Cain's gaffe.

In an interview earlier this week, Mr. Cain seemed to stumble over a question about the late unpleasantness in Libya. He recovered and went on with the interview. Yet many of our conservative pundits immediately decided he was hopeless and would never be up to snuff to handle the great BHO. The same with Perry's brain freeze, or where Newt buys his wife's jewelry. We have yet to get to Iowa and the search for the perfect is driving these pundits to bury the good.

Over the past half century we've been working to weaken the political parties and close up the "smoke filled rooms." The idea was to weaken the Party Men thereby allowing the best men to come forward and run for office. As if the Party Men held a sword of Damocles over elected officials, as if the man in office never made his own decisions, for the good and the bad, as if he didn't hold the actual powers of the office. Now all that's left of the parties are the shells that run the primaries and hold the mainly ceremonial conventions.

So people now present themselves for president from all sorts of backgrounds, from First Lady to Pizza Guy, yet the only Presidents with foreign policy credentials in my lifetime were Eisenhower, Nixon, and G.H.W. Bush. Their cred was based in WW2 and the Cold War, yet the world still bilndsided them. Such is the march of History. Since the collapse of the USSR, let's face it, we've been winging it. When GW was running he was asked who was the leader of Kazakhstan, when he didn't know everybody thought he was useless, though it didn't stop Osama. When BHO was running he had all sorts of ideas on how he would change our foreign policy, none of which seemed to work, to the point that now he's running on his fidelity to GW's regimen.

As it is most people don't care about foreign policy or whether we have some sort of grand strategy at all. Which is why we seem to be backing into wars as if tripping over stones, then they take notice. But was ever true of Americans, we look at the world with a mix of realism and idealism. Tired of our world girdling power and responsibility, yet knowing that no one else will carry the load with the level of morality that we have.

China anyone?

JimG33