Sarah Palin has succeeded in removing herself from the equation by her sterling performance Thursday night. It is now between John McCain and Barack Obama.

If President Obama is in our future, if he is the one who stands up there to take the oath on Inauguration Day, I will cheer, I will pray for him, I will celebrate. It will be an historic occasion. It will be one of the greatest moments in all of human history. I will have the audacity to hope that Barack Hussein Obama turns out to be a great leader at a time, once again, of Civilization’s greatest peril.

It will not be the first time that a man of unrevealed moral courage and integrity has risen to the nation’s highest office. It has been the case with many of our Presidents, from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to John Kennedy to Richard Nixon. It is the democratic crap shoot. The polis, the citizenry, the Palinesque rubes, have no understanding of the “issues”, but they may, hopefully, usually, but not always, be capable of judging, in spite of the media filter, the character of the contestants in the democratic beauty pageant.

I, myself, have seen no evidence of courage in Barack Obama, and I have seen, as we all have, undeniable courage in the character of John McCain. For me, that is the deciding factor. Obama may have it, or he may not. McCain undoubtedly has it. In the times to come, this will be absolutely essential in our President.

Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. Obama is certainly graceful, but I have not yet seen him exhibit courage under pressure, other than the courage to even presume to offer oneself as a candidate for President of the United States of America, something I suspect Obama himself did not expect to have gone this far.

In fact, when pressed with uncomfortable questions, Obama has been testy and petulant. His tendency has been, so far, when the chips are down, to play it safe, to equivocate, to shift the blame. I have seen grace, and more than grace, under pressure, from John McCain, and now I have seen it in Sarah Palin as well.

This has little to do with the issues of health care or tax policy or war, or any of the other issues that I and my fellow political geeks value so highly. This is about the real deal, not the hypocrisy that all politicians necessarily indulge in during campaigns. Who is this guy, or gal? Obama might turn out OK. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t too bad. Harry Truman turned out pretty damn well. Ronald Reagan was fairly successful. Kennedy might have been great. Who knows? Obama might just turn out to be the cat’s pajamas.

Why am I so doubtful?

Barack Obama is the most accomplished liar I have seen since Bill Clinton, maybe even better than Bill Clinton. John McCain, on the other hand, is one of the worst liars I have ever seen in public life. This is not a criticism of Obama or praise for McCain. Being a smooth liar is arguably a desirable quality in a President. It certainly didn’t hurt FDR or Thomas Jefferson. As an old college debater myself with a 99% winning record, I had to wince at McCain’s performance more than once.

The problem is that I, and by extrapolation everybody else, have no idea who Barack Obama really is. Nobody has any doubt about who John McCain really is. I believe that the gulf between the reality of Obama and the public image of Obama is enormous, a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon, whereas for McCain it is practically nonexistent. What you see is what you get, and has been for many decades. Maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? Maybe Obama is actually a decent, honest, idealistic guy who rose to the top of Chicago politics through sheer excellence of character and ability. But I doubt it. This guy is a smooth-talking equivocator. I can’t stand him. He enrages me. I despise him. I think McCain, and the Clintons, feel the same way. They can’t believe this guy is getting away with it, but of course he is.

As far as the debate went, Obama is a vastly more skillful debater than McCain. The only reason it was pretty much a draw is because Obama was saddled with a weaker case to defend. When talking about the current financial crisis, the single most important issue of the moment, they both managed to expel large quantities of verbiage containing not a single speck of meaning. McCain scored a few points on earmarks but neglected to mention the fact that he, John McCain, has never requested any earmarks for Arizona. As an old debater I found this inexplicable.

In general I thought that Obama eked out a slight victory on points during the economic babble. McCain doesn’t care about economics. He believes that the federal government should stay out of economics as much as possible. I agree with him, but of course he can’t say that as a candidate for President, especially now. The economic hypocrisies demanded of a Presidential politician are a real problem for McCain, but are a piece of cake for Obama.

