I’m reminded of the scene in Life of Pi where the ministers of three religions are scandalized because the boy, Pi, who will later endure shipwreck with a tiger, wants to worship in all three of them. 

This account of the pros and cons of being a "Global Nomad" — what you are if you did part of your growing up in another culture or cultures — is extremely pertinent to understanding Obama’s "both/and" style and strategy and the way his identity and positions are hard to pin down.  For example, pro:

[A]s the world becomes ever more fast-paced global nomads come already equipped with the necessary skills to change adjustment stress into success. As cultures and communities come increasingly into contact, global nomads know how to respect, observe and learn from cultural differences. We don’t assume that our way is the best or only way. We are life-long learners, and the world is our classroom. These are critical skills in a world looking for economic prosperity and peace, when in the past there has been a tendency to destroy what we don’t understand and annihilate those who are different.

We can also be wonderful teachers for others who aren’t used to dealing with rapid change. Global nomads tend to think quickly on our feet and can take the initiative to troubleshoot — but we often do so in a context of understanding the currents and observing the situation first. Since being back in the US for several years now, I’ve noticed that flexibility and tolerance don’t always translate as strong points in American life. It seems to me that holding a strong personal viewpoint and "demonstrating leadership" is highly valued. A person’s forceful thinking and handling of a situation garners kudos. Observation in particular seems to be underrated. [...] Global nomads try to figure out which way the river is flowing before we jump in. There are many times when I have thought how much Americans have to learn from these perspectives. [...]

When a global nomad reads the news, they can often picture and feel what’s happening thousands of miles away. [...U]nlike kids who grow up in one place, a global nomad feels connected to events taking place all over the world. [...] Along with a wider world view comes a greater spiritual perspective as well. [...I]t’s easy for the global nomad to question those who promote a belief that there is only ONE way to nourish a spiritual life. Rather than be threatened by different belief systems, global nomads often relish the beauty in the diversity of religious systems, taking something from everything.

And from "the darker side":

One of the drawbacks is a sense of rootlessness.
The belief that you belong simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. [...]  The struggle in answering the question "Where are you from?" is a common experience [...]  It took me until my late twenties to acknowledge the deep sense of rootlessness and insecurity that my "exotic" overseas life masked. [...]

[G]lobal nomads know how to keep emotional distance. Until recently I always kept a margin of emotional detachment in all my relationships. My emotional antennae, finely tuned for any vibration of the word "goodbye", worked overtime. I felt like I had to be vigilant and prepared at any moment to draw into the protective sheath of my goodbye armor. Global nomads say goodbye multitudes of times — not only to people, but to schools, to homes, to cultural identities, to aspects of a country
they have come to love. Trusting a relationship to stay the course through the joy and the pain of life flies in the face of accumulated global nomad experience. [...]

[F]or those of us who have moved around a lot, stable community is a new concept, and it takes time to really understand or trust it. [...]

Here Obama’s belonging to the African American community should not be questioned. It’s his home community of choice, the one he has cast his lot with by commitment, time put in, marriage, and worship. If choice is in some ways a weaker bond than birth, in other ways it is stronger.

Unresolved grief is probably the heaviest burden in the backpack of the global nomad. [...] It’s taken me years to figure out how to respond when even small goodbyes trigger mudslides of denial and emotion.

There’s lots more.

He is both an African American and the biracial son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother; both a product of the streets of Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer, and a son of the streets of Jakarta, where he played as a kid. Obama is the personification of “both-and.”

That makes him representative of the growing numbers of us who rather smoothly juggle multiple identities. Any African American who speaks differently with black friends than in mixed settings, any college grad who works with his hands among other honest skilled laborers, any Jew like me who has a bizarre sense of homecoming among my neo-Orthodox cousins but feels even more at home at 1 A.M. in snowy Moscow in a bus full of karate students from all over the world, the windows steaming up as the South African team sings an African chant with Japanese words — well, we can relate.

He said his belief that American politics has seen enough “either-or” â€â€? and that he can shift the paradigm to “both-and” â€â€? is what led him to undertake “the risks and difficulties and challenges and silliness of a modern presidential campaign.”

Thus on the question of inner-city poverty and dysfunction, Obama proposes a suite of orthodox solutions â€â€? early childhood education, after-school and mentoring programs, efforts to teach young parents how to be parents. But he also emphasizes personal responsibility: “The framework that tends to be set up in Washington â€â€? which is either the problem is not enough money and not enough government programs, or the problem is a culture of poverty and not enough emphasis on traditional values â€â€? presents a false choice.”

