In about fifteen years I was a skilled and experienced international lawyer for the US government. And even though it is illegal I learned the lobbying trade at the same time because the Executive Branch lobbies Congress every day. (It's called giving technical advice so as not offend the law.) (Despite eight years as President I'm sure "W" doesn't know that arm-twisting on Capitol Hill is a criminal offense for a government employee. But he lacks lots of experience.)
To the best of my knowledge no American President has interpreted treaties, negotiated in 80 countries, worked the delegates at the UN, seen Robert McNamara nude in the Pentagon swimming pool when he had to be briefed in a big hurry and manipulated Congress at the same time. Short of doing that no President has ever had serious experience in international affairs or national security affairs. People will tell you that Roosevelt was an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. By the time an issue got that high in the Navy Department it was already decided. FDR was not an expert in international affairs and national security until he was close to dying. One of our best Presidents succeeded him with no warning, Harry Truman. HST was a haberdasher in Missouri. When he became Vice President under Roosevelt he was given nothing to do and had no briefings of importance. But he had what Obama has, brains, judgement and personality.
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I want to mention one other thing. "Traveling Senators". They are set up by the State Department. Their appointments are arranged. The people they meet are pre-selected, they are made to feel important and given leather bound briefing books with all the "right" answers and they are taken shopping. Cocktail parties a plenty. They are duped. Except for a spontaneous greeting like the one Obama got in Berlin. Don't imagine the Bush State department helped set that one up for a Democrat.
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So where did McCain get his foreign affairs and national security experience? He didn't. He went to the movies. Thousands of witnesses paraded before the dais of his committee and carefully guarded the truth to ensure that McCain didn't know it. Sometimes he was given classified briefing books market Top Secret with a cover sheet bordered in red. But the contents of the briefing book only included information the executive branch wanted him to have. He was duped.
I could go on all day but you get the point. Washington is run, arranged and manipulated by the executive branch to dupe the dupeables. McCain was one of those. That's why he doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shiite. Its hard to remember all those words when you only read five minutes a day. If he read much more he would have graduated higher than the bottom of his Annapolis Naval Academy class.
Obama has no more (or less experience) than McCain. But there is one big difference. He's smart as a whip (and being President of the Harvard Law Review attests to that. If you have that title in your resume today you can work anywhere in the country you want and fresh out of law school you'll be earning $165,000) and he isn't one of the dupeables. He is a quick learner. McCain thought he'd royally screw up his foreign trip and say the wrong word at the wrong time so he goaded him. Then he had to do everything possible to destroy a man who obviously slid right into the role of a wizened chief of state. When the Russians invaded Georgia McCain attacked viciously and immediately. Obama attacked mildly and cautiously. The experienced foreign policy expert would have done what Obama did. The temperamental foolish dupe would do what McCain did. He didn't even have time for his staff to brief him on the importance of Russia's help in settling that minor atomic bomb crisis in Iran before shooting off his mouth. But Obama was thinking. Always thinking. And Obama is a nice man or he knows how to present himself as a nice man. Either one is better than McCain who acts like a son of a bitch. And the media kisses his ass because he's a maverick.
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No matter what you hear, Presidents do occasionally get that 3:00 AM phone call. I can just hear Obama saying "Tell me more". I hear McCain saying, "Let's go get those fuckers".
Most of you are too young to have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis with a President Kennedy and his brother Robert both of whom lacked McCain's so called experience. I am quite confident that if McCain had been President during the Cuban Missile Crisis I would be dead now, along with my wife and children and I can't imagine what the rest of the country would have been like. I am certain that Obama could be trusted to guide us through that nightmare. We really did believe we would all die the next day in a nuclear holocaust. Go back and read if you didn't live through it. But we slept better with a smart, personable man of good judgment than we would be entitled to sleep if John McCain were President.
Which goes back to my earlier (outsider) post on Wisdom. A president must listen, and then exercise sound judgement. According to contemporary accounts, the current president refuses new or more complex information than he has already based his decisions on, and either allows the information received through a very filtered single source (the VP's office) or directs the information be changed or created out of whole cloth to support his ideas (Suskind).
And then there comes the question of exercising judgment. Even in cases where he might have had the best information available, I think we can all agree that his judgments tended to result in either total failure (Katrina), opposite outcomes (democratically elected Hamas officoals in Palestine), or a prolonged mess of one step forward, two steps back (the rebuilding of civil society in Iraq and Afghanistan).
John McCain, despite his "maverick" reputation, has voted with Bush administration goals and proposals 95% of Bush's term. And this week, his response to the situation between Russia and Georgia has sounded painfully like our current president, if even more hawkish. Despite the fact that our recent diplomatic efforts in the region have really painted us into a corner and tied our hands in this conflict.
Should the cold war be heating up again, should we face a power over the next 8 years who's actually armed enough to cause us great harm, I want a JFK on that phone. A deep thinker as well as a pragmatist, who projected good will to the harshest of America's critic, who had some diplomatic credibility as well as the brain power to keep that button from being pushed, in the USSR or here in the states.
We don't truly know how either candidate would lead until the office tests them. But we can look at their tendancies in the time we've known them and make the best decision.
I'm voting for the guy who has demonstrated the ability to listen, to respond, to allow his plans to evolve and change as new information is made available.
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