Honor, Empathy And The Limits Of Political Virtue
If you want to understand how a President McCain or a President Obama might approach the world from the summit of the Oval Office, two words, above all others, must be pondered.
Those words go not to the amount of experience each has accumulated in life--the usual point of comparison between the two men, who are separated by a generation gap of 25 years--but to McCain's and Obama's dueling qualities of heart and mind and maybe even soul. The words are "honor" and "empathy."
Consider a pair of images. The first, from early June, is a John McCain campaign speech at the Pontchartrain Center in suburban New Orleans. Yes, this is the nationally televised speech with the infamous lime-green backdrop, which even McCain admirers thought looked awful, but that's not the point. In the audience, supporters are hoisting placards with "Honor" stenciled in navy blue on a white background. "Honor" is not your typical campaign slogan, but it has a special resonance for McCain and his followers. For the McCain group, the signs are a kind of return salute as well as an affirmation of McCain's vision of Superpower America's role in the world. McCain is a military man and a senator for whom honor is not only a cardinal personal value but also one that powerfully informs his foreign-policy agenda. With respect to Iraq, his signature issue, his refrain is, "Our American troops will come home with victory and honor."
The second image dates backs a couple of years. Picture Barack Obama, with less gray in his hair than he has now, delivering the commencement address to the class of 2006 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb. He is holding forth on his pet theme of empathy. "There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit--the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us," Obama tells the students. He offers as examples "the child who's hungry" and "the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room" and notes, "As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier."
Although Obama's examples are drawn from an American gallery, it is clear that he sees empathy in a global context as well. In his 2006 best-seller, The Audacity of Hope, the chapter on "The World Beyond Our Borders" begins with nine pages on Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood, as a "useful metaphor" for the world outside of America as well as "a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years." And his main point is that America, notwithstanding its frequent interventions in the affairs of Indonesia, including some by covert CIA operatives, has consistently failed to see Indonesia clearly. America has failed an empathy test. And this is not surprising, because, as Obama acidly says in a single sentence that commandeers its own paragraph: "Most Americans can't locate Indonesia on a map."
Honor for McCain and empathy for Obama--each is a touchstone. As such, each orients a vision of the world--and in that sense is a link to potential action. Every president, when confronted by advisers who counsel whether to do this, that, or the other thing with respect to some complicated event in a far-off land, filters their advice through a screen made up of familiar habits of thought and feeling. "Character is destiny," McCain asserted in his 2005 book of that title. And because neither man is especially wedded to an ideological point of view as a guide to decision-making, personal character may matter more than ever in a McCain or Obama presidency.
But exactly how might the honor principle--or the empathy principle--play out? The answer is not as predictable as it may seem--for honor in politics is not only about the stiffened spine, and empathy is not only about the misty eye. And although honor and empathy, standing alone, represent virtues, neither is a solution for governing, for dealing with foreign friends or enemies, for resolving sticky matters like the Iraq occupation or Iran's nuclear ambitions. Indeed, honor for McCain and empathy for Obama have the potential to be blinders--to keep them from adjusting their sights to uncomfortable realities. It is one of life's ironies to be tripped up by one's most deeply felt values.
For McCain or Obama to succeed as president, he would have to discover the practical limitations of the value he holds so dear; he would have to attach himself to a more transcendent conception of American policy. And that will be a difficult and probably painful challenge--there is a lot at stake, for America and the world, in how well it is met.
Honor as a Blinder
The McCains were "bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald," John McCain proudly declares in Faith of My Fathers, a "family memoir" written with his longtime aide Mark Salter. "No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers. But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war, in the War for Independence, on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War." One of his ancestors, McCain relates, was killed and scalped by Indians in the Battle of Black Creek in the 1760s. "Like his descendants," the dead man's brother "was not one to suffer such an insult quietly," and he tracked the killers, sending some to the grave, "and recovered his brother's scalp."
