The Genius Move

The New Hampshire primary was a great triumph of American democracy. The Granite State, humbled and preemptively disencumbered of its influence and credibility the entire overstuffed talking-shop of American political commentators.

They almost all announced the political demise of the Clintons, whom most of them had strenuously supported for 15 years, after Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama by a few thousand votes in a sub-primary delegate-selection process in Iowa. This state has 2% of the country's population, and the Democratic presidential candidates rarely win it.

This was all most of the Clintons' long-serving media claque needed to scurry out the back door into the tall grass and start debunking the Clintons as washed-up, pseudo-dynasts. The great oracular experts of the American media floundered like halibut. Many reached for the safety net of Senator Clinton's quasi-tearful 30 seconds of the day before. This was the rope-ladder: Senator Clinton allegedly had moist eyes but not cheeks and a momentarily, slightly, constricted voice.

So a supposed 13% Obama lead evaporated because the Senator from New York and wife of the former president was "human," having, pre-Iowa, in the minds of the same authorities, been virtually super-human. Lacrima Hillary. If I had heard Wolf Blitzer tell us one more time that CNN had "the top political news team on television," I would have had to reach for the sick bag. New Hampshire showed that the Emperor Punditry has no clothes, and is unattractive without them.

In policy terms, Senator Obama is a $3 bill. He is an attractive and intelligent man, speaks well, and has some of the cadences and inflection, though little of the justified moral outrage, (though he tries to simulate it), of Martin Luther King.

His program, disinterred from all the bunk about "change," which the country doesn't need or want apart from the reduction of the $800-billion current account deficit and its implications, is: 1) the largest tax increase in world history; 2) a complete and instant bug-out in Iraq; 3) dealing with terrorism by sitting down and rapping with the terrorists; 4) an unholy war on the drug, insurance, banking, and oil industries. His most durable electoral asset may be frequent public exposure of his wife in exiguous outfits.

Unless Rudy Giuliani cleans up in the Florida, California, and Illinois primaries, which I doubt, it is Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain. If the economy doesn't wobble badly, and the progress in Iraq doesn't come unstuck, Mr. McCain should win, though probably almost as narrowly as Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, Mr. Carter in 1976, or the present Bush in 2000.

In 29 of the 43 presidential elections prior to 1960, someone best known as a senior army officer was a serious nominee for national office and winner of electoral votes, successfully in 18 of those elections. These included some of the greatest names of American history: Washington, Jackson, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower. They were successful, as a group, in 10 of 12 national elections. Being demonstrably patriotic, brave, successfully commanding in crises, and untainted by political logrolling has never lost its appeal to Americans.

Since World War II, the only popular and successful war the country has had, the first Gulf War, yielded a hero who did not choose to run, General Powell, though he probably would have won if had run.

So since 1960, the parties have usually nominated men proud of their military background, but not in high command positions: Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, Goldwater, McGovern, Ford, Carter, Bush Senior, Dole, Gore and Kerry (not to mention George Wallace's 1968 vice presidential running mate, Air Force General Curtis "Lob-one-into-the-men's-room-in-the-Kremlin … and-turn-North-Vietnam-into-a-parking-lot"-Lemay).

Successful nominees with military backgrounds also included now obscure figures, such as Vice President (Colonel) Richard Johnson, renowned for living for decades with a black slave as an un-emancipated wife-equivalent and co-parent, half a mile from the District of Columbia slave market, and for supposedly having killed the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh. His vice presidential election slogan in 1836, "Rumpsey, dumpsey, who killed Tecumseh?" though tasteless and childish (and possibly false), was more original than this endless current mantra about "change."

For all its tawdriness and philistinism, it is part of the greatness of the American electoral process that the gender, pigmentation, religious background, marital history, and age of Mrs. Clinton, Messrs. Obama, Giuliani, and McCain, (and New York's current mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, if he runs), will not figure significantly in the result.

Mr. McCain, an authentic hero, though irascible and burdened with a bogus campaign-finance bill and unacceptable views on immigration, is in the best of the military-political tradition of integrity. He doesn't speak in clichés or adjust his views for the fluctuating polls, and he does have a sense of humor.

If he is the presidential nominee, the genius move would be to invite Mr. Bloomberg to be his running mate. At this early point, if the office, in a phrase from Washington's time, is seeking anyone (i.e. being unsuccessfully sought by anyone), it is John McCain.

Lord Black is the author of "Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full" and "Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom."