The other week, Barack Obama came up with what he doubtless saw
as a snappy comeback in answer to Hillary Clinton’s oft-repeated
boast that she would have the experience to be ready to govern “on
Day One” by saying that “it is important to be right on Day One.” I
hold no brief for either of these candidates, but this, clearly, is
exactly wrong, and a reinforcement of Mrs. Clinton’s attempts to
portray Mr. Obama as callow and inexperienced rather than an answer
to them. For being “right” is no more an option for a president
than it is for anyone else. Doubtless he will be right sometimes,
but he will also be wrong a lot of the time. That is not something
he can promise not to be without appearing either to be a fool
himself or to be fooling the electorate. It is tantamount to a
promise not to make mistakes. How can we take a man seriously as a
potential president who would make such an unwise — indeed,
mistaken — promise?
But Mr. Obama is surely aware that his claim to electoral
advantage on the grounds of being right is an appeal to a
particular constituency that is sure to be influential in the
selection of the Democratic nominee — and in the enthusiasm with
which he (or she) is supported and campaigned for in the November
general election. This is the MoveOn constituency, the “Not in Our
Name” crowd. Above all it is those with the bumper stickers about a
village somewhere in Texas which has mislaid its idiot. For such
people — and, to a disturbing extent these days, the Democratic
Party as a whole — pride of intellect is politically debilitating.
They have no political philosophy or program apart from
not being so stupid as they are now so heavily invested in
representing George W. Bush as being. Among such people, it must
seem like a real option to run on a platform of being so smart that
you won’t ever have to do anything hard or scary — like, say, go
to war.
Mrs. Clinton would actually have her own claim to stake on this
constituency, if she were not, for some reason, a little shy of
making it. It is that her own “experience” of executive power, such
as it is, came from being part of the Clinton administration that
mostly conducted its national security business on the same
principle: whatever you do, don’t risk being wrong. That
administration’s failure to offer any but the feeblest and most
ineffectual military response to any of a series of provocations
from the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the
bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, its swiftness to
withdraw American forces from Somalia when American soldiers were
killed there and its limitation of American and NATO intervention
in the Balkans to aerial bombardment that cost not a single
American life was presumably just the sort of foreign policy that
Mr. Obama’s emphasis on being “right” would approve of. Yet, oddly,
he does not cite the Bill Clinton record of not making mistakes —
at least mistakes with fatal consequences for American servicemen
— as a model for his administration either.
Of course, the recent successes attributable to the “surge” of
American forces in Iraq make it just a little more difficult to
make out the Bush administration’s audacity — to use an
Obama-esque word — in invading Iraq to be quite so indubitably
wrong. But say that it was. Say that the hard-line
leftists, the Michael Moore style Bush-haters are right. He was
wrong. He was woefully wrong in undertaking the invasion of Iraq
instead of going after Osama bin Laden. The fact means less than
nothing now. Osama bin Laden is carrying on his anti-American
jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, Pakistan just as
if the President had been right! Right or wrong, if we mean to
fight al Qaeda — as opposed to being nice to them in the hope that
they’ll start being nice to us, which is the view of the more
extreme, pacifist wing of the anti-Bush coalition — these are the
places where we must fight it. Who was right and who was wrong
about Iraq in 2003 is irrelevant now — unless, of course, you are
like Barack Obama and willing to promise your hopeful supporters
that you will never be wrong.
That he has not been laughed off the national stage for such
foolish presumption is one measure of the eagerness in his party to
welcome a political savior, a fantasy figure and superhero who can
put everything right. My impression is that this eagerness, this
willingness to see a one-term senator from Illinois as an object of
veneration, as if he had accomplished some great deed instead of
just promising “change,” exists not just on the media fringe but
among people who would once have scorned such childishness. Oh how
certain sorts of Democrats want to believe in their infallible
superman! It’s the closet utopian in them who desperately need to
believe that if you’re smart enough — as, in effect, Barack Obama
is promising them he will be — they won’t have to fight
anybody! They believe, as utopians of all descriptions
have always believed, that peace and prosperity will come at the
bidding of the smart. That’s why they have to denigrate the
President’s intelligence at the same time that they are willing
naively to believe in the omnicompetence of Senator Obama’s.
In a long and persuasive article in the current Claremont
Review of Books, Victor Davis Hanson shows that America has never gone to war without
making mistakes in numbers, gravity and frequency to rival anything
we have seen in Iraq. Probably no other nation ever has either. But
the technocratic mentality is scandalized by error and, instead of
seeking to correct it, wallows in recriminations and
second-guessing. As Professor Davis Hanson says, “in postmodern
America it is defeat that has a thousand fathers, while the notion
of victory is an orphan.” Why is this? He has a number of helpful
explanations, including the fact that “an affluent, leisured
society has adopted a therapeutic and managerial rather than tragic
view of human experience — as if war should be controllable
through proper counseling or a sound business plan.” I would just
add that we shouldn’t forget the utopian temperament to which
Senator Obama appeals — and to which it is unbearable to think
that it is just not possible to be so smart, so much in control,
that disastrous error is precluded.
