A week ago, I woke to the sound of my alarm ringing. I jumped from the bed with all the spryness of a fat smoker with a bum knee. Wisps of smoke rose from the ashtray, sinuously winding their way around the neck of a nearly empty bottle of Tennessee sour mash. The burning cigarette told me I'd only been asleep for about ten minutes, and the anger began to seep into my soul like mud puddle water into a pair of worn-out sneakers because I thought I had missed the first presidential debate between senators Barack Obama and John McCain.
Fortunately, I hadn't missed a thing. I sat down for 90 minutes of double-talk, after which the media shamelessly spun the outcome. They proved only that events like the debate (and most other events in life) are subject to perspective.
I'm sure some of you are tired of all the political talk, but with the election only a month away, there's no such thing as thinking too much.
Some believe Obama won, and others think McCain won, but a majority of viewers felt there was no clear victor.
What I saw was the careful laying of traps by McCain. His statements were similar to Senate bills: common sense and decency on the surface followed by abominations of logic.
McCain made statements Obama was forced to agree with in part, then he mixed in the twisted perceptions of his warped ideology. This strategy put Obama on cleanup detail. He was forced to follow behind the grizzled veteran's words and dismantle his statements, to explain why he agreed in part and why other parts were either lies or badly distorted versions of truth. The most egregious of these offenses came when the conversation finally turned to the subject the debate was intended to encompass: foreign policy.
McCain attacked Obama's willingness to meet with leaders such as Iran's President Ahmadinejad "without precondition." He stubbornly stated that meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad - who has reportedly made comments about the destruction of Israel - would serve to "legitimize those comments."
Obama pointed out that Henry Kissinger, one of McCain's advisers, has said he would do just that: meet with such leaders without precondition. McCain refuted Obama's assertion, of course. It's all semantics, nothing more than word games.
Obama tried to appeal to viewers with logic by telling viewers what meeting such leaders without preconditions means.
"What it means is that we don't do what we've been doing, which is to say, 'Until you agree to do exactly what we say, we won't have direct contacts with you,'" he said. "There's a difference between preconditions and preparations."
McCain held fast to his assertion that meeting with such leaders legitimizes their zealous claims and threats, but that is his twisted ideology speaking for him in place of reason.
David Concepcion, a professor of philosophy at Ball State University, told me once that when people hold fast to an idea and present it as infallible truth in order to halt a debate, they're losing. It's called a "definitional stop." It's a rhetorical device used for precisely that purpose, and when one can recognize it, it makes those who use it seem weak. I hope anyone who witnessed the debate was able to see this is what McCain was doing.
For 90 minutes, McCain dug holes hoping Obama would fall in. Unfortunately for those of us who support him, he didn't sidestep them well enough to cause the media to proclaim his victory in the debate. Because he's a man of character, he didn't sidestep them at all. He endeavored to meet McCain's comments head-on and separate the truth from the ridiculous.
I thought he did a fair job at it, but it was a less political approach and more of an honest one.
So, take that for what it is. Do we want a president who is an honest man looking out for the majority of us rather than just the elite?
In this columnist's humble opinion, there is a time and place for everything. There was a time when we needed Ronald Reagan, and there was a time when we needed John Kennedy. This is our time for a man of sense, compromise and thoughtful perseverance. If we ever have a legitimate war to fight, a war that truly holds our freedom at stake, we might just need McCain.
I personally hope that day never comes.
Write to John at jrfrees@bsu.edu
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