Somewhere today George Bush and John McCain are wandering around like two punch-drunk fighters, trying to explain to their dwindling entourages how they got KOed in this week's big fight. "I t'ought I had 'im on the ropes wit' my big 'Appeasement' Punch!" "He shoulda been a sucka for the ol' 'Naive' One-Two!"
Barack Obama, that wily counterpuncher, just shook up their world with a stunning combination.
Bush, of course, is Old News, both literally and figuratively, and McCain will be joining him sooner than he thinks. But at least Bush will be able to brag, in his dotage, that he was once the Heavyweight Champ of the World, even if he didn't win it on merit, but was installed by a kangaroo Supreme Court decision that ranks with boxing's worst mob-fixed fights. McCain will be reduced, in his more-imminent dotage, to doing "I coulda been a contender" monologues in backwoods VFW halls. You can already see the bewildered terror in his eyes . So blissfully convinced, just a few days ago, that foreign policy was a winner for him, he can sense -- like the rest of us -- that the fight's not going according to plan.
Finally -- a Democrat who hits back! And who not only hits back, but kicks serious ass!
"Styles make fights," the promoters say, and the contrast here is stark. Bush and McCain are old -- not in age, but in approach. They're stiff. They're clunky. They're "musclebound" without being strong. Obama's technique is dazzling: he's deft, fast, and blessed with Sugar Ray Robinson skills of improvisation that make Bush and McCain look even clumsier. Imagine: a candidate who's at ease dropping words like "amorphous" and "disingenuous" into one fluid sentence -- and who trusts the intelligence of the American people enough to do so.
But tactical brilliance is only truly worthy in the service of moral integrity -- and Obama earned his title shot by having the guts to speak out against this criminal "war" back when it was considered practically treason. He earned it, too, in the debates, by standing up for the simple proposition that diplomacy is preferable to war. Even when Clinton tried to mock him for it.
So it was good to hear Hillary rally to his defense against the creepiest of the Bush/McCain smears. But what if Clinton herself had been the nominee -- how would she have been able to fight back against that kind of cheap -- but previously lethal -- Republican suckerpunch?
When one candidate is threatening a hundred years of war, and his opponent is promising to obliterate entire populations, then where exactly is the debate? It's only over the details. Who to kill, how many of them to kill, and under what precise conditions to kill them.
A McCain vs. Clinton match-up would've been maddening that way -- a battle over who could show more "testicular fortitude" by threatening more destruction. Maddening -- but dull. With two opponents who both voted for George Bush's war -- and for his self-defeating saber-rattling against Iran -- it wouldn't exactly have been a thrilling battle of opposites. They're both, in a way, holdovers from another era.
This week we saw the first punches landed in a brand-new kind of fight. Obama gave the speech that Hillary Clinton could never have given. The speech that even John Kerry -- similarly hamstrung by his early support for the war in Iraq -- couldn't give. It signals the arrival of an innovative, cagey, and principled warrior in the ring.
Get your bets down now. Should be a helluva fight.