My title, of course, references Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous evaluation of FDR. I believe it also describes Barack Obama. The contrast between his even keel and the, um, uneven responses of his opponent to the issues that have arisen throughout the campaign is striking. We have a tendency to lose track of even the immediate past amidst the 24 hour news cycles of the campaign, but try to remember all of the way back to August--when Russia invaded Georgia.
John McCain declared, "My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War [9/11, anyone?]. This is an act of aggression." McCain followed by reinforcing his already extreme position on Russia: we should kick them out of the G8, enroll Georgia in NATO, confront Russia militarily--after all, McCain intoned, "We are all Georgians," echoing JFK in Berlin. Senator Obama, meanwhile, said that this was a bad thing. That was really about it. Senator McCain attacked Obama ferociously for his somewhat understated reaction.
So, as McCain suggested, has the new Cold War started? Um, no. In fact, if you haven't heard much about Georgia lately, you're not alone. The EU, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, cut the sort of deal we used to broker, back when we had a president. The Russians are now adhering to its terms. They're doing so in no small part because, it turns out (as Obama occasionally noted) that financial markets exert their own sort of globalized discipline on rogue military actions; the Russian stock market started a free fall as a result of the Georgian conflict and the credit problems throughout the rest of the world have only added to Russian economic difficulties. So, the Russians are paying an enormous price for their aggression and whatever military "crisis" that existed has now stopped. Neither side can afford it.
So, McCain urged immediate, precipitate action that could have alienated key adversaries and allies just as the world was entering a time of great economic difficulty, while Obama urged patience and teamwork to address a difficult but by no means overwhelming problem. It doesn't take a genius to see who was right. Temperament does matter.
Comments