The Next Four Weeks
I believe the next four weeks may be the single most important factor in next year’s presidential election. Our presidential candidates, hitherto suspended in the country’s most ridiculously protracted presidential lead-up, are about to lay their chips down for reals. And it’s the big money chips. Especially for the Democrats.
So if you care about what’s about to happen—and what’s about to happen is going to be enormous one way or another—then it’s time to consider what you will do, if anything, in the next four weeks.
I’ve said before I’m a fan of Obama. That conviction grows daily. Today it took another leap forward when I read Frank Rich’s analyis of Obama and Clinton.
Mr. Obama’s much-derided readiness to talk promptly and directly to the leaders of Iran and Syria, for instance, was a clear alternative, agree with it or not, to Mrs. Clinton’s same-old Foggy Bottom platitudes on the subject. His supposedly reckless pledge to chase down Osama bin Laden and his gang in Pakistan, without Pakistani permission if necessary, was a pointed rebuke of both Mrs. Clinton’s and President Bush’s misplaced fealty to our terrorist-enabling “ally,” Pervez Musharraf. Like Mr. Obama’s prescient Iraq speech of 2002, his open acknowledgment of the Pakistan president’s slipperiness turned out to be ahead of the curve.
He also has some insightful things to say about just how bad things might get if we set this election up as another Holy War between Blue and Red for the sliver of independents:
The unspoken truth is that the Clinton machine is not being battle-tested at all by the Democratic primary process. [...] In reality, neither Mr. Edwards nor any other Democratic competitor will ever hit her with the real, personal mud being stockpiled by the right. But if she’s getting a bye now, she will not from the Republican standard-bearer, whoever he may be. Clinton-bashing is the last shared article of faith (and last area of indisputable G.O.P. competence) that could yet unite the fractured and dispirited conservative electorate.
The Republicans know this and are so psychologically invested in refighting the Clinton wars that they’re giddy. Karl Rove’s first column for Newsweek last week, “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November,” proceeded from the premise that her nomination was a done deal.
To which I say: please, no. Please let’s not start this again. But then Rich points out:
Peggy Noonan wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek when she wondered in The Wall Street Journal last month whether Mr. Obama “understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans.” In her view “they see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.”
Yes. More of that please. More real leadership. Less battling-it-out-for-just-enough-votes-to-make-it-into-office-and-then-flip-the-bird-to-the-other-side-for-the-next-four-years.
If you approve of subtlety in politics, of new thinking, of a focus on shared problems and opportunities to solve them cooperatively, if you think the United States may want some friends in the world, if you’d like the President to talk to you as if you were an intelligent human being, if you’d like some confidence that the head honcho is inquisitive, clear, persuasive, hopeful, pragmatic, electrifying, and deeply intelligent….
You’ve got about four weeks to do something about it.