In the news media's usual telling of the John McCain story, his attachment to the honor code is attributed to his upbringing in a military tradition, with his father and paternal grandfather serving as four-star admirals in the Navy and John himself a graduate, if a somewhat rebellious one, of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. But there is a wider frame of reference for understanding McCain's attachment to honor principles. McCain's ancestors settled in the antebellum South on a plantation known as Teoc, in Carroll County, Miss., on which his grandfather was born. "I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions," McCain notes in Faith of My Fathers--and that was surely the case, for that was a typical characteristic, along with a penchant for fighting, of Southern families sharing the heritage of the McCain brood.
As the scholars Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen remind us in their perceptive 1996 book, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, honor principles penetrated especially deeply in the South because the South was largely settled by "herdsmen from the fringes of Britain" while the North was largely settled by sedentary farmers from places such as England, Holland, and Germany. That might not sound like an important distinction, but as Nisbett and Cohen note, "Herdsmen the world over tend to be capable of great aggressiveness and violence because of their vulnerability to losing their primary resources, their animals." In this fuller sense of the concept, they observe, honor is not only about "probity of character" but also about defense of turf, about being "on guard against affronts that could be construed by others as disrespect."
In the military, the honor code serves an elevated and even essential purpose--the code is about putting country and comrades ahead of self. McCain lived by that code in his hard times as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton, to which he was sent after his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1967. Withstanding torture, he exemplified honorable behavior by refusing an offer of early release from his captors after his father became commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater. His acceptance, after all, might have damaged the morale of his fellow prisoners.
Country and comrades were served in that instance, but how well do honor principles work in other avenues of life, like in the realm of geopolitics?
Peace With Honor
McCain has operated in the political world for more than 25 years since being elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986. But his conception of honor is still tinged with the sentiment of the warrior. His favorite play, he has said, is Henry V, "a soldier's play"; and in the introduction to Character Is Destiny, he quotes from the famous St. Crispin's Day speech, in which King Henry urges his outnumbered band to battle against the French, for honor, glory and fraternity, "for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother."
And yet Shakespeare is not offering an unambiguous celebration of the honor principle--he views honor as a rounded concept. In the St. Crispin's speech, above the lines quoted by McCain, Henry defiantly asserts: "But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive."
A sin to covet honor? Shakespeare is on terrain staked out by philosophers all the way back to Plato. Ancient Athens was the ultimate culture of honor, which at the time meant something akin to public reputation. The man of honor was a figure of worship. But for an irreverent skeptic like Plato, the good life was decidedly not about honor. One reason he banished poets from his ideal Republic was because he viewed them as likely to promote vainglorious conduct. "And what will anyone be profited if under the influence of honor," Plato has Socrates ask, "he neglect justice and virtue?"
These are not idle speculations. In insisting on an honorable victory in Iraq, McCain in a speech in mid-May outlined the prospect of "most" U.S. troops coming home by January 2013--the end of his first term--with Iraq left as a "functioning democracy," with "militias disbanded," with Al Qaeda in Iraq "defeated," and with Iraq's government "capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders."
Left unsaid was precisely the question that vexes philosophers--at what price honor? McCain did not offer a strategy for achieving these goals; he did not say what cost in blood or treasure he would pay to achieve them. He offered an honorable victory as a hope, not as a potentially hazardous journey.
Absent a specific plan for honorable victory, the McCain line, fairly or not, invites cynicism. President Nixon repeatedly said that "peace with honor" was his objective for America's exit from Vietnam--and he invoked that phrase on January 23, 1973, in his nationally televised speech to announce the signing of the Paris peace accords with Hanoi's leaders. Indeed, he congratulated the American people for their insistence on a deal that achieved peace with honor.