That’s exactly the frustration of so many centrists — our sense that the Right and the Left each have a part of the truth, and they can’t put the two parts together because they’re too busy fighting with each other. When Mike Huckabee, for instance, says the right to life includes the right to basic health care and education, we feel the same relief listening to a Republican as we do to Democrat Obama. The relief of someone being drawn and quartered when the horses pulling in opposite directions are called to a halt.

While more resources are needed, “there is a strong values-and-character component to educational achievement,” Obama said. “To deny that is to deny reality, and I don’t want to cede that reality to conservatives who use it as an excuse to underfund the schools. … Sometimes people think that when we talk about values, that somehow that’s making a ‘lift yourself up by your own bootstraps’ argument and letting the larger society off the hook. That’s why I always emphasize that we need both individual responsibility and mutual responsibility.”

The cultural values of “educational achievement and delayed gratification and intergenerational responsibility and hard work and entrepreneurship” produce success, he said, but “if a child is raised in a disorderly environment with inadequate health care and guns going off late at night, then it’s a lot harder to incorporate those values. We as a society can take responsibility for creating conditions in which those cultural attributes are enhanced.” [...]

“We’ve learned that it was a good thing to break down the gender barriers that were keeping women from fully participating in the society; on the other hand, it turns out that things like marriage and fidelity are actually good things,” he said.

Robinson observes that Obama is not the first to say these things: “[N]o message gets through without the right messenger and the right moment. Not everyone is convinced that Obama is that messenger.” It is, however, the combination of the message and the messenger, who not only embodies it but has an unusual facility for articulating it, that is so appealing. When Obama gave the 2004 convention keynote speech that launched him into the political stratosphere, what struck me about it was his ability to express complex ideas with clarity, which has the effect of not just respecting but flattering the listener’s intelligence: what he’s saying isn’t oversimplified, yet you understand it so clearly that you feel smart, and you feel that he knows you’re smart. Robinson describes this nicely:

That’s the way Obama talks, by the way, in sinuous but precise sentences that practically diagram themselves as they go along.

It’s this rhetorical skill, combined with his appeal to those of us with multiple identities and the chameleonlike ability his own multiple identities give him to speak to many different singular identities in their own languages — that makes up Obama’s political whammy.

Read the whole column, and see who doesn’t think it’s Obama’s time.

I’m in the midst of writing another book now, called The Broken American Male. It’s about how the family rut is primarily due to the fragmented nature of today’s manâ€â€?just how messed up men are today and how we can heal them.

~ Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, in Publishers Weekly.

Discuss.

Presidential aspirants tend to write more sanitized books for use as campaign tools. [...]

But Dreams From My Father is not like that. Obama wrote the highly personal book when he was in his early 30s, after being approached by a publisher when he became the first black person elected editor of the Harvard Law Review."This is not the kind of book you would ever expect a politician to write," said GOP consultant Alex Vogel.

Now that infatuation with all things Obama is so intense, the book is a paperback bestseller, about to be re-released in hardcover with a new preface — and it is forthright about the fact that, as a confused and angry adolescent (which of course is redundant), Obama dallied with drugs.

In the book, Obama acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he says.

Oops. Lois Romano in the Washington Post wonders whether the candor will come back to bite him.

It was not so long ago that such blunt admissions would have led to a candidate’s undoing, and there is uneasiness in Democratic circles that "Dreams From My Father" will provide a blueprint for negative attacks. [...]

Two decades ago, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was forced to withdraw as a nominee for the Supreme Court after reports surfaced that he had used marijuana while he was a law professor. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton thought marijuana use could be enough of a liability in 1992 that he felt compelled to say he had not inhaled. And President Bush has managed to deflect endless gossip about his past by acknowledging that he had an "irresponsible" youth but offering no details.

Through his book, Obama has become the first potential presidential contender to admit trying cocaine. [...]

Obama has not expressed any regrets for his candor. In a preface to the new edition, he says that he would tell the same story today “even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.” [...]

“I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively,” he said. “Voters can make a judgment as to whether dumb things that I did when I was a teenager are relevant to the work that I’ve done since that time.”

