If you were foolish enough to entertain some optimism about the political health of the Republic going into the debate, John McCain was there in Oxford to disabuse you. The venue was historic Ole' Miss. The topic was foreign policy and the most straightforward thing that was said was this: "You don’t say that out loud," McCain chastised. "If you have to do things, you have to do things..."
There was some impressive parity in Friday's debate, Mcain and Obama each denied the other a transcendent television soundbite. Less impressively, both stuttered their way through their attacks on one another stringing together actual policy differences with invocations of some really excessively invoked gaffes from the primary season.
However I begrudge John McCain because he could have saved me 90 minutes by reminding me at the beginning that essentially nothing was on the table to be debated. Both candidates said that Israel was good; Iran was bad; sometimes you have to fight wars; diplomacy is good, but tricky; Putin simply bad. Really blah, blah, blah.
The security policies of the United States are secrets. Secret because their consummation is really at the whim of the President and because the central security strategy called the "war on terror" is probably a gruesome counterintelligence assassination campaign, to which both democrats and republicans by and large assent. On other issues polling dictates answers that are utterly mandatory to remaining a serious candidate for president:
- Hawkish and unqualified support for Israel
- "Supporting the troops," a morbidly ironic piece of doublespeak for either party given the repeatedly documented dearth of resources for veterans' care, the only issue to which the phrase could be meaningfully applied.
and many more...
Still they talked for 90 minutes.