And yet despite America's promises to continue standing up for its ally, the South Vietnamese government, that government collapsed as America beat a retreat, punctuated by that chaotic day on April 30, 1975, when a helicopter picked up the last American personnel from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Hundreds of Vietnamese friends, who had been assured they would not be left behind, stood on the roof waiting for helicopters that never returned. The embassy was looted. "It was not a proud day to be an American," the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., a writer and analyst who served in Vietnam, observed.
The historian Larry Berman persuasively argues in his 2001 book, No Peace, No Honor, which he based on declassified records, that Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the president's top negotiator, "expected" the Paris accords to be "immediately violated" by the North Vietnamese--an outrageous breach that would give Nixon credible license to pursue an aggressive airpower campaign "to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency." That strategy failed as the Watergate scandal consumed Nixon's presidency, forcing him to resign his office with more than two years left in his second term. An emboldened post-Watergate Congress cut off funds for the war.
Finger on the Trigger
McCain's silence on an Iraq strategy likewise raises the question of whether he intends to escalate the war in Iraq--and possibly take the fight to neighboring Iran (which the U.S. military has repeatedly accused of meddling in Iraq by aiding anti-U.S. insurgents)--in order to achieve an honorable victory. The disintegration of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, courtesy of the U.S.-led invasion, has enabled Iran's ruling Shiite mullahs to forge tight bonds with Iraq's post-Saddam Shiite-led government--and the mullahs, at times, seem almost to be spoiling for a fight.
To appease an aggressor goes against the honor principle--and can invite further aggression. It is possible, though, that Iran means to send a deterrent signal by showing that it is prepared to defend itself against an attack by Israel or the U.S. When a nation suffers a loss of prestige, as America already has in Iraq and the wider Middle East theater, the historian Berman said in an interview, "it should lead decision makers to reflect on the limits of intervention rather than looking for the next target to prove that we're the world's sole remaining superpower."
Another possible trip wire for a President McCain is Russia. With his passionate statement "We are all Georgians" after Russia's August rumble through that South Caucasus country, McCain seemed to be investing his personal prestige in the effort to draw a red line against Russian aggression in its old imperial backyard. What will he do if the Kremlin, heedless of the warning, tries to take a bite out of nearby Ukraine?
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, is among those with misgivings about how a President McCain, wedded to a code of honor, might handle duties as commander-in-chief. Wilkerson is as familiar with the honor code as McCain is--and also knows something about statecraft. He served in the Army for 31 years before leaving active duty in 1997. He fought in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and from 1989 to '93, he was an aide to Colin Powell when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 2002 to 2005, he served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Powell, and afterward became a public critic of how the George W. Bush administration has fought the war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.
"I am still a Republican," Wilkerson said in an interview--but a Republican not planning to vote for McCain. "John McCain with his finger on the nuclear trigger frightens the hell out of me," he said. "In the national arena, you do things in accord with the realities of power, not according to some code. I am not going to vote for him for that very reason.... There is a much bigger concept than honor, and that is morality."
Empathy as a Blinder
That is a harsh criticism of McCain--but Wilkerson's anxieties about how a President McCain might proceed with the honor principle is matched by worries shared by others about how a President Obama might use his attachment to empathy.
Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of acclaimed best-sellers such as The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. George W. Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In one of his slimmer books, A Bound Man, Steele offers a penetrating essay on the character of Barack Obama, a figure to whom he relates because, as he writes at the outset, "I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not obsession--with it."
And yet it is precisely Steele's insight into Obama's character that makes Steele so concerned about an Obama presidency. Steele's thesis is that Obama is "born to bargain." "Bargaining is his natural metier," Steele writes of Obama, "because he seems to understand it as a kind of charm" that will relieve those who are white of whatever anxiety they might feel on encountering a black person. Or as Steele told me in a telephone interview, Obama has an instinctive knack for standing in the shoes of the other: "He wants primarily to make the other side comfortable; he wants to show empathy." Following Obama's pronouncements is "like watching a tennis match. Something wonderful to say to conservatives, something wonderful to say to liberals."