Romano observes that in this pure-potential, honeymoon stage of Obama’s not-yet-candidacy,” the public seems to be enthusiastically embracing his openness.” But this may not just be a matter of giving a fair-haired favorite a free pass. In the “Purple Party” issue of New York Magazine, John Helleman provided this recipe for today’s winning “Frankencandidate” (I excerpted it here):

The candidate comes across, first and foremost, as not being completely full of shit. The journalist Joe Klein once wrote, in his guise as Anonymous, that “the handshake is the threshold act, the beginning of politics.� But today�at a moment when the national stage is cluttered with figures adept at left-right posturing but lacking utterly in authenticity�the threshold act is candor. Our man (or woman) is blunt and plainspoken, allergic to cant, averse to obfuscation. [...]

I continued quoting Helleman and commenting:

It gets better. The candidate is outspoken and plainspoken:

Thus does the candidate succeed in pissing off an assortment of muscle-bound constituencies. But he delights countless voters who crave a leader capable of surprise. Who, upon hearing yet another of his forays into the realm of the impolitic, find themselves
nodding, smiling, gasping, “I can’t believe he said that.�

He (or she — Andersen avoids politically-correct pronoun handwringing) is “recognizably human” — has flaws, an imperfect family life, has made mistakes, still sometimes makes them — and admits it, and learns from them. He knows when to say “I don’t know.” Above all, this candidate doesn’t condescend:

For the past three decades, American politics has been run by a consultantariat whose fundamental premise [...] is that voters
are entirely malleable, endlessly spinnable, infinitely manipulable. Stupid, in a word. [...]

The candidate [...] exists to test an alternative hypothesis. That the voters are more wised-up tha[n] the political professionals assume and that they can be wised-up even more. [...]

He senses that out there, on the hustings, the appetite for a grown-up conversation about where we are and where we need to go is palpable, bordering on ravenous.

Obama’s phenom status may be due to the fact that he appears to step into and fill precisely that void. American voters don’t mind human imperfection.  They mind hypocrisy and disrespect for their intelligence.  Indeed, Romano quotes "a senior Republican strategist who will be advising a GOP presidential candidate in 2008" saying that…

Obama has not yet gone through an intense vetting process and that a problem could arise if there is more to his story than he has chosen to share.

IMHO, barring any truly sordid revelation, Obama’s candor will serve him more as an asset than a liability. His drawbacks will be his inexperience, particularly his executive inexperience, and his premature overexposure. Simply by the law of gravity — what goes up must come down — the early overenthusiasm for this appealing but untested man cannot help but generate a backlash. The crush will cloy, and simply by being a real guy hailed as the incarnation of an ideal, Obama will inevitably disappoint. And I think he knows it.

(In the comments here, True Ancestor recommended Gore-Obama — which, we agreed, could truly be called The Green Ticket.)

By the generals running the war, says The New York Times.

In the fall of 2005, the generals running the Iraq war told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq was imperative.

The American troop presence, Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said at the time, was stoking the insurgency, fostering dependency among the Iraqi security forces and proving counterproductive for what General Abizaid has called “The Long War� against Islamic radicalism.

This week, General Abizaid, chief of the United States Central Command, told the same committee that American forces may be all that is preventing full-scale civil war in Iraq, so a phased troop withdrawal would be a mistake. What has changed, military experts and intelligence officials say, is that the insurgency of Baathists and foreign jihadists is no longer the greatest enemy the United States faces in Iraq. The biggest danger now, they say, is that violence between Shiites and Sunnis could destroy Iraq’s government and spill across the Middle East.

This is really interesting. The Democrats have rejected John Murtha as House Majority Leader, an implicit rebuke to Speaker Pelosi’s clear antiwar views (as well as to Rep. Murtha’s ethics troubles) and in a sense a replay of Lieberman’s victory over Lamont. One sizable contingent of Democratic voters were voting specifically for an end to the war, but it was the centrist “Blue Dog” Democrats who put the party over the top. Centrists of both parties seem to be leaning not so much towards “Let’s change course and leave” as towards “Let’s change course and win,” or at least give it a smart, serious try before giving up. Now the generals are saying that troop levels not only can’t go down yet, but they may need to go up:

A unit of about 2,200 marines that had been aboard naval warships in the Persian Gulf has begun moving into Anbar Province, the restive Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad. [...]

On Friday, the Pentagon also announced a new set of deployment orders for troops that will enter Iraq early in 2007, most for yearlong combat tours.