When they got onto foreign policy, all of a sudden McCain seemed to come alive. He was direct, he was speaking straight from the heart and from experience, he looked like someone who knew what he was talking about, and who knew what to do about it. He recited numerous, hard to pronounce, names of foreign leaders of obscure states. Obama was professorily articulate, like someone who had studied the subject, but had never actually dealt with it. But he didn’t make any mistakes, and he came across as acceptably competent. I would give the win to McCain, but Obama didn’t embarrass himself, which is really all he had to do.

For me, the key moment of the debate occurred after McCain had related a heart-rending anecdote about being given a bracelet by the mother of a soldier who had been killed in Iraq, which McCain swore to wear “with honor”. When it was Obama’s turn, he began by saying, “I have a bracelet too.” Obama supporters probably didn’t even notice that, or if they did, it didn’t matter. For me, it was the clincher.

Overall I think that people who prefer McCain, like me, still do, and people who prefer Obama, also still do. Which means that Obama wins, since he’s ahead supposedly. I doubt that he’s really ahead. The polls always say the Democrat is going to win, and he never does. And then there’s the Bradley effect. I just hope and pray there are enough white racist Democrats left in the country to keep this dangerous demagogue out of the White House.

Here’s an email exchange between me and my cousin Andy about McCain’s lame reaction to the financial meltdown, which I had already been forced to concede was lame, just because it really was lame. The excerpts from my email are in italics. Andy’s responses follow them. Severe irony warning.

Yup, that was pretty lame on McCain’s part, calling for the Cox decapitation, accusing him of betraying the public trust, with no evidence offered whatsoever. Fortunately Sarah Palin will be there to steady him when he has one of these fits as President. It’s just that he is so passionate about combating evil in the world, that he sometimes gets a little carried away.

Absolutely. It just demonstrates his wisdom in choosing a down-to-earth, steady-as-she-goes running mate to help strike a balance between his moral passion and actual fact. The efficacy of small-town common sense, without any distracting knowledge of high finance or foreign policy.

This whole financial meltdown deal is really weird. This thing that keeps being repeated is that these complicated financial derivatives are so complex that nobody on Wall Street understands them. Really? Wow! I heard today somewhere, for example, that some of the things they did was to bundle the principle and the interest and the balloon payment of a home loan, all into different packages that were bought and sold separately. And that is just the bare beginnings of the kinds of shenanigans they have been up to.

Not to be overly pedantic, but I think you meant the bundling of “principal” along with all the other goodies in those arcane incomprehensible financial pinatas. But maybe not. It probably works either way.

So McCain is right to be so righteously angry about it all, but that’s no excuse. I would like to know what his prescriptions are for this deal? I’d like to know Obama’s, or anybody’s. I have no idea whether or not Paulson is doing the right thing, nor does anyone else, I gather. It’s like the derivatives, too complex for the mind of puny humans to comprehend.

I fail to see that it’s up to either McCain or Obama to come up with a detailed prescription. Some things you have to leave to the guys in charge, who at least have access to all the discernible facts and conceivably know more or less what they’re doing.

Looks to me like sort of a hail-Mary pass, but sometimes when it’s fourth down and goal to go and you’re behind and the clock is running out that’s the only alternative. And occasionally you actually connect.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

OK, I admit it, much as I hate to. The current financial crisis is a result of a lack of governmental oversight and regulation. I hate to admit it because it is a given, as far as I’m concerned, that the government in no way has the requisite knowledge, wisdom, experience, or motivation, to make good decisions about the financial marketplace. And yet, obviously, neither does the management of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, or AIG. And the thing is, if it is up to the government (i.e. the taxpayer) to come to the rescue when it all goes South, which it necessarily is, then clearly it must also be up to the government to see to it that this never happens.

The investment banks and hedge funds were investing in packages of home mortgages, turned into complicated bundles passed from hand to hand, growing ever more complicated as they traversed up the chain. And they were doing it at a leveraged ratio of 30 to 1. In other words, they were gambling on weird financial instruments that nobody really understood, by borrowing 97% of the cost of their investments. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were leveraging at a ratio of 60 to 1, i.e., they were borrowing 98.3% of the value of their investments. This was being done based on the belief that real estate only goes up and never comes down, and is therefore risk-free. Investment bank and hedge fund managers have walked away from this debacle with billions of dollars in their pockets, while the taxpayers, living and as yet unborn, are left holding the bag. Risk free indeed.

