I’m voting for Obama. I want a President capable of speaking and thinking above the fourth grade level. W. was promoted as the guy you could share a beer with. He has turned out to be dumb as a brick and incapable of intelligible speech. When we found out he had given up brewskis for Jesus, there was nothing left.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire McCain. He has promised to keep troops in Iraq until we can declare victory with honor. The last time we invaded a country less than a third our size the best we could come away with was peace with honor. And that time we had a purpose and a theory to back it. We had to stand firm in Viet Nam to keep communists from sweeping to the south and taking New Guinea, Borneo, Indonesia, Australia, all the countries in between, New Zealand and, presumably, Antarctica. They would fall like dominoes and ultimately penguins would wear the yoke of global communism. And we succeeded. The penguins remain free. Still the best we could extract from the Vietnamese was peace with honor. We didn’t have to feel ashamed. We could always point to the honor thing.

McCain’s vision is bolder. And the terrain is tougher. I admire him.

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When we finally sit down to bargain with the Iraqis and sort out who won and who lost and who gets the honor thing, we’ll be facing a seasoned negotiating team. They’ve been at this bargaining business for four thousand years. Iraq is only a tenth our size, but Iraqis have the experience thing. Still our position is not hopeless. Since our purposes for invading Iraq have vanished one after another like a series of desert mirages, we’re not stuck with some unattained goal. We can make one up. And to his credit McCain seems to recognize this and avoids saying what victory would consist of in order to keep his options open.

Even so it won’t be easy. We can’t claim that we wanted to establish a stable central government since there already was one before we set foot in Iraq. We can’t claim that we wanted to stifle terrorism since there wasn’t any terrorism in Iraq before our invasion. We can’t claim that we wanted to topple Saddam to establish a nicer central government since the one we established appears to have allowed, and at times encouraged, sectarian slaughter and has proven strikingly incompetent at providing even basic services. I wouldn’t waste my breath on these contentions. The negotiators we face are sure to make short work of them.

I think McCain is on the right track: The Surge. This long-neglected noun has finally come into its own and between the storm surge of Katrina and the cash and manpower surge of Iraq it has won a place at the table of really big words. If McCain can persuade the Iraqis that our purpose all along was to wait a few years into the war and then stick more troops in and put 100,000 Iraqi insurgents on the American payroll, I think he may have something to work with. To be sure that position is not without its problems. It may be pointed out that if the purpose of all this was to reduce the level of violence, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble by not invading in the first place. But it may be our only shot.

The honor thing may be an even tougher fight. Even the least able negotiator won’t miss shoving Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture and extraordinary rendition down our throats. And while McCain may contend that we shouldn’t allow a few bad apples to besmirch our reputation, it will probably be pointed out that according to the saying it only takes one. The demonstration of bizarre American depravity will be hard to overcome. Even more problematic is McCain’s desire to secure both victory and the honor thing. Typically honor is the sugar-coating for defeat which the winner willingly puts on the table. Winners don’t usually worry about the honor thing. We won WWII. Nobody ever worried about whether we won it with honor. We probably did, but it wasn’t an issue. When you say someone or some country fought with honor, it’s pretty much tantamount to saying they lost.

Good luck with that John. I just think the best you can hope for is to call it even. But maybe that’s what victory with honor means.

I was brutal to W. Okay. But when the President stands up in front of something other than his bathroom mirror and says ‘all people yearn in their souls for freedom’ or ‘they hate us for our freedom’ or ‘bring it on’ or explains his reluctance to talk with anyone saying we don’t negotiate with evil … somebody has to say something. He handles world affairs like a pre-teen and he has led us from a moment in which we enjoyed world sympathy to one in which we are largely viewed as a bizarre and dangerous clown. It’s stomach, W., not soul. And it’s food, not freedom. Most of our fellow humans yearn for a little food, a little stability and don’t much care whether it’s provided by Attila the Hun or Saddam Hussein. They don’t hate our freedom. They despise drugs, booze, porn, crass materialism, homos, sex equality, profanity, charging interest and secular laissez-faire. A lot of people here feel the same way. It’s just that they have a little more conviction than we do. They don’t mind blowing themselves up over it. We just elected W.