American commanders had hoped by this point to be deploying fewer combat brigades into Iraq than the number rotating out, but the Pentagon is now planning to keep a base level of about 141,000 troops in the country, with the possibility of “surging� more troops as needed.

The question is whether a majority of midterm voters will feel betrayed (we know some will) or vindicated and inspired by this shift.

So that’s all it’s all about.

Humility becomes him, doesn’t it? He sounded like a different person — far more real. The cockiness is gone, along with that contradictory little undertone of appeal — I don’t know quite how to describe it. When Dubya spoke he always sounded as if he was struggling to defy and ingratiate at the same time. He’d heavy-breathe with the effort — I always visualized cartoon drops of sweat flying from his brow — then smile to measure the effect of what he’d said, with a mixture of doubt and brazen daring.

That Bush is just . . . gone. That one sounded like Mighty Mouse on a trapeze. This one sounds like he has his feet on solid, modest, common ground. And I wondered . . . am I imagining it, or . . .

Rush Limbaugh said, “I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried.”

Do you think Bush feels liberated too? Do you think he is relieved? Has the election released him from the thrall of an ideological cabal who didn’t really suit him? Is he, on some level, glad that his handlers, minders, jailers, have been proven wrong?

Quite amazing, considering how much the Dems leave to be desired. And to be understood, I think, as a lashing-out at Bush & Co., a sublimation of the wish to yell “You’re fired!!”

My own reaction surprises and amuses me. My heart and head go their separate ways. I can’t help feeling an involuntary surge of exhilaration at the Democratic victory (if that’s what it is in the Senate as well as the House — big if) which is pure conditioned, home-team reflex: I was raised blue, most of my family and old friends are blue, and a part of me will always run with my herd of origin. But my brain has gone the other way! I disapprove and am apprehensive of much of what the Democrats are likely to do. I hope they surprise me, and are sobered by their sudden expulsion from the womb of opposition.

But the Republicans really had it coming. It’s the arrogance, stupid. Who can forget these breathtaking words:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that realityâ€â€?judiciously, as you willâ€â€?we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
        ~ Ron Suskind, The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004

It wasn’t “the reality-based community” that took the Republican empire down. It was reality.

Political polling has become a lucrative industry as we begin the 21st century, but the quality of polls has been in decline for decades.

John Podhoretz has recently said that most political polls this year are “garbage,” and that the pollsters know it. The low initial response to pollsters by the public is one of the reasons why the “margin of error” is much larger than pollsters will admit. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it is no wonder that most pollsters maintain a cabal of silence about the true value of their product. In virtually all of the contested major races this year, there are numerous polls which have attempted to measure voter sentiment. There are local and state polls (mostly by newspapers and universities), and national polls conducted by consultants and pollsters for cash and for media attention that promotes their polls.

A detailed examination of the mathematical and statistical reasons why polls have become so inaccurate over the past several decades belongs to another page and another time, but I am convinced (and believe it can be undeniably demonstrated) that the so-called margins of error in most political polls is not the usual three to five points, but really ten points or more. If that is so, the dependence on polls by the media and politicians is not only unjustified, but is likely to misinform the public. This year the evidence is rather overwhelming in that similar polls taken at the same time with similar samples have come up with such divergent results. Who is to be believed?

Read on. Good political prognostication, Casselman says, takes patience, legwork, and an almost uncanny ability to listen to what people are saying underneath what they’re saying. And even then it’s fallible, because a finger on the voting lever concentrates and crystallizes the mind in unpredictable ways.

So, happy (?!) Election Day, everybody. See you here tonight.

Mr. Obama was elected to the Senate only two years ago. He has no executive experience. The office in question is the presidency, arguably the toughest job in the world, requiring not only decisiveness, but vision, ability to manage and delegate, stamina, concentration and determination. Mr. Obama has had no chance to demonstrate any of these. He does have many abilities, including a gift for communication, a sense of humor, intelligence and a certain refreshing modesty and self-deprecation. His future is bright, and he eventually may be the first Hawaiian president (where he was born) of the United States. [ ... ]

I like Mr. Obama. He often thinks imaginatively and unconventionally. He is ultimately a centrist in a party which needs much more centrism than it is displaying now. He also has begun to show signs of political skill. I think his current “reconsideration” is just a ploy to put off the unseemly clamor of media pressure that was suddenly thrown at him, and that after a suitable time (and the mid-term elections), he will will restate his desire to finish at least one term in the Senate, and gain some valuable and critical experience. In fact, I have a suggestion for Mr. Obama and his party. Sen. Harry Reid, the minority leader, has become embroiled in a scandal from which he is unlikely to emerge without great damage. His leadership role even before this was received poorly by the American public, and it seems unwise for his party to elect him leader, either in the majority or minority, in the next term. Since Mr. Obama has already demonstrated communication skills, and is being mentioned for much higher office, why not make him the senate leader? It would be an excellent opportunity for him to learn and demonstrate his management and executive skills for a future presidential race, and Mr. Obama would be a much better spokesman for his party.

