When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don’t believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.The Anchoress is encouraging supporters to call their GOP representative, if they have one, to express their support, and also to call Speaker Pelosi’s office to express disagreement (politely and respectfully!). Personally, I’d go one step further: call your House member, whomever that might be and of whatever party they might be, and make it clear to them that you support democracy, not the attempt to use the rules and bylaws of our government to squash democracy; if issues can’t be debated fairly and squarely because someone like the Speaker of the House uses strongarm tactics to silence opposition, we’re in big trouble.HT: Bill
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Follow the evidence
As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it’s an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn’t like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I’m in here tapping the keys. It did spark a thought, though: the preacher’s job in studying Scripture (and anyone’s, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don’t want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we’re never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we’re trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we’re still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we’re open to correction. It isn’t solely on our shoulders to get it right—that’s the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don’t block the Spirit’s work.
Sarah Palin hits the bullseye
John McCain leads Barack Obama among women over 40—normally a solidly Democratic voting bloc. To take advantage of this, Dick Morris concludes, McCain should take dead aim at this demographic, perhaps by selecting a female running mate who would appeal to them.
To do that, are there any better options than Alaska’s Sarah Palin? I don’t think so; and as Adam Brickley points out, people are noticing. Gov. Palin for VP.
Barack’s Iraq doubletalk
I’ve noted before that Barack Obama’s position on Iraq hasn’t been as consistent as he likes to make it out to be (he even went so far in 2004 as to tell the Chicago Tribune, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage”—which doesn’t square with his statement earlier this year that “I opposed this war in 2002, 2003, 4, 5, 6, and 7”); but this video (produced, of course, by the McCain campaign), which consists almost entirely of clips of Sen. Obama, makes his back-and-forth record on the situation in Iraq, and I think the fundamental cynicism with which he has approached the whole issue, excruciatingly clear:
I am increasingly suspicious that should Sen. Obama be elected President in November, those who voted for him will find what the liberal netroots are already finding: he is indeed “the black Bill Clinton,” and his promises are secondary to the political needs of the moment.
Yeah, I think I can stop worrying about Sarah Palin
For all that sites like Daily Ko[ok]s have been crowing over the Walt Monegan brouhaha in Alaska and proclaiming it the death knell for Gov. Palin (and for Lt. Gov. Parnell in his run for the House), it appears the people of Alaska aren’t buying it: an independent poll has her favorable rating still at 80%.As regards Daily Kos’ premature dancing on Gov. Palin’s grave, I’m irresistibly reminded of C. S. Lewis’ dry comment in the preface to The Screwtape Letters that “there is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.” That will probably get me into trouble, and I don’t mean it seriously—people with their kind of attitude just annoy me, whether liberal or conservative, which is why I couldn’t help recalling it. 🙂
Can a “citizen of the world” be the President of the US?
Barack Obama went abroad to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and trim John McCain’s advantage in that area, and at first it seemed to be working; now that he’s back, though, the trip pretty clearly looks like a political flop. For the first time since Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination, we have a poll (USA Today/Gallup) showing Sen. McCain in the lead, by four points; in the Rasmussen tracking poll, perhaps the most accurate one out there, Sen. Obama leads by three points, within the margin of error.What went wrong for the Chicago senator? One major thing seems to have been his Berlin speech, in which he greeted his German audience as “a fellow citizen of the world,” apologized for America, went out of his way to avoid crediting the US with saving West Berlin via the Berlin Airlift (for that matter, he also snubbed the Brits for their part in it), and referenced the fall of the Berlin Wall without ever mentioning that that came about because America led the West in standing up to Communism. As a result, his speech doesn’t seem to have impressed much of anyone. A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune noted dryly, “While America may not be perfect, there is no reason to apologize to the Germans, architects of the Holocaust.” In a commentary in Germany’s Stern magazine sardonically titled “Barack Kant Saves the World,” Florian Güssgen called Sen. Obama “almost too slick” and said, “Obama’s speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon’s feel good song ‘Imagine’ than of a foreign policy agenda.” As for the UK, a columnist for the Guardian snidely dismissed the whole thing with a classically British crack: “Barack Obama has found his people. But, unfortunately for his election prospects, they’re German, not American.”It probably didn’t help, further, that he kept the American flag offstage, both for his Berlin speech and during his press conference in Paris with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy; that could only underscore the impression that Sen. Obama cared more about the opinions of his European audiences than he did of the opinions of American voters, whom the trip was ostensibly intended to impress. The thing that might end up hurting Sen. Obama the most, though, was the incident at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he had been scheduled to meet with wounded soldiers. According to reports, the Pentagon informed him that he would not be allowed to bring the news media or his campaign staff, only his official Senate staff; in response, Sen. Obama canceled the visit. Sen. McCain’s response was predictable on every level, as political opportunity combined with a snub he no doubt felt keenly: he attacked.