And this mind-set, Steele continued, is worrisome because it is inherently soft--insufficiently regardful of the problem of "human evil" in the world--and because it is incomplete. When I read for Steele Obama's Northwestern commencement riff on the "empathy deficit," Steele commented: "This is so typical of Obama--to name some irrefutably good thing, like empathy, as a way of avoiding saying who the hell he is and where he wants to take America's role in the world."
Let's put that criticism to the side for a moment. Is "empathy" really the defining word for Obama's character? It does seem to be the word that comes quickly to the lips of those who love him and know him best, like his wife, Michelle, who described her husband as "sweet, empathetic" in an appearance on the ABC morning talk show The View. But the most persuasive source for this proposition is Obama, as he types himself in Dreams From My Father, an autobiographical tale of his efforts to find his identity. Obama presents himself as a kind of human seismometer, exquisitely sensitive to the vibrations of the social landscape.
Bound for Columbia University, he spent his first night in Manhattan "curled up in an alleyway," and as he got accustomed to New York City, he felt that "beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place ... it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America's race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia's bathrooms as well."
By the same token, it is the want of empathy, Obama believes, that can account for evil deeds. His explanation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America is decidedly more sociological than theological. In a column written for a Chicago community newspaper shortly after the attacks, he said, "The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers; an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." He said that "most often," such a "failure" of empathy "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."
Standing in Their Shoes
The gift of empathy--and it is a gift--certainly can be useful for a political leader, in global affairs as well as domestic ones. "You cannot influence a person that you do not make an effort to understand," Robert McNamara said in an April 2005 speech at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. "Today we don't do this. It's a lack of the willingness to move toward empathy."
McNamara served as Defense secretary in the mid-1960s for a president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who seemed at times to have a stunning inability to understand the North Vietnamese enemy that the Pentagon was trying without success to bomb into submission. An intensely personal, hands-on politician, LBJ was painfully aware of his own deficit of empathy in this instance--he simply could not, he admitted, put himself in the shoes of Ho Chi Minh and see the world as Ho did. His frustration mounted at the end of 1965, as the White House debated the merits of a bombing pause as a possible path to a diplomatic solution to the conflict. "I don't know him," LBJ confided to an aide, Jack Valenti. "I don't know his ancestry or his customs or his beliefs. It is tough, very tough."
Empathy is a natural springboard for a diplomatic strategy of engagement, which Obama has said would be a hallmark of his presidency. As the Democratic presidential primary debates got under way last summer, Obama distanced himself from Hillary Rodham Clinton in his professed willingness to meet one-on-one, without precondition, during the first year of his presidency, the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them," he said at the CNN/YouTube debate in South Carolina, "is ridiculous."
Obama gets support on this perspective from the likes of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a biting critic of Bush administration foreign policies in Iraq and elsewhere, who is leaving the Senate. "This world is now so much beyond where we were 25 years ago, that no longer is it adequate for America to adjust and calibrate and frame and build and implement policy based on our optic alone," Hagel said at a June 18 forum on "smart power" organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We've got to reverse those optics and get a sense of how the Pakistanis see us, too, or how the Muslim world sees us, or any other country. That doesn't take anything away from our sovereignty, our manhood. That's just smart," he said. Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran, has not endorsed McCain, and he is a plausible Cabinet official in an Obama administration.
And yet Steele's criticism of Obama resonates not because engagement or "reversing the optics" is a bad approach but because Obama, the self-declared candidate of change, has so far failed to show how this tack would fit into a broader foreign-policy strategy and vision. In his chapter in The Audacity of Hope, "The World Beyond Our Borders," Obama boldly declares, "We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of [President] Truman's post-World War II policies," and then he goes on to say, "I don't presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket." He leaves the reader with "starting points for a new consensus" on a new strategy--which is little more than a series of conventional observations along the lines of "Any return to isolationism--or a foreign-policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S. troops--will not work." He praises certain aspects of President Carter's stewardship--and certain aspects of President Reagan's. It is a mishmash.