In my margin account with my stock broker, I am legally not allowed to buy stock on margin past a ratio of 4 to 1. In other words, I can only borrow 75% of the value of the stock. The thing about leverage is, when whatever you are investing in is going up, leverage makes you rich quick. The problem is, when your investment is going down, leverage makes you poor just as quick. And when the value of your investment sinks below what you have borrowed, you have to come up with the cash. The real estate bubble, as all bubbles from tulips to internet companies eventually do, has popped.

Even though the underlying basis of this crisis is just the home mortgages that are in default because some home loans were authorized that shouldn’t have been, and even though that still only represents a relatively small percentage of home mortages, nevertheless we have a crisis because the great financial houses on Wall Street leveraged these loans way beyond any rational level. If they had been leveraged at 4 to 1, and the value of home mortgages dropped 25%, they would still be OK. But when you are leveraged at 97% or 98%, then your investments can’t drop at all or you are in big trouble. You can’t meet the margin calls. It’s 1929 all over again.

A major component of the problem is the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the investment bankers, were making very generous donations to various Congressional Representatives’ and Senators’ campaign funds. The number one recipient of these contributions was, coincidentally, the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd, who also got a sweetheart deal from Countrywide, America’s largest home lender, for his own home mortgage. The number two recipient of the largesse of Fannie and Freddie was (hold onto your hats) a freshman Senator named Barack Obama. He got more money from these guys than any other member of the Senate except for the Chairman of the Banking Committee. How do you suppose that happened?

On the other hand, in 2005, three years ago, Senator John McCain introduced a bill in the Senate called the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which would have placed the exact restraints on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that might have prevented this crisis. What happened to the bill? It was killed by Chris Dodd’s committee.

This is all a little bit too complex to be the subject of a TV campaign ad, so Obama blames George Bush, and therefore John McCain, because, as everybody knows, they are one and the same, and McCain blusters about promising to go after the greedy Wall Street bankers. Oversimplifications R Us.

But the real truth is, in this economic crisis, McCain is the prescient reformer, and Obama is the sold-out enabler.

It’s funny. The only real news angle at the carefully staged Democratic Convention is the extent of the rift between the Clintonistas and the Obamaniacs. The pundits, whether on Fox or The News Hour or MSNBC, all agree that the rift has nothing to do with policy. Barack and Hillary are essentially in agreement on policy. The primaries were decided on personality, Clinton fatigue, the young fresh image of Obama, blah, blah, blah.

This just amazes me. It is such utter nonsense. Hillary Clinton lost the nomination of the Democratic Party for two reasons. Number one, she refused to apologize for her vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq. And number two, the Black, Democratic primary voters, heretofore the Clintons’ most loyal supporters, voted 95% for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton was rejected by the Democratic Party for being too supportive of the war in Iraq, and for being White. There were also some shenanigans in the caucuses by Obama people, to be expected of a politician who cut his teeth in Chicago politics, but that’s Hillary’s own fault for not paying attention. Why won’t any one state these obvious truths?

Of course these weaknesses on Hillary’s part would have been strengths in the general election, and vice versa for Obama. His primary strengths are now general election weaknesses. He was, and is, wrong about Iraq, and Black people always vote for the Democrat anyway. Hillary’s attacks on Obama as being too inexperienced had no resonance in the primaries, but they do now.

If the Democrats don’t have buyer’s remorse, then they are even more out of touch with reality than, well, I was going to say than I imagined, but actually they are as out of touch with reality as it is quite easy to imagine.

If Obama had picked Clinton as his V.P., McCain would be toast. Now, John McCain may very well win in a landslide.

I really don’t like this guy Barack Obama. At first I was like, this guy’s OK, I don’t agree with him mostly, but he is a breath of fresh air in many ways. Wouldn’t it be great at home and abroad to have a partly Black President? Of course it would. It would be great. The war in Iraq is already won. He can’t really screw that up. And he can’t do much of anything else because there’s no money. The worst thing that might happen is that he and the Democratic Congress will raise taxes on people richer than me.

