Mark Steyn on the U.S. Presidential hopefuls

Excerpt

President McCain? Or Queen Hillary? Henry Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s that it's a shame they both can't lose. Conservatives have a slightly different problem: it's a shame that neither of them will lose; that, regardless of who takes the oath come next January, the harmonious McCain-Clinton consensus policies on illegal immigration and big government solutions to global warming will prevail. Where's Neither-of-the-Above when you need him?

Democracies get the political leaders they deserve, and that's particularly true in the US, where the primary system allows rank-and-file citizens to choose not merely which party to vote for (as in Britain, Australia and Europe) but also which individuals will be the candidates of those parties. True, it helps to be wealthy. Up to a point.

But it wasn't enough for John Edwards, the curiously unconvincing "angry populist" muttering darkly that "they" would never stop him telling the truth about nine-year-old girls shivering without a winter coat because daddy had been laid off at the mill. "They" didn't need to stop him. The champion of America's mythical coatless girl laid himself off last week. High on a hill, the lonely coatherd suddenly realised he was yodelling to himself....

Michael Ledeen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, suggests that the rise of McCain through New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida indicates that for many voters the war is still the issue, because, after all, what else has the senator got going for him? Surely it's not his global-warming hysteria or illegal-immigration amnesty or demonisation of capitalism. It's because he's Mr Surge.

Well, maybe. The senator is an eloquent defender of the US armed forces. A president McCain will not permit a military defeat in Iraq. But it's not clear to me he has much of a strategic vision for the ideological struggle, for the real long-term battlefield in the mosques and madrassas of Pakistan and Indonesia and western Europe. McCain's lead is no evidence of popular commitment to the long war and, absent any surprising developments, this will not be a war election.

The Clintons are nothing if not lucky, and Hillary must occasionally be enjoying a luxury-length cackle at the thought of being pitted against a 71-year-old "maverick" whose record seems designed to antagonise just enough of the base into staying home on election day.

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There is a fairly convincing refutation here of Jack Wheeler's allegations about McCain in Vietnam. I said when I noted Wheeler's story that it could be old Soviet disinformation and that now seems the most probable origin of the story.

Posted by John Ray