As Casselman immediately goes on to say, however, majority leader would of course depend on the Democrats taking control of the Senate, which does not look that likely, as the critical races across both houses of Congress are now (predictably) tightening up. In fact, he says, the overly high Democrat expectations that have gotten out of control have made anything less than a sweep look like a defeat. Defeatocrats, indeed.

Barack Obama.

As the scrutiny of every little detai about the junior senator from Illinois begins, Michael Currie Schaffer writes in The New Republic that Obama’s nicotine habit could furnish a welcome populist touch in a party infamous for upscale, Whole(Foods)ier-Than-Thou elitism:

[A]mong the healthy living smart-set types who represent the elite of both the Democratic Party and the American meritocracy, smokers are about as common as guys with mustaches. [ ... ]

Maureen Dowd wrote on Saturday that the smoking habit was an example of how the senator was “intriguingly imperfect,” a description that was never applied to the likes of Al Gore of John Kerry. Actuarially foolish and hopelessly out of fashion, it is a behavior that, at least in an overachiever like Obama, seems to assuage our national discomfort with overt ambition. [ ... ]

Which is why it was sort of disappointing to read a recent interview in which Obama claimed to have quit except for the occasional lapse. Though it was better than hearing him declare that he’d never inhaled, it sounded like the first step toward some eventual mealy-mouthed declaration that he voted for nicotine before be voted against it. “It’s an ongoing struggle,” Obama said.

I think that’s even better as a political attribute. To be an unapologetic puffer would be too downscale, and slightly unclean. To be a priggish, disapproving abstainer would be too too John Kerry. But constantly struggling to quit — that’s something everybody can identify with.

Reports The Christian Science Monitor.

[Y]oung Muslim-Americans today [are] educated, motivated, and integrated into society – and their voices help explain how the nation’s history of inclusion has helped to defuse sparks of Islamist extremism.

“American society is more into the whole assimilation aspect of it,” says New York-born [Omar] Jaber [an AmeriCorps volunteer]. “In America, it’s a lot easier to practice our religion without complications.”

In a nation where mosques have sprung up alongside churches and synagogues, where Muslim women are free to wear the hijab (or not), and where education and job opportunities range from decent to good, the resentments that can breed extremism do not seem very evident in the Muslim community. [ ... ]

“What we have here among Muslim-Americans is a very conservative success ethic,” says John Zogby, president of Zogby International in Utica, N.Y., whose polling firm has surveyed the Muslim-American community. “People come to this country and they like it. They don’t view it as the belly of the beast. With very few exceptions, you don’t see the bitter enclaves that you have in Europe.” [ ... ]

America, too, has poorer neighborhoods with large Muslim concentrations, but they tend to be interspersed with other ethnic groups and better assimilated into society. [ ... ]

In the US, 95 percent of Muslim-Americans are high school graduates, according to “Muslims in the Public Square,” a Zogby International survey in 2004. Almost 60 percent are college graduates, and Muslims are thriving economically around the country. Sixty-nine percent of adults make more than $35,000 a year, and one-third earn more than $75,000, the survey showed.

And so they haven’t needed Saudi money to build (Wahhabi) mosques, unlike the much poorer and more isolated British and other European Muslim communities, where the rate of unemployment and frustration among young men is dangerously high.

Heck, Ali Eteraz could have told them all that.

Read the whole article — and read Ali’s for even better analysis. In a dark time, it’ll make you feel proud of this (yes, I’ll be corny) land of opportunity, this experiment that works, for all its faults.

(What’s curious to me is that radical Islam hasn’t made bigger inroads into black American ghettoes — a question Ali also raises. It may be that even there, the capitalist allure of sports and hip-hop offers an antidotal form of the American dream. Or it may be that the pathology of the ‘hood is more self-destructive and disorganized . . . and when religion serves as a redemptive and organizing force, it’s usually the bone-deep, loving, long-suffering and optimistic Christianity of African-American tradition.)