Nor has Obama fleshed out this vision in his foreign-policy speeches on the campaign trail. His usual narrative device is to work off the theme of hope in a fashion that binds his tales of working as an organizer in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago with stories of his overseas travel. "My experience has brought me to the hopeless places" of the world, he noted in an address at DePaul University in Chicago last October. "As a senator, I've been to refugee camps in Chad, where proud and dignified people can't hope for anything beyond the next handout."
Aaron David Miller is a retired professional diplomat who, over the past two decades, has advised secretaries of State for Republican and Democratic administrations on how to deal with the Middle East. The lessons of his experience at the negotiating table are ably laid out in the 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land. "Barack Obama may have all the empathy in the world," Miller said in an interview. "He may improve America's image in the world--Lord knows it needs improving--but he may not get anything done. There is no correlation necessarily between empathy and advancing America's national interest."
Honor and Justice
The McCain campaign, eager to promote the honor theme, is offering a pack of 50 lapel stickers with the word "Honor" printed on them for a $10 campaign contribution. The Obama campaign, facing questions about whether their man has the fiber to take on America's enemies, is not peddling anything on the "empathy deficit" theme. Its mantra, as ever, is "Change." You fill in the blank.
But let's not forget that we are in the high tide of the campaign silly season. Come January, it is quite possible that honor would lead a President McCain--or empathy, a President Obama--in directions at odds with the one-dimensional images these values generate in the media and the realm of political spin.
While the typecast image of honor tends to evoke an uncompromising approach to politics, surely honor also can be married to the principle of justice. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, it became a matter of national honor for America to try to rescue the Vietnamese who had helped protect U.S. troops and other Americans in the country--and who were likely to be murdered or "re-educated" by the triumphant North Vietnamese. President Ford, Nixon's successor, personally decreed an effort resulting in the resettlement within America of 131,000 Vietnamese by the year's end.
So far, candidate McCain has steered clear of the complexity of the refugee crisis that the Iraq war has caused. Perhaps McCain figures that talking about the Iraq refugee problem during the campaign could draw unwelcome attention to the shortcomings of the war. Whatever his calculation, the next president will find this matter on his desk. An estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees are stranded outside their country, mostly in Syria and Jordan. This is not only a humanitarian issue but also a national security issue, given the potential for refugee communities to serve as recruiting grounds for anti-American militant groups.
And it is a matter, too, of America standing by its friends. Among the Iraqi refugees are those who put their lives on the line for U.S. forces in Iraq--working in combat zones as interpreters, for example. Having been branded as collaborators by anti-U.S. groups in Iraq, they face the prospect of retaliation should they return. Washington's pledge to resettle 12,000 Iraqis in fiscal 2008 is a paltry one. The bureaucracy is unlikely to move faster without Gerald Ford-like presidential pressure. "It is clearly a matter of national honor," Ken Bacon, the president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group, and a former Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview.
Although McCain has not announced a policy on refugees, sentiment exists within his camp for a President McCain acting boldly to make en tering the United States easier for stranded Iraqis who helped Americans. "We should open our doors to those people," McCain foreign-policy adviser Richard Burt told me. Burt served in the Reagan administration's State Department, first as director of political-military affairs, then as assistant secretary of State for European and Canadian affairs, and then as U.S. ambassador to Germany.
No Dumb Wars
America's national honor, too, has been called into question by the torture of U.S.-held prisoners at Abu Ghraib and by the treatment of the detainees held in seemingly permanent limbo at Guantanamo. On this set of issues, going to the core of America's identity as a nation of laws and fairness, surely no political figure in America has more credible standing than McCain to craft policies that pass constitutional muster, keep faith with universal standards of human rights, and protect America's security. As a senator, he has been a selective critic of certain Bush policies. As president, he would have a unique opportunity, with the bully pulpit before him and the whole world watching, to review all established policies and insist on appropriate reforms that future presidents would dare to change only at their political peril.