If Sen. Obama wants to convince skeptics he can handle foreign policy, he’s going to have to do better than this.
Evening prayer
As I’m sure is no surprise to anyone who’s spent much time reading this blog, I have an interest in apologetics, which is the rational defense of the Christian faith; as irritating as I sometimes find the attitudes of the so-called “New Atheists,” I appreciate the part they’ve played in stirring up a similar interest in a lot of my contemporaries in the church who’d never paid any attention to apologetics before. Too many Western Christians for far too long have simply conceded the rational arguments to their critics, assuming that their opponents were right, and tried to defend their faith on other grounds; but I don’t believe the atheists have the best of the argument (though I’ll certainly concede they have arguments which need to be taken seriously and respectfully), and I think it’s a good thing that more and more Christians are realizing that.That said, I think we need to be careful not to go overboard here. Apologetics has gotten a bad name in the past from people who thought they could use it as a bludgeon to beat people into the Kingdom, and we must be careful not to let enthusiasm drive us into such an attitude. We must always remember that the love of God in us should be the primary thing in us drawing people to Christ—we should know the arguments and be able to offer them appropriately, but they should be secondary.In this, as in so many things, I continue to be educated and humbled by C. S. Lewis, and particularly by this poem of his:
The Apologist’s Evening PrayerFrom all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me. Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery, lest I die.
The Empire shoots back
I was interested today to find a hit on my blog coming from the blog run by the editors of Canada’s National Review of Medicine; it was, of course, to my post on the Canadian healthcare system. I checked out the post in which I was referenced, and came away a little disappointed—it consists, in my view, of little more than a willful misunderstanding of the significance of the article by Dr. David Gratzer to which I linked in my post and a drive-by dismissal of several blog posts (mine included) which dealt with that article, followed by a few moments of patting themselves on the back that a lot of Americans would like to be like Canada. There was no effort to engage with any of the evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, which I and others referenced, or any attempt to make a real case for socialized medicine; honestly, I think I got a more thoughtful response in the comments on my post than these folks offered. I would suggest, of course, that you read the NRM editor’s post for yourself and see what you think, since your opinion might be more positive than mine; for my part, though, I think there’s more worth considering in the two comments on that post than in the post itself. I have no objection to the architects and managers of the Canadian system defending it and making the case for themselves—but if they’re going to do so, I think they have the obligation to actually make it, which means taking those who disagree with them seriously enough to actually engage their arguments.
Pray without ceasing
In 1949, on the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, the leaders of the local presbytery of the Free Kirk of Scotland grew so worried about the way things were going that they issued a proclamation to be read in all their congregations lamenting “the low state of vital religion . . . throughout the land,” declaring, “The Most High has a controversy with the nation,” and calling on everyone to pray that God would call the nation to repentance. In one parish on the island, the parish of Barvas, the message took root with a pair of sisters in their eighties. The sisters encouraged their pastor to pray together with the elders and deacons, and promised that they would pray twice a week from ten at night until three in the morning. So the minister and lay leaders prayed twice a week in a barn—no word on whether they stayed up until three AM—and the sisters prayed in their home; they did this faithfully for several months, in which nothing happened. During this time, a request was sent to an evangelist named Duncan Campbell, asking him to come to Lewis; he declined, because he was scheduled to speak elsewhere. God had other ideas, however, and his commitments were cancelled, freeing him up to go to Lewis. The result was a spiritual explosion, as revival swept the island, transforming it by the power of the Holy Spirit. Where once the jail was full and the churches nearly empty, the situation reversed itself—the churches were full to overflowing, while the jail was shut up for lack of use, because there was no crime. It was a remarkable time, and over the years, many have praised Campbell for it; but as he himself said more than once, it wasn’t his preaching that brought revival. Indeed, many who came to Christ during that time never heard him or anyone preach. No, this was no pre-planned preacher-driven event; rather, the roots of that revival were to be found in the faithful, persistent, believing prayer of those two sisters, and of those who prayed with