On the campaign:
McCain is profoundly patriotic, as were his military forebears. Patriotism, rather than race, may indeed prove to be the determining factor in this election. But I simply don’t see that McCain has the basic managerial ability to run the complex Washington bureaucracy. Obama lacks executive experience too, but he has shown a shrewd ability to captain a national campaign. And Obama’s sober, deliberative temperament seems to me genuinely presidential. In contrast, McCain’s bizarre grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis (such as his embarrassingly unprofessional call for cancellation of the first debate) suggested that he lacks the steadiness of behavior and expression that we have a right to expect in a president.
On Sarah Palin:
The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin’s bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition — without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She’s no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she’s pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite — which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend.
On Obama:
What would concern me more about an Obama administration, given these rampant doubts, is the possibility that he would jump more readily toward war in order to prove his toughness. We don’t need more foolish military incursions, bogging us down in regions whose vicious factionalism has boiled irresolvably for 3,000 years. Where our national interest is not directly at stake, we should mind our own business. Israel, on the other hand, whose very survival might be menaced by a nuclear Iran, would always have the right of preemptive self-defense.
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