But now? I hate him. I can’t stand to even watch him on TV. I have to flip the channel. It’s just like Bush Derangement Syndrome, which I have had some trouble understanding. What is this? Am I like totally susceptible to the great American political polarization that all the pundits are using for column fodder? Or is Obama really an a**hole?

I’m sorry. I know he’s part Negro and all, but I think he does just happen to be, racial DNA completely and utterly aside, an a**hole. I’m telling you, this guy Barack Obama respects Bill Ayers and the most Reverend Jeremiah Wright (Rev. Wright seems so long ago, thanks to the MSM). I mean I know he was just using them to get ahead in Black Chicago politics, and I understand that, but nevertheless, in spite of that laudable, manipulative, political ambition, I think there actually is some deep sympathy, on Obama’s part, for the “ideals” of the 60’s that Ayers and Wright represent.

He keeps talking, for example, about how guilty we are for consuming so much energy, and, in general, for being so undeservedly rich and powerful, as if America (and George W. Bush) were the primary source of the problems in this otherwise beautiful world of ours.

And now His handmaidens are spreading rumors to the effect that McCain somehow cheated and listened in to His SaddleBack interview, and that he stole his most poignant Hanoi Hilton story from Solzhenitsyn. Just for the record, that anecdote, about the cross in the dirt, does not appear in any of Solzhenitsyn’s works. Questioning the integrity of a man who spent five and a half years being tortured in a Communist prison camp, on behalf of myself and all Americans, seems like a rather desperate tack.

Obama may believe that the American people are ignorant, racist, selfish, whiners, and I’m not saying there is no evidence to support that point of view, but I don’t think it’s a winning message. And I think that, obese and bellicose as we Americans are, we’re not as stupid as the Democrats think we are.

The ideological battle lines have been drawn. On the Right is the usual multiplicity of opinions about the Russian invasion of Georgia and the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the various possible U.S. responses to it. On the Left is the usual lockstep agreement that this is all George Bush’s fault, because of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and the Russians are just doing what anyone would do when threatened by American imperialism.

Do they really believe that invading Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, were the moral equivalent of invading Georgia to get rid of its democratically elected government, the same thing as the intimidation of the other nations bordering Russia? Is the entire concept of there being such a thing in the universe as good guys and bad guys rendered invalid, once and for all, by postmodernism?

I’m not saying that mistakes have not been made. I’m not saying that the independent nation status of Kosovo is an unalloyed good. I am saying that George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, and the United States of America and Russia, are not peas in a pod. There is a difference. There is still a role for discrimination among alternative realities.

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party seem to be making that moral equivalence. John McCain knows better. Kick Russia out of the G8? Sure, why not? They didn’t belong there in the first place. Block Russia from becoming a member of the World Trade Organization? Absolutely. Form an organization of democratic nations to parallel the U.N.? Yes, I’m in favor of that.

Make Georgia a member of NATO? I don’t know about that. I would hopefully like to have the members of NATO be willing and capable of allocating sufficient resources to their military defense to be of some use. But then, by those criteria, we would have to boot most of Europe out of NATO. NATO has become almost as irrelevant as the U.N. As far as military and moral force (are they separable?) are concerned, in the West there is only the United States.

Here is a diatribe from that notorious neocon, Zbigniew Brezezinski. Of course he must be forgiven, having had the unfortunate experience of actually living under Russia’s benevolent boot.

The system administrator I hired at sfgate.com, when I was Director of Technology there, Sergey, a brilliant guy, was a Russian from Latvia. He served in the Russian Army. He spoke Latvian and Russian. He was born in Latvia, grew up there, and now, after sojourns in San Francisco and Amsterdam, is back there again. The Latvians don’t like the large Russian population that still lives there. Sergey told me about the big parade in Riga, his home town, where the Latvian Nazi collaborators marched. Back in the day, the Latvians welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Russians, and they still honor the Nazis. The Jews weren’t too popular in Latvia either. It’s a complicated, dare I say nuanced, business. The National Socialists are a distant, buried memory in Germany, but the Russians are as bad as they ever were.

I’m beginning to think that perhaps the Democrats have nominated yet another lame-o candidate, in the tradition of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Barack Obama is a hard man to get to know, but the more we know, the less we like, it would seem, if the polls mean anything.