I don’t take kindly to religious fascists be they Christian, Muslim or Jewish. None of them are willing simply to mind their own business. You live your life; I’ll live mine. Thank you. But I don’t think they are evil. They’re just a pain in the neck. Not W. He thinks they are evil … especially if they are Muslim. Pretty big word W. W. likes big words that don’t have too many syllables. But, W., it’s a kind of prissy word. People I drink beer with don’t call folks they don’t like “evil”. They use other expressions. Some have four syllables. But just two syllables a word. This is serious business. Prissy words don’t measure up. If you can say ‘bring it on’, surely you can talk straight through a prissy word like “evil”.

But that’s W. It has to be a struggle between good and evil. You know … it has to have Biblical proportions. Trouble is: We don’t measure up to good anymore than they measure up to evil. It’s more like a struggle between the strangely intentioned. They have their strange intentions and we have ours.

Then, of course, there’s the bald-faced lie thing. W. stands up in front of the country and says we don’t torture. His administration then scrambles to fuzzy up the definition of torture and decline to comment on specific cases in order to protect national security. It’s reminiscent of Clinton defining sex. Except this time we are actually hurting people. And this time we didn’t have the Justice Department step in with a Memorandum saying the President could do anything he wanted if his goal was to protect us. So, if he wanted to, he could torture. But he didn’t. Liar. He did too. And the laughable part was the handwringing chorus ruing our loss of the moral high ground. What moral high ground?

I could go on, and I will. Take the whole “war on terrorism” thing. Or, as it is sometimes known: The war on “global terrorism.” What a ridiculous idea. By any definition the largest terrorist acts in world history were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everybody commits terrorism. It’s a technique, not an objective. It’s a crude technique. But the objective behind it doesn’t alter what it is. As was pointed out, declaring our invasion of Iraq to be a “war on terrorism” is like calling WWII a war on submarines. What was “Shock and Awe” if not terrorism? One man’s ‘collateral damage’ is another’s ‘terrorism’. If it doesn’t do anything else, the definition of a war should at least give you some idea of when it will be over. When will this one be over? When terrorism disappears? Settle in folks. This will be a long haul.

In his defense people say W. got a degree from Yale, a distinguished place of learning. Yale should ask for it back or just start selling its degrees on the Internet.

Okay, I don’t really admire McCain. What he forgets about Viet Nam and what he’s forgetting about Iraq is what they represent: Naked, unjustified American aggression. Both were wrong. The only good thing that can be said about either adventure is that they had to lie to us to get us involved. The downside is that it didn’t take much to fool us. McCain’s current effort to justify the Iraq invasion is simple: If we hadn’t attacked Saddam to protect ourselves from the weapons of mass destruction that he didn’t have, he would have busied himself spending oil revenues to get them. Pointing to higher gas prices, he contends that every gallon an American purchases would not only finance highway construction but Saddam’s terrible arsenal as well. Pretty scary stuff, John. By the way, John, where have you been? Did you miss the part where Saddam was hemmed in on all sides by no fly zones and restricted to purchasing food with oil revenues? And did you miss the part where Iraq tottered on the brink of economic collapse and starvation for years after the so-called first Gulf War? By the time W. decided to attack, Iraq had been drained, sanctioned, bombed, rocketed and starved for ten years. This is what you want us to be afraid of?

And, John, we know about the oil revenues. Weren’t those the ones that were going to make the whole invasion and reconstruction of Iraq free for the American taxpayer? You remember that don’t you, John?

W. traces his political lineage to thinkers who want to drag the country back to a simpler, cleaner mythical past promising that we can take our big screen TVs with us. In this mythical past we would all go to church on Sunday and then lounge about watching professional football or NASCAR races on TV while women in dresses and heels busy themselves in the kitchen. The Taliban are an offshoot of the same line except they want to drag people back about 1200 years. W.’s mythical past is sometime in the last century.

McCain doesn’t appear to have selected a particular time period. He’s talking about a parallel universe with knights and armor and ladies sighing at uniforms and men with grim faces and duty and honor and flags and ribbons and badges and saluting and guys sitting around in bars not talking about the things they saw. It’s a board game and you have to dress up in costume to play it. I’m just afraid he’ll want everybody to play. It’s called a draft. That way we can be ready to attack everyone and our war budget won’t be five times as big as everybody else’s put together; it will be ten times bigger.

