What follows is an email that I prepared for my family. First, a little background: I have been receiving via a member of my family the occasional anti-Obama smear. Up till now I have primarily satisfied myself with debunking the crap and moving on because I don't think that the sender can be convinced. Just this once, however, I figured, "What the heck," and decided to be more proactive in informing the whole family.
You'll find the email, slightly modified for formatting, below the fold.
Hello family,
I thought that instead of waiting to debunk the next piece of rumor mill flotsam to float in from the internet, I would offer you an opinion of my own based on current events. Yes, this is about McCain versus Obama, but this time the email will be significantly shorter.
Quite simply two essential qualities any President or other executive officer needs are sound judgement and an even keel temperament. McCain is demonstrably deficient in both areas, especially in comparison to Barack Obama.
On judgement, rather than comparing their histories on issues, it is instructive to look at how both men gamble. By taking the political angle out of the decisions we're examining it allows us to see the thought processes of both men with unclouded eyes, revealing how they fit together better. Luckily for us, TIME Magazine has given us just such a look. In short - John McCain plays craps avidly, and Obama played poker (it isn't clear from the piece whether or not he still plays).
McCain's game is entirely a game of chance where players share a camaraderie at the table because their fortunes are linked as they roll against the house. If you look at the decisions John McCain has made in his life you'll see that the man likes to take risks (as a rule breaking youth, naval aviator, courted the media when other politicians didn't, wants to "bomb bomb" Iran, and his recent selection of Sarah Palin as running mate before he had a chance to see that she has a history of associating with a secessionist political party in Alaska), will double down when losing (unveiled the surge - luckily for his idea we started bribing the Suunis and Al-Sadr declared a cease fire soon after the insufficient troop increase), and likely doesn't know when to quit. Oh, yes, there's also the fact that McCain has never reported either his winnings or losings on his taxes from his long gambling sessions. That leaves two possibilities - he's either breaking the law, or gambling with somebody else's money. Even though his wife is richer than sin, we can't be sure that he isn't gambling on lobbyists' dimes because his wife won't fully release her tax returns ( there's a more thorough analysis of McCain's gambling here). In short, McCain doesn't think things through but instead takes a chance based on his gut - much like the current occupant of the White House.
Obama's game is almost the polar opposite. Although it provides a thrill in victory, only an idiot relies on luck in poker. Instead poker players have to develop a distinct skill set that includes evaluating the odds, reading other players, and bluffing. In short it is a game of skill, and those skills are the same ones needed by a diplomat or politician. This paragraph from the TIME article displays Obama's style:
But he always had his head in the game. The stakes were low enough — $1 ante and $3 top raise — to afford a long shot. Not Obama. He studied the cards as closely as he would an eleventh-hour amendment to a bill. The odds were religion to him. Only rarely did he bluff. "He had a pretty good idea about what his chances were," says Denny Jacobs, a former state senator from East Moline.
This is exactly the way Obama dismantled the Clinton campaign. While Hillary was full of bluff and bluster about big states and inevitability, Obama and his campaign were closely counting the delegates they could win in the caucus states and proceeded to dismantle Hillary's campaign piece by piece. The Clinton campaign only realized what had happened just too late to do anything about it - the compressed primary schedule that was supposed to make her unbeatable instead left her without enough contests to claw her way back into the lead. On the war in Iraq, Obama knew that Bush was gambling on long odds on all sorts of fronts (that Saddam had WMDs, had some kind of ties to Al-Qaeda, we would be greeted as liberators, Iraq could finance its own reconstruction, and we wouldn't get bogged down in a guerilla war), and after we got stuck in he could see as well an anyone that we were "on tilt," or overplaying our meager hand in an attempt to win back what we lost. Thus, his strategy on Iraq is to cut our losses and leave, as the Iraqis are now demanding we do.
To sum up, on judgement these two men are polar opposites: McCain is someone who thinks with his gut and will take big risks, and Obama is a methodical evaluator of facts and odds who only occasionally bluffs.
On temperament the contrast also couldn't be more stark, even ignoring the elements revealed in our discussion of judgement. Obama is cool as a cucumber and seeks to build alliances and coalitions out of disparate people. While McCain is charming most of the time, he has an explosive temper and rashness that he barely hides from the public but that is well known to even his Senate colleagues.
I think that McCain's temperament is likely heavily influenced by that section of his biography that he loves to remind everyone about but that has concrete implications that are seldom pointed out. McCain was a POW for several years in the Hanoi Hilton. The fact that he made it through alive and with honor means that he was made of stern stuff. That doesn't mean that the experience necessarily made him stronger, though. There's no way McCain went through that much torture and didn't come out of it with PTSD. Naturally, McCain refuses to release his psychiatric records but you know that if they exonerated him of having PTSD he would have them out there in a flash. Even if you don't want to believe that McCain has PTSD, in spite of evidence like this (from the Salon article):
There are behaviors associated with the candidate that would be consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD. Author Robert Timberg mentions McCain's intense explosions of anger --- a hallmark sign of lingering mental trauma from war -- in his book "John McCain: An American Odyssey." Timberg describes the episodes as "an eruption of temper out of all proportion to the provocation." Timberg, who McCain has said "knows more about me than I do," wrote that McCain's sudden fury is a result of Vietnam coming "back to haunt him." McCain has himself described having an adverse reaction to the sound of jangling keys, which reminds him of his Vietnam jailers. McCain also told doctors that during solitary confinement he had strayed pretty "far out" and had referred to himself as "mentally deteriorating."
Then it is still undeniable that the man has an extreme temper that has been described as "volcanic" and "explosive". Do we want someone like that in charge of international relations and to have his finger on the button?
The contrast with Obama can be seen in two ways. First, the Obama campaign has been run consistently and methodically - even in the face of setbacks and events that would have had other campaigns leaking to the press the Obama campaign maintained "no drama" (discussed here and here ). Second, you can watch the candidate himself perform under pressure. You can watch him in the Democratic debates (all 18 or so of them) where, even if he makes a mistake, he never loses his cool (just search Youtube for them). That's not to say that he doesn't get his dander up (see "Enough!" from his speech to the DNC), but even when it is clear that he is perturbed he still performs well under pressure.
Now, I know I promised a short email and this one has gotten pretty long, but consider that I've only really examined two issues. I haven't even touched on policy, experience, honesty, or talked much about the VPs.
Even so, this is sufficient.
Love,
BlackGriffen