McCain adviser Burt said that McCain, in principle, is very well positioned to act on those issues but that the practicalities are daunting in their complexity. No obvious solution exists for what to do with the Guantanamo detainees should that facility be closed, Burt said.
As for an Obama presidency, although the typecast image of empathy tends to evoke a forgiving approach to politics, surely empathy can also be a matter of backbone. Who is more deserving of empathy than victims of genocide? If the history of the 20th century and of the first decade of the early 21st century is any guide, then the next president is likely to be confronted with the question of how to deal with genocide in some remote part of the world that, as Obama might say, few Americans could locate on a map.
Even though presidential candidate Obama rallied the antiwar Democratic Left to his side with his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq and his call for bringing U.S. troops home, a commander-in-chief Obama may find himself tempted to use America's globally unrivaled military arsenal to stop crimes against humanity. The truly empathetic leader, after all, is as apt to be a liberal war hawk as a pacifist; the hope that a terrorized villager in Darfur seeks comes not in the form of food packages but from the barrel of a friendly gun. "I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars," Obama declared in his now-famous speech, at an anti-war rally in Chicago in the fall of 2002, opposing the approaching Iraq war.
Empathy and Genocide
Obama has not set forth the particular conditions under which, as president, he might use military force to prevent genocide. But two of his closest foreign-policy advisers, Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, are somewhat hawkish on this matter. In "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" an op-ed that The Washington Post ran in the fall of 2006, they called for U.S. military intervention, with or without U.N. support, to stop genocide in Darfur, just as America acted in Kosovo in the 1990s without a U.N. resolution. (Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., also co-wrote the piece.)
Rice, a possible choice for national security adviser in an Obama White House, has written passionately and in considerable conceptual depth about the "responsibility to protect" victims of crimes such as genocide. "There is danger in the impulse to submerge liberal ideals beneath the familiar veneer of strategic realism," she wrote, with co-author Andrew J. Loomis of Georgetown University, in an essay in the 2007 book Beyond Preemption, published by the Brookings Institution. Noting that "the U.N. still lacks any effective rapid deployment capability," that piece called for strengthening U.N. capabilities to conduct "humanitarian" interventions.
Rice served on President Clinton's National Security Council from 1993 to 1995--during the time of genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, in 1994--as director for international organizations and peacekeeping. (Clinton later called his failure to intervene in Rwanda his biggest regret as president.) From 1995 to 1997, she served as the NSC's senior hand on African issues, and from 1997 to 2001, at Foggy Bottom as assistant secretary of State for African affairs.
Africa may be the testing ground on which the bones of an Obama "empathy policy" acquire sinew. Africa often suffers from geopolitical neglect--and no continent has suffered more from genocide, civil war, and failed states over the past 15 years. It seems unlikely that Obama will ignore Africa, the birthplace of his father and a land that has evoked some of his most deeply felt writing. And as a practical matter, some of his most enthusiastic political supporters are African-Americans, including first-generation African immigrants who are helping to register voters and raise money for the Obama campaign.
Like every other chief executive, a President McCain or a President Obama would be challenged to reconcile a signature value with the dictate of pragmatism. How might a President McCain deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who gratuitously insulted George W. Bush by likening him to the devil? The McCain camp's current answer comes out of the honor code: "Senator McCain thinks that Chavez is a charlatan and a thug. The senator doesn't trust Chavez, and does not think it worth getting into a back-and-forth with him," a McCain adviser told The New Yorker. From a top Obama supporter came an equally predictable answer: "We need to establish some lines of communication with him," New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson told the magazine.
Neither answer addressed the difficult question of how to construct a policy to address Chavez's ambition of becoming leader of a regional bloc perched on America's doorstep. Messy realities are the rule in foreign policy. While McCain and Obama offer contrasting profiles of character, the same world awaits whoever is elected president--a world as likely to frustrate American initiative as to reward it.
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