Thursday, March 06, 2008

More Time

And will the question, “Who do you trust as Commander-in-Chief?” -- a fair question for the electorate of the world’s pre-eminent superpower -- advance to the front burner? For that is a question that knocks Mr Obama out of consideration, and he can only hope to win as long as people can be persuaded not to think about it.

If they persist in thinking, anyway, his own rhetoric could easily sink him, for on foreign policy he is incoherent. His official position now, towards America’s allies in the Middle East, is to divide them into two groups, abandoning some, such as Iraq, bombing others, such as Pakistan, with perhaps a mixture of abandonment and bombing in Afghanistan. Getting from there to somewhere credible will take more time than a presidential campaign provides.