"I Give You Our Party, Gentlemen, Wrong or Right!"

Our Party, Wrong, seems tolerably firmly seated in the saddle just at the moment:

The key and overwhelming reason voters prefer Clinton to Obama is that they believe she has more experience.

Of course if "experience" is to be the crux, we donkeys should have voted for John Quincy Adams in 1828 and thus never have become proper donkeys in the first place. Obviously we ought to have reëlected Taft in 1912, rather than let that crackpot academic in! 1932 was perhaps rather different: Dr. Hoover may retain the title of "Most Experienced American Pol Even" even as of August 2007, but he displayed, or was perceived as displaying, a singular unwillingness to learn from his multifarious experiences how to handle radical and displeasing novelty. And thus FDR snuck in somehow.

1932 still seems to be the beginning of political Modern Times to me, but perhaps the average polled donkey voter is so much younger than I that she thinks of FDR much as I think of Grover Cleveland? More likely she doesn't ever think of FDR at all and possesses no notion of him comparable to what Richard Hofstadter and Alan Nevis have furnished me with about our Grover.

Well, OK, sure, Change and Decay!, that was bound to happen sooner or later. Now that it has happened, though, I wonder exactly what date the special friends of Mizz Hillary and of "experience" in 2007 date their own donkeydom back to. Truman? JFK? LBJ? Jimmy Crater, even?

Probably Truman. Almost certainly Truman!

And that's rather fun, not only because the militant extremist Republicans want to appropriate HST to themselves, but because HST possessed even less antecedent "experience" in April 1945 of the special sort now demanded than the "naive and irresponsible" Senator from Illinois has in August 2007. Knowing how to be a successful machine pol in Kansas City is no doubt all very well in its way -- and let no donkey say a word against its way! --, but does that way automatically make one a predestined Tamer of Stalins?

What HST actually did, of course, was to assemble probably the most distinguished Cabinet (and kitchen cabinet) in all America's recorded annals and then mostly defer to their "experience" rather than rely upon his own. Was that an excellent plan in general, one for all donkey posterity to be edified and guided by forever, or did our Harry just accidentally luck out, expert-advicewise? Myself, I really dunno, one can read the tea leaves either way, especially considering what JFK subsequently let himself in for expert-advicewise with Sec. MacNamara and Sec. Rusk and others.

All that's as may be, at the moment the great thing is to notice that Mizz Hillary utterly ain't Harry Truman and that she shows not the slightest signs of proposing to trumanize. The "experience" in question is to be strictly Her Ladyship's individual own, unless maybe St. Bill counts for a little bit too at times. And 56% (as opposed to 37%) of us donkeys account Her Ladyship's unilateral and preëmptive "experience" the very thing required to set America right after the Crawford derailment! Not among them am I, for Lady Rodham is far too much like the other crew's current fruit for my 37% palate. To be sure, George XLIII does not fall back upon any mere Rodhamite personal "experience," of which he hadn't any at all before January 2001, but upon his Yale-and-Jesus-instructed gut feelin's. All the same, it's much the same spinach to me. (What's to say about that shtik, really, after one says "Yuck! It's spinach."?)

Turning to the per contra, I can't see how the "naive and irresponsible" Barak Obama could lose (for campaign purposes) by trumanizing explicitly, by expressly undertaking to be guided by all the Guidance and Wisdom available, the collective wisdom of us all, rather than flying solo as Her Ladyship obviously wants to, and as the GOP's Little Brother has, so very disastrously for his Uncle Sam, always flown solo.

Yet should the campaign be successful on that basis and culminate in "President Obama," it might not make much difference, at least as regards Uncle Sam's aggression and occupation policy. "President Obama" would immediately repair to Brookings and the CFR for top-notch wisdom and guidance, and there he'd be preached the usual bipartisan and credibilitarian (and sadly spinach-infested, me judice) sermons about Responsible Nonwithdrawal from the former Iraq, and then go on to doings not unlike what we'd get from "President Rodham" or "President Giuliani."

Wirklich wir leben in finsteren Zeiten! (But still, it's kinda fun to be alive to watch the show.)