All three U.S. Senators running for president have begun sticking faster than glue to an unwritten rule of the campaign trail: Gall is a virtue, and the biggest shame is being ashamed.
This cynical dictum might clash with the message of Pope Benedict XVI, who arrives today in New York. But nowhere was its force felt more than in the Democrats’ last debate before Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary.
Here stood Barack Obama, who repeatedly touts his opposition to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, hailing the last President Bush on the 1991 Persian Gulf invasion.
When the candidates were asked how they would make use of former presidents in the White House, Obama just happened to sing the praises of the man Bill Clinton unseated. “I’m probably more likely to ask advice of the current president’s father than the president himself,” replied the change agent, “because I think that when you look back at George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy, it was a wise foreign policy.
“And how we executed the Gulf War, how we managed the transition out of the Cold War, I think, is an example of how we get bipartisan agreement.”
Oh? That might or might not sound surprising coming from a man his foes wish to paint as radical — even after he gave that hat tip to Ronald Reagan a few months back.
But you should avoid betting against Hillary Rodham Clinton in an audacity contest. She showed gumption-wrapped-in-apology during the do-or-die debate when called to account for her false story....
Dan Janison
...of being under sniper fire while visiting Bosnia.
Her Balkan delusion marked an odd attempt to offset Obama’s skewering of her foreign-policy chops. “Unfortunately,” she said Wednesday, “on a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past.” And she still defended her First Lady travels as bringing valuable experience to the general-election race against Sen. John McCain.
“So I will either try to get more sleep .... or, you know, have somebody who, you know, is there as a reminder to me,” she said. Would-be First Spouse Bill also has raised this exhaustion alibi on the Bosnia falsehood. But that opens the question raised in her own anti-Obama ad: What happens when that phone rings at 3 a.m.?
Maybe the gall credo is absorbed from spending time in the Capitol. John McCain this week showed his virtuous lack of embarrassment on tax cuts — with a plan that lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent and, among other measures, preserves Bush administration tax parings.
Seven years ago, fresh from opposing George W. Bush in the Republican primary for president, McCain declared: “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.” Rightly or not, many Republicans have set to complaining that their likely nominee has, to put it kindly, adjusted his positions to GOP expedience.
Survival of the nerviest goes beyond presidential candidates. There’s talk in local circles that some Democratic congressmen, while vowing their loyalty to the party, would not mind having McCain as president — seeing it as a chance to expand their majority in Congress and inflate their own importance.
Which sends us back to the Pennsylvania primary — where New York campaign operatives are sending volunteers to help in greater numbers than they could to Ohio.
And if you think the candidates show gall in their personal appearances, just YouTube the TV ads broadcast across the Keystone State over the weekend. They’re guaranteed to put the debates to shame, in a race whose strategists seem to have little.