The only fun thing about that is thinking about the heartburn it must be giving Hillary.

If the Democrats really do retake control of Congress in two weeks (WaPo is saying it looks increasingly possible for the Senate as well as the House):

• Part of me will be feeling Schadenfreude because the Republicans have really, really asked for it with their winning combination of arrogance and incompetence. According to the laws of behavioral psychology, if you want your dog to learn anything, such behavior should not be rewarded with the treat the pup loves best: power.

• Part of me will be feeling nausea and dread at the Democrats’ glee — because if they win, it’s not them winning, it’s just the Republicans losing. But instead of infusing them with sober responsibility for cleaning up the mess they’ve inherited, I fear a win will make them drunk with an arrogance of their own, and that they will go on a rampage of revenge and blame at a moment of grave national danger.
• And part of me will be feeling a neutral, Olympian bemusement at the whole tragicomic spectacle.

*participation mystique:

George Soros is giving a financial boost to the political fortunes of a former four-star general, Wesley Clark, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and is poised to mount another bid in 2008.

Mr. Soros gave $75,000 in July to a political group led by General Clark, Wes-Pac, according to a report filed yesterday with the Internal Revenue Service.

It is the largest known gift from Mr. Soros this year to a political organization affiliated with a contender for the presidency in 2008. [ ... ]

In April, Mr. Soros hosted a fund-raiser for WesPac at his home in Manhattan. General Clark also serves on the board of a nongovernmental organization supported by Mr. Soros, the International Crisis Group.

I received this via my brother from an Israel watchdog group that spotted some not-so-supportive-of-Israel remarks General Clark apparently made in a speech he gave at the University of Alabama last Friday (the 13th). Here’s the video, and here’s an article on the speech from the Tuscaloosa News (on Clark’s website, Securing America) which reports that Clark “took the Bush administration to task on practically all its foreign policy initiatives” — not talking directly to North Korea and Iran, not putting enough soldiers into Afghanistan to get Osama at the beginning, rushing into an Iraq war that has served al Qaeda’s interests and contemplating actions in Iran and Syria that would do the same. The article doesn’t mention Israel, and as yet no transcript of the speech is posted on Clark’s website. (The video link is there, and a transcript is promised.) I don’t have time to watch the whole video, so the following quote on Israel, from the Israel watchdog group’s e-mail, is unconfirmed by me:

We’ve made some serious, serious mistakes, the latest being – it’s hard to pick the latest – but one of them, recently, was the one where we sided with the Israelis in that air campaign in Lebanon. And instead of stopping the bombing, we were cheerleading it. It hurt Israel, it hurt Lebanon, and it hurt us. It helped Iran.

Clark, unfortunately from my point of view, is swinging left, stumping for Lamont and garnering praise from Daily Kos. It’s obviously proving a shrewd move short-term, since it scored the KA-CHING! from Soros. What it has to do with “Securing America” is a matter of debate.

His political philosophy places him closer to Theodore Roosevelt than to his other idols, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan: more noblesse oblige than libertarian populism or business conservatism. He says he favors “a minimum of government regulation in our lives,” but what really matters is whether a policy or business practice is in the national interest. If it isn’t, he’ll use the power of the government to change it. Goldwater would not have voted for a bill tightening controls over the tobacco industry, and Reagan would have balked at curbing pollution. McCain has backed both. [ ... ]

His commitment to bipartisanship is real–he worked with Russ Feingold on campaign finance reform, Ted Kennedy on immigration reform, and Joe Lieberman on global warming–as is his relish for battling his own party’s leaders. [ ... ]

McCain has one other attribute that separates him from many of his peers in Washington: He is willing to change his mind. This may be his most admirable quality; yet it is also frequently overlooked, probably because it seems to contradict McCain’s reputation for stubbornness, even nastiness–a reputation his right-wing opponents are all too happy to speculate about. [ ... ] Yet the most distinctive aspect of McCain’s temperament is not his anger; rather, it is his penchant for reconsidering both old enmities and old convictions.

Merely another journalist seduced? Is this the same McCain one of my commenters, and some Arizonans I know, call “tetched”? Who knows a pol better than his own constituents in his home state? Or does familiarity breed a sometimes unjust contempt? I have to admit, that Arizona opinion worries me. I vividly remember the people of Georgia warning us about Jimmy Carter, and did we listen?

