Yes, Lucky Ticket Holder, you correctly observe that my metaphor is mixed. Moreover, it has reached the breaking point. All three candidates cannot strike out! Not if this is baseball. Politics, it turns out, resembles Big Brother or Survivor more than baseball. Strange alliances, madcap strategies and cold calculations come into play.
Take Hillary. She’s playing the only game that offers her a chance. It’s called Destroy Obama. Only by painting him as unelectable can she become the Democratic nominee. Her allies are many: those tapes of Rev. Wright, the ongoing Rezko trial, Super Delegates, a pliable media, plus a well-spring of goodwill for the Clintons.
Still, nostalgia for the Clintons is running low. As an old friend put it, Bill Clinton didn’t shoot the Democratic Party in the foot, when he foolishly opened himself to an unjust impeachment. No, he shot it in the head. I wouldn’t go that far, but it appears at times that Hillary’s bent on finishing the job. Her “kitchen sink” strategy could sink the party. Plenty of voters I know of a certain age and gender say they’d vote for McCain before they would Obama. And how many Obama supporters will vote for Hillary if they feel she’s destroying their Field of Dreams candidate.
For his part, McCain is positioning himself beautifully to attract any and all defectors. Last week I watched him deliver a speech on foreign policy. Whole passages could’ve been written by Hillary or Obama. McCain declared that we must restore our nation’s reputation. Support norms of international behavior. Stop torturing. Close Guantanamo. Build down our nuclear arsenal in a way that honors the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. We must unite to defeat global over-heating and find alternative energy sources. We must step up efforts to fight poverty and AIDS.
Could McCain win my vote? Absolutely. I couldn’t have said that a month ago. I hasten to add, it’s not likely. I could still bring myself to vote for Hillary, depending how she acquits herself from here until November.
More and more, however, I’m for Obama. I believe the presidency is his to lose. As my friend Joe Gallagher suggested in an email last week, “Obama isn’t Casey, at least not the one who struck out. He’s The Natural.” Remember the old Robert Redford baseball movie based on the Bernard Malamud novel Despite obvious differences, there’s some truth hovering over that comparison. And if you’ll pardon one more swing of a cracked metaphor, here’s hoping that some way, some how, Obama summons the strength, intelligence and charisma to knock out the stadium lights.
1 | 2
