choir transforms “Ode to Joy” into “Ode to Freedom”. I first saw this film in Berlin in the 90’s, at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, watching it at least three times, alternately with German and English narration. The focus is not on Ronald Reagan, but on Michel Gorbachev. As more and more East Germans escaped to the West, Gorbachev offered little support to the failing East German Government. In a sadly (for him) prophetic statement, he said that we lived in rapidly changing times, and that those who could not keep up would be swept aside.
The film caused tears to stream down my face, especially when the citizens of East Berlin first rushed through a checkpoint and celebrated joyfully in West Berlin. At one point a woman pointed to a bus with an ad for Gorba-something Vodka and said, in German of course, “Gorbachev, we owe it all to Gorbachev.” As Americans, we often lose sight of the extent to which Gorbachev and other Russians contributed to the end of Communism and to the freedom of Eastern Europe. We often glory in our victory and stick a finger in the eye of the Russian bear.
As the Bush Administration puts anti-missile defenses in Poland, and encourages Georgia to subdue their breakaway provinces with large Russia populations, as they continually humiliate this once seemingly strong nuclear power, did it ever occur to them that Russia might, at some point, push back. McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, Randy Sheunemann, was a paid lobbyist for Georgia and was certainly involved in setting their expectations on how far they could go and still be assured of US backing.
This month Georgia invaded their breakaway province of South Ossetia, reportedly killing hundreds of people, and triggering a ferocious counterattack from Russia. John McCain then launches a ferocious and politically expedient verbal attack on Russia, announcing the return of the cold war. Call me paranoid, call me cynical, but did Randy Sheunemann help orchestrate these events? Or merely lay the groundwork?
The recent news coverage on McCain’s reaction to 9/11 is quite informative: his calling for an invasion of Iraq long before the Bush Administration made their plans public, his call to invade other countries that he saw as supporting terrorism; his strong support of Donald Rumsfeld; his statement that had he been the Republican nominee in 2000, he would have chosen Dick Cheney as VP. The bottom line is this: John McCain has not sold his soul to the Neo-Conservatives. He has been one for a long time.
The Obama campaign should not allow McCain to rewrite history. Is was not John McCain who originated the surge, and it was certainly not John McCain who fashioned the Anbar Awakening. The latter refers to the Sunni decision to join forces with us to defeat Al-Qaeda, and it predated the surge. In trying to take credit for the Anbar Awakening, and to link it with the surge, McCain only highlights his own ignorance. During his most recent tour of Iraq, McCain still did not understand the difference between Sunnis and Shiites; he actually thought that Shiite Iran was supporting Sunni Al-Qaeda. Joe Lieberman had to discretely correct McCain on that one, creating a campaign moment that should fit nicely into an ad. The bottom line is not just that McCain is a Neo-Conservative, but that he is not even a well-informed Neo-Conservative. This is not surprising. He graduated near the bottom of his class at West Point.
John McCain names President Theodore Roosevelt as one of his heroes and yet, Roosevelt famously said, “Speak softly and carry a Big Stick”. John McCain talks loudly about punishing Russia for their invasion of Georgia, but the war in Iraq has seriously sapped our military resources and left our “big stick”, not to mention our moral authority, considerably diminished. I used to think that had John McCain become President in 2000, he would have avoided the mistakes of the Bush Administration. It now appears to me that he would have only magnified them.