But has any man ever had quite so contradictory a reputation? Hot or cold, love him or hate him seems to be the rule with McCain. At least he can’t be accused of that lukewarmness that is so many centrists’ damning faint praise.

Judis goes on to the point of his article: that McCain has changed his mind about American military power, becoming much more of an activist and interventionist than he used to be:

Nowhere has McCain’s willingness to question his own previous assumptions been more dramatic than on foreign policy. When he first arrived in Washington, he was essentially a realist, arguing that U.S. military power should only be used to protect vital national interests. Since the late ’90s, however, he has joined forces with neoconservatives to support a crusade aimed at overthrowing hostile and undemocratic regimes–by force, if necessary–and installing in their place democratic, pro-American governments. [ ... ]

And therein lies my McCain dilemma–and, perhaps, yours. If, like me, you believe that the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, then you are likely disturbed by McCain’s early and continuing support for it–indeed, he advocates sending more troops to that strife-torn land . . .

Exactly what endears him to some of us centrists to Judis’s right — those who feel that a loss in Iraq, however courted by the Bush administration’s folly, is strategically and morally unaffordable.

So, I’m confused. Who is the real John McCain? Nutjob or warrior-statesman?

Either that’s standard chintzy cover for an under-the-table deal with Hillary (a deal cozy?), or it’s true and therefore he’s the man we would have wanted for president: the man sane enough not to want to run for president. The Great American Catch-22.

I have never shared other centrists’ enthusiasm for Warner. He may have been a pragmatic and effective governor, but in his utterances he seemed to me the bland and cautious, “trimming” kind of centrist. I share many people’s nostalgia for Bobby Kennedy, but looking like a bad cartoon of him (the hair, the teeth) does not alone make a man presidential. I think he would have made a weak candidate, unelectable for different reasons than Hillary. So I don’t agree with those who think the Dems’ shot at the White House in ‘08 has just been set back.

So now what? *Shrug.* As a nonpartisan, my only dog in this fight is the hope of a fair and vigorous contest and at least one good choice. Among the remaining Dems, I have been most impressed by Wes Clark, though it’s painful to me to watch him doing the obligatory shilling for the likes of Ned Lamont. I know those are the dues that have to be paid to play in the big sandbox, but it’s yucky.

Of course I’m an Obama “fan,” and of course the less he pleases the blogo-mandarins of the left, the more he appeals to me:

[Obama had said:]

One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me? . . . And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.

[Talk Left remarks:]

[T]hat centrist credential burnishing has been going on for some time. [ ... ] Obama’s statement is pretty consistent with his disdain for the base of the Democratic Party and of a piece with his flirting with the DC Beltway mentality. You can be sure that David Broder loves this kind of stuff from Obama. I do not.

But, to say it yet again, it’s too early for him. Obama could be wasted in this contest. He’s not going to beat McCain or Giuliani. Sure, you can lose the presidency and win it later (see Nixon, Richard), but why would Dems want to risk their rising star becoming that kind of damaged goods? Let him keep his virginity a while longer.

Which means, I hope the Repubs nominate somebody I can vote for. Good riddance, George Allen. Mitt Romney I don’t know nearly enough about. Even before 9/11, Rudy was the kind of mayor who would be a good president. I’d vote for McCain, though a number of people I respect think he’s either a calculating grandstander or nuts.

If those numbers persist, they will likely excuse a number of sins, such as being pro-choice (though I’d wager Rudy will moderate or qualify that position if he runs — the pro-choice but anti-abortion position is being wheeled into place just in time) and being so comfortable with homosexuals that he crashed on the sofa of a gay friend and his partner when Donna Hanover kicked him out. (I (heart) New York.)

According to the same poll, “America’s Mayor” also leads the field of Republican candidates, and seems “ideologically about right” (neither too liberal nor too conservative) to 51% of registered voters, including 70% of Republicans.

And yet, 57% of voters surveyed don’t think he’s likely to be elected if he runs.

The poll then asks the same questions about Hillary.

The answers are somewhat symmetrical similar, but Rudy’s edge shows in several of them: 54% of voters DO want him to run, while 51% DO NOT want Hillary to run. And 66% don’t think she’s likely to be elected if she does.

Check it out.

Hat Tip: Icepick from The Kitchen Drawer.