It looks like the presidential battle between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama will be about one overarching theme: judgment versus experience. And Exhibit A will be the Iraq war.
Obama insists judgment is more important. He's right: A wise leader with no experience is preferable to a moron with plenty. Of course, that's rarely the choice we actually face.
The opposing argument is that experience yields good judgment. The battle-scarred soldier, the trial-tested lawyer, the accomplished surgeon -- these people tend to have better judgment precisely because they've clocked a lot of field time. That's McCain's contention. He's walked through the fire and learned valuable lessons as a result.
Obama's camp holds that even valuable experience like McCain's can cause a person to become hidebound and dogmatic. "It is not a question of longevity in government," Obama's campaign manager, David Axlerod, recently told the Huffington Post. "It is a question of judgment, it is a question of a willingness to challenge policies that have failed. And he seems just dug in."
On the surface, this all sounds like precisely the sort of disagreement we should have during an election.
The problem is that it doesn't reflect reality. Obama, who was a junior Illinois state senator from a very liberal district in Chicago and a star parishioner of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ when the country was debating invading Iraq, would have voters believe that he carefully weighed the pros and cons and concluded it would be a bad idea.
You may be willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. I am not. A far more plausible explanation is that Obama took the position you would expect from him. Just as it never occurred to him that his pastor would be an albatross in a national election, it never dawned on him that he should take a stance other than the one expected of anyone on the far left of the Democratic Party. This doesn't necessarily obviate Obama's bragging rights, but the idea that in 2002 he would have taken any other stance strikes me as unlikely as Wright or filmmaker Michael Moore siding with the pro-Bush camp.
But, even if you want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, it's hard to give him the benefit of the facts.
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama said he would "unequivocally" oppose President Bush on the war. But once in office, he voted for every war-funding bill -- until he decided to run for president.