I think I understand some things about Obama’s personality. I was an Air Force brat. We moved frequently, all over the country, and outside of the country. I went to high school in Germany for three years. By the time I had left home, at age 17, I had lived in at least ten different places; South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, Germany, North Dakota, not necessarily in that order, and a few other places I don’t remember. Since leaving home I have lived at numerous addresses in Iowa, California, and Tennessee.

Obama had a similar background, having lived in Hawaii, Indonesia, Cambridge, Chicago, etc., having had a Kenyan father and a peripatetic white mother. The effect of this, as I can testify from personal experience, is to both endow and saddle one with a certain detachment. It is hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm for the home team, if this is the sixth or tenth home team you have been called upon to root for.

Obama has a previous reputation for detachment, at Harvard and the University of Chicago, and a current reputation for throwing anybody or any issue under the bus that gets in the way of his ambition. I’m not a politician like Barack, but I can relate to that. I think I understand how he got that way. I’m not knocking it, but I have to ask myself, would I vote for me for President of the United States? I assume you realize, dear reader, that is a rhetorical question.

John McCain, on the other hand, is one of those straight-ahead guys, whose future direction, and bedrock principles and beliefs, were laid down at an early age, and have sustained him ever since through unimaginable ordeals and pressures.

He may have had some measure of adolescent identity crisis, I don’t know, but I very much doubt that it came close to what Barack and I have had to deal with. Obama wrote a whole, prize-winning, book about his search for identity. On the other hand, McCain has had to deal with circumstances that neither Barack nor I can conceive of, not only as a resident of the Hanoi Hilton, but in the cockpit of his fighter jet before it got shot down, and in his long political career since his torture and release.

Even though I possess the requisite hair and narcissism, I would never presume to throw my hat in the ring for Prez, or even Senator or Governor. Of course, I never went to Harvard, taught at the University of Chicago, had a best-selling autobiography, or got elected to the Illinois State legislature and the United States Senate. And I am terminally white. I have no trouble admitting Obama’s superiority to moi, as a candidate, or generally, as a remarkable human being. I hope that doesn’t make me a racist?

I don’t like Obama’s ideology, to the extent that I can figure out what it is. It appears to me to be an America-disdaining, quixotic mirage that I have, in my twilight years, rejected in favor of an embrace of things as they are, America-affirming and cautiously optimistic, despite the nightmare of history.

I think he, Barack Hussein Obama, the One, is going to lose, and oh, will there not be a great gnashing of teeth when he does?

Interesting article about the new urban monoculture. This is one of the reasons why I was glad to get out of San Francisco. Now that we’re in Murfreesboro, 30 miles from Nashville, we long to move to the city, to enjoy all the delights of the urban fantasy. Nashville has become not all that different from San Francisco.

It’s not quite as off the charts crazy as San Francisco. It’s not as much of a gay Mecca, for example, and the Mayor and Council members are pretty sane and sensible. There are no resolutions to harbor illegal aliens or to ban high school ROTC, but the city has a similar feel nevertheless. Candace played a gig at the Whole Foods in Nashville. There were beautiful, young, left-wing people everywhere. Everyone we know in Nashville would fit in in San Francisco without the slightest need for readjustment, other than financial.

Nashville, unlike my memories from back in the day, has world-class restaurants, a symphony, a ballet. It has always had world-class music coming out of its ears. Bill Frist endowed a very respectable art museum, not as fancy a building as San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, but arguably with a better collection. There are beautiful parks, the Cumberland River, a happening NFL franchise, and it’s a day’s drive, more or less, to Chicago, Atlanta, Birmingham, Savannah, Louisville, Washington DC, Bay City Michigan, New Orleans, not to mention Knoxville, Chattanooga, the Great Smokies, and Asheville, NC.

It is now too expensive for us to live in Nashville. Not as bad as SF, but bad enough that we’re stuck out here in the burbs. And people around here think 30 miles is a lot further than do the citizens of the Bay Area.

