Debating to lead the tarnished States of America

This is, perhaps, the single most important opinion column I've read during this presidential campaign. I've often extolled the uniquely brilliant perspective and insight found in Lisa Van Dusen's writings - but today, Ms. Van Dusen has pierced the heart of what is wrong with American politics and contemporary American society.

PLEASE pass this along to your families, friends, and co-workers. Now is the time for all of us to embrace our indignation, passion, and outrage - and lay claim to the hope of a restored America marked by values of justice and moral leadership.

That... is what is at stake in this election. - zjm


By LISA VAN DUSEN | Sunday, 28 September 2008

Given the frenzy of anticipation whipped up ahead of the first McCain-Obama debate Friday night, the event itself was a bit of a shrug.

With the U.S. economy in its biggest meltdown since the Great Depression, last week's bail-out freak-out on Capitol Hill and John McCain's will-he-or-won't-he pre-debate tease, Americans were on the edge of their Lay-Z-Boys, waiting for some sense that somebody feels not just their pain but their outrage.

As it was, most of the tension was between the two men on stage and not about the anger of the mob outside.

On the economy, Barack Obama and John McCain laid out their mixed feelings about Congress's reworking of the three-page carte blanche package from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a back-and-forth that was not helped by McCain's weirdly flaccid maverick turn Thursday.

(The thing about guys who make a career of ticking off their own party is that when they turn up in the middle of a campaign trolling for a consensus photo-op, scores get settled).

Though the two men clashed again on the wisdom of coming out against the invasion of Iraq versus the wisdom of coming out in favour of the surge, most of what was said on foreign policy reinforced what we already knew: McCain has been to places Sarah Palin's never even heard of and Obama is a bigger fan of diplomacy than of swagger.

More than anything, the dynamic between the candidates revealed just how much hostility can develop between two men caught in the vortex of a dysfunctional campaign week. There was a great pot/kettle joke when McCain, who's been running a chaotically id-driven, purely tactical game, accused Obama of not knowing the difference between tactics and strategy.

The format outlined by moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS actually allowed for McCain and Obama to address each other directly at regular intervals but McCain wouldn't look at Obama, much less address him, which was an excellent example of a tactic as opposed to a strategy.

The debate that almost wasn't came at the end of a Washington week so crazy that it was a triumph of polls over personality (85 per cent of Americans wanted the debate to go ahead) just for McCain and Obama to spend their Friday night on the same stage.

There was the disaster of the economic meltdown followed by a bailout package that landed on Capitol Hill like a gigantic radioactive meteorite nobody would touch without a very long pole and a hazmat suit.

Then there was the tactical disaster of McCain suspending his campaign without really suspending it and riding into town to create the illusion of an intervention nobody wanted.

Meanwhile, both Main Street and Wall Street now look like downtown Grozny, circa 1995, and America's standing internationally has been devalued to the point where its moral, strategic and economic leverage is receding by the day.

In foreign policy terms, the next president will be taking the tiller of a garbage barge piled with an illegal war, flaunted contempt for international law and the collapse of the latest WTO round, among other policy refuse.

Add to that an economic meltdown that will undermine America's authority with international financial institutions and a bailout that could seriously impede both the deficit cutting and priority implementing abilities of whoever wins, and the political discourse takes on a whole new sense of urgency.

In this context, the most important differences between the candidates Friday night were the stylistic ones. These days, McCain's 20th century posture that America is always right because America is America sounds downright reckless.

There's an advantage to being the new guy in a race against the party of an incompetent and unpopular regime. No matter how hard your opponent tries to disown the record, you get to stand as the advocate for and surrogate of the voters who can't be in the room.

For Obama, there's an added value in reminding people that McCain doesn't really have much right to be angry, given where he's spent the past 26 years, the past eight in particular.

That indignation should come from the guy who wasn't part of the problem, didn't endorse the policies and doesn't have 13 cars and nine houses.