In 1967 I had the good luck to be chosen as a member of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to go to the Kingdom of Lesotho. Four years later I returned to the United States penniless but immeasurably richer. During the first two years of my service I was a teacher upgrader in the Mokhotlong District high in the highland mountains of a country whose lowlands are five thousand feet above sea level. I traveled by horse towing a pack mule from school to school for the purpose of working with uncertificated teachers, and the memory of long ascents up steep mountains on narrow trails and high grassy meadows are etched in my mind’s hardest rock. Etched as well are the recollections of a people eternally pleasant and welcoming even in the face of unyielding poverty. As most any volunteer would say, I was given far more than I gave.

On an occasion when volunteers doing the same work as I and many of the teachers we were working with were brought together in the capitol city, Maseru, for training, a fellow volunteer, Karl S. Beck, delivered a short lecture. I have never forgotten what he said, and I am glad I had learned to pay attention when Karl spoke as he was and remains a reliable source of insight and good sense.

Comparing African stories to those from other lands, Karl pointed out that all stories tended to emphasize certain virtues and a common thread in African stories is the emphasis on cleverness. Problems are solved, obstacles overcome and dangers avoided through cleverness. He gave examples which I don’t remember, but I forgive myself as often when a new idea comes along I find myself flooded with connections to it and the ability to keep paying attention fails me. I thought of the stories we had learned in school, stories about Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or John Henry none of whom can be said to have placed much reliance on cleverness. Their métier seems to have been limitless physical prowess. And it came to mind that a story I had learned to tell in Lesotho to students high in the mountains always prompted a warm response. The story tells of Ali who borrowed a large pot from his friend Mustafa to prepare a feast. After the feast he returned the large pot with a small pot inside. Mustafa asked Ali where the small pot came from and, smiling, Ali told him the large pot had had a baby. Mustafa happily accepted the new arrival without question. Sometime later when Ali asked to borrow the large pot again Mustafa was happy to oblige him. When weeks went by and Ali had not returned the pot, Mustafa went to him to ask for it back. Ali put on his saddest face, took Mustafa by the hand and told him that he had very sad news: The pot had died. For the cost of a small pot, Ali had obtained a large one.

These recollections all seemed to come at me at once, but they were soon brushed aside when I remembered a story from my childhood which alongside The Little Train That Could was my favorite. The story was read to me out of a Little Golden Book and when I learned to read I read it many times to myself. It was the story of Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. As I later learned, it was an African story.

Are there Americans, at least Americans of my generation, who do not know how Brer Rabbit managed to persuade Brer Fox that he would be just fine with being roasted and eaten so long as he was not cast into the briar patch? And how Brer Fox who had so cleverly used the tar baby to capture Brer Rabbit was unable to resist his sadistic side and condemn Brer Rabbit to what was apparently the worst of fates: The briar patch. Disney did the story and I can still recollect the Disney-style pictures that accompanied the text in my Little Golden Book. I wonder whatever happened to The Little Golden Books and, if they are still around, what stories they tell now.

All this happened years ago, but it was brought to mind recently when I watched the film Hotel Rwanda. The protagonist wheedles, bribes and lies his way through the stark dangers of a genocide for the purpose of saving some lives. While his purpose must rank as nobler than Ali’s and more selfless than Brer Rabbit’s, he shares with them the virtue of cleverness. Our own national bent would be for the cavalry to arrive guns blazing blasting away the bad guys.

When we attacked Iraq, we shook hands with the tar baby and became mired in a set of circumstances most of which we cannot control. The cavalry is not coming. It’s already there, stuck in the tar. We need cleverness. McCain is not clever. He is tough. He is determined. He can endure a lot. But he is not clever. We don’t need a tough negotiator; we need a clever one. And clever negotiators don’t worry about pride or honor or good or evil. They pick much simpler goals. Our goal is to extract ourselves. The invasion was a colossal blunder not because it was incompetently planned but because the region is a tar baby. The incompetent planning just made it worse. Brer Rabbit got stuck because he was offended by the tar baby’s discourtesy. We got stuck because some persuaded us we should be offended by Saddam’s apparent intransigence. What we need now is the functional equivalent of the briar patch and that’s going to take some deep cleverness. Obama is cleverer than McCain. I like his chances. I’m afraid McCain will just keep on looking for the cavalry.