In 1969, my wife Susan and I, and our two children, Jason and Jennifer, were living in San Francisco. I was working downtown in the financial district for a consulting company, pulling down a very respectable salary, something like $12,000 a year, enough money to have afforded the down and payments on a nice, three story Victorian in the upper Haight. However, held back by my beliefs as I was, we did no such thing. Instead we paid $160 a month for a beautiful seven room, third floor, Victorian flat on Page Street, 4 blocks from the corner of Haight and Ashbury, two of the local streets.

That hypothetical three-story Victorian is now worth somewhere around $2 million. In those days, San Francisco, groovy as it was, was still a local place, not all that different, economically, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was of course the emerging bummer of the Haight, but there were also neighborhoods, families, children, blue collars. It was more or less as affordable as anyplace else. Silicon Valley did not exist. The peninsula was a rural landscape of apricot and pomegranate orchards.

So it goes. Now the Democrats have a lock on the urban poor, who don’t, fortunately, vote, people who think of themselves as being “of color”, and the young, urban, professional elite, who, fortunately, also don’t vote. And the Republicans have the middle-aged, white, middle, and working class, and old folks like me, who vote like crazy. Did you see the recent Gallup poll that had McCain ahead of Obama by five points among likely voters?

As I read the comments at the end of this article in the LA Times, I see a fair number of them, coming from those of the leftward persuasion, that advance the notion that the mainstream media is so in the pocket of the right-wing extremists, who have betrayed and bankrupted this country, and who should be prosecuted and shot, that of course Obama has not seen a bounce in the polls from his inaugural tour.

This is indeed good news. If Obama, and the Democratic Party, are even slightly as delusional as these commenters, even a crazy old Republican fart like John McCain has a chance. These are the people Obama still has to be careful not to offend. McCain has already offended all of his crazies.

On the one hand, it is almost too easy to disparage the trivial nature of the issues in this Presidential campaign, the issues that rise to the top of the national media’s attention. Did John McCain question Obama’s patriotism? Why won’t Obama admit he was wrong about the surge? Does it help Obama or hurt him to announce his world citizenship, and apologize for America’s shortcomings, to 200,000 Germans? Does McCain really think that Pakistan and Iraq share a border? Is Obama really a sincere Christian? Is McCain? Is Obama arrogant? Is McCain old? Does a bear sh*t in the woods?

On the other hand, when people are sussing out a new neighbor, or a fellow worker, or their boss, or a lover, these are the kinds of questions for which they seek answers. Rightfully so. The issues are irrelevant. They will not be the same issues by the time the new President takes office. What matters is who that guy really is that we just put in the White House. We won’t really know the answer to that question until it happens, but it’s important to evaluate it the best we can.

There have been many instances of men who seemed flawed or mediocre, who have risen to the occasion of becoming President. As a rule, we don’t find out whether or not a President was great until at least a couple of decades after his death, sometimes longer. Herbert Hoover will be restored, one of these days, to his rightful place somewhere above his current position. Me and three or four other people think that George W. Bush will also rise in the ranks as time goes by.

Obsessive as I am about the issues; Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, health care, energy, taxes, regulation, the value of the dollar, I have to admit, this is not what really matters. It’s my hobby, the hobby of those without better things to do. Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, Bush, none of these men had any idea what they would face, or what they would do about it, before they became President. Well, maybe Ronald Reagan knew, but he had a limited imagination, thank God. When asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, Harold Macmillan replied, “Events, my dear boy, events”. This is more true today than ever.

Whatever the upcoming events turn out to be, it is a safe bet that they will be hair-raising. The real audacity of hope is the audacity of the hope that the President turns out to be someone who will keep it together and make the right call when events inevitably overtake him (or her). Most of the time Presidents do OK, but sometimes they don’t, and the stakes keep getting higher. McCain looks like the best bet to me, or at least the safest bet, for obvious reasons, but nobody really knows what either John McCain or Barack Obama will do when events hit the fan.

This is the judgment that American voters are always called upon to make, and it doesn’t matter much how informed they are about the issues. What matters is how good a judge of character they are. Political ideology and issue wonkery tend to obscure one’s ability to judge character, rather than enhance it. I have much more faith in the American people’s capacity to assess what a man or woman is made of, than I have in the depth of their knowledge and understanding of the issues of the day. Fortunately, that is exactly what is needed.