OBAMA vs. McCAIN: Who's Got Sound Judgment?

In my past blog, I mentioned that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama should select Sen. Hillary Clinton as his vice-president to make his candidacy strongly supported by all Democrats. However, his ambition to etch a name in the American political history on his own effort, completely separating from any high-ranked official, in the like of former President William Jefferson Clinton, he unfortunately chose Sen. Biden. Now, he is scrambling for defense against his Republican rival John McCain, especially in the issue of sound judgment.

This is how I see the changing polling showdown where Sen. McCain now is slightly ahead of Sen. Obama. Just as many other countries, the good old USofA considers its president as the highest ranking government official. To tell the nation that Obama is choosing Biden for a vice president, because he has more experienced, particularly in foreign relations, has created a negative effect on Obama’s sound judgment. Rather than helping boost his candidacy, he not only turned away the millions of democrats, who cried for him to chose their “political idol” and the “voice of the women”, Sen. Clinton, but he also has told the nation that he is selecting the top-gun on foreign relation, because that is one of his inadequacy and the problem America is facing today. So, inadvertently history is repeating itself this early.

Remember what has happened to the outgoing president? One reason why he chose Richard Chenney was because he also was a top-gun in national security and defense. He has more experienced in national and international politics than the governor turned president. Result? People looked at his decision making lame, heavily dictated by those top-guns around him. People lost confidence; popularity went tumbling down.

Should Sen. Obama had chosen Sen. Hillary Clinton, the decision could have catapulted his candidacy, because he could have said that they have fought tooth and nail all the way to the end during the primaries, it is just fair and unifying for her to be the vice president. Such statement could have placed him at equal footing with his vice president; it couldn’t have placed his ability in foreign relation in question.

Look at the case of Sen. John McCain! He is very wise to select a woman, hoping to tap many of those Clinton supporters and undecided voters to his side. He is very wise to select a not-so-well-known governor to showcase his ability to lead and experience in both national and international issues. Unlike Biden, Governor Palin is an active and experienced cheerleader, who can never out-shadow Sen. McCain’s political prowess. McCain, if ever he’d get elected, would be the commander-in-chief; she would just be a captain of a company, ready and willing to serve anytime, and… a “football mom” (whatever that is).

To contrast his platform of change against McCain’s, Sen. Obama jokingly said in Lebanon, Virginia the other day, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, but it still going to stink.”

Nevertheless, what kind of change does not stink in the long-run? Many programs smelled so good when they were implemented, however, with the social, economic, and cultural changes going as fast as a “bullet train”, they soon stink over time. No matter how you identify yourself as an innovator and a radical change agent, you cannot have a change evolve from nothing. As Ruth Benedict’s in her book, Pattern of Culture (1934; 1959:84) wrote, “…men are never inventive enough to make more than minute change. From the point of view of an outsider, the most radical innovation (change) in any culture amount to no more than a minor revision, and it is a common place that prophets have been put to death for the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”