them; they were certain God would answer them, and refused to stop until he did.That is stubborn prayer. It’s the approach to prayer which Jesus tried to develop in his disciples, and it’s part of what Paul talks about in his epistles. It’s the spirit we see in Jacob when he wrestled with God at Peniel—he was clearly out of his weight class, but he would not let go until God blessed him. He hung on for dear life, through his exhaustion, through the pain in his dislocated hip, through the screaming ache in his muscles . . . through it all, he hung on until he had nothing left but determination; and as the night was ending, God blessed him. We don’t often think of Jacob as a model for anything, but in this, he is; he’s a model for us in prayer.That may seem strange to us, because we aren’t taught that way; and some might be wondering, “Isn’t that selfish? If God tells us ‘no,’ are we allowed to just badger him until he gives in and gives us what we want?” Certainly, that could be true, if we’re praying selfishly; but if our prayer is truly focused on God and centered on his kingdom, that’s another matter. Such prayer leads us out of selfishness, not into it, in part because it draws us out of our small desires and teaches us to desire the presence of God, that we may live in the awareness of his presence.To understand the significance of that, stop and think about what it means to be in someone’s presence, and particularly to be in the presence of someone you love. It means that it doesn’t take any effort to talk to them; it means you hear them when they talk to you; it means you’re open to them, available to them, and they’re open and available to you. It means that even when you’re not talking to them or specifically thinking about them, you know they’re with you, and so they’re involved in some way in what you’re doing; their presence connects them to you. Even if you aren’t having a conversation, conversation is always possible, and comes naturally; and even your silence can be its own form of communion.That’s what our life with God is supposed to look like; that, I believe, is what it means to pray without ceasing, as Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5. That’s what it means to pray at all times in the Spirit, as he says in Ephesians 6. It’s not a matter of talking all the time, by any means; the silence and the listening are as important for us as the times when we talk. The key, rather, is to be in what we might call a spirit of prayer, by the Spirit of God, such that we are aware of and attentive to God when he speaks, and that conversation with God flows naturally out of whatever we’re doing—that whenever we have something to say, whether something that’s bothering us or something that gives us joy or a question that’s puzzling us, it’s perfectly natural for us to turn and say it to God, just as we would to anyone else to whom we’re close.As you can probably guess from this, I don’t agree with those who say that it’s unspiritual to pray for your own wants and needs. In fact, I’m always kind of surprised to run into that attitude, though I shouldn’t be—it’s common enough. In my last church, I had an elder sit in my office and argue that position, angrily and at great length; he firmly believed that if you could do anything about a problem, you shouldn’t be praying about it, because it was your responsibility to get out there and fix it yourself. He then argued, further, that if you had created the problem, you had no right to ask God to help you fix it, because it was on your shoulders. I bit my tongue and didn’t point him to the numerous psalms in which David and other psalmists do exactly that. When he told me that God helps those who help themselves, though, I did remind him that that isn’t Bible, it’s Ben Franklin. (All I got in return was a blank look.)There are a lot of people who think this way, but their view isn’t rooted in Scripture; Paul takes us a very different direction. Look at Ephesians 6:18: “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” Then in Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Notice: when? “on all occasions”; we might also say, “at all times.” About what? “Everything.” These are commands to ask God for things, to tell him what we need and want and ask him to provide for us; they insist to us that God wants us to do that, and indeed that he expects us to do so.Why isn’t that selfish? Well, in the first place, what’s the foundation for our requests? Our relationship with God. We don’t go to him just as someone who can give us stuff and demand that he do so; this is not just another consumer transaction. Rather, we talk to him as someone who loves us and whom we love in return, and we tell him what’s on our heart, including our needs and our desires, because he cares about us and he wants us to tell him. We don’t just ask in order to get what we want—we also ask in order to deepen our relationship with God. When we approach him in that way, it’s not a demand for services, it’s an expression of our dependence on him, and an act of trust. It’s an act of trust that he can in fact give us what we ask for, and that he does actually want to give us good things. That can be hard, because there are times when trusting him is hard, and times when we don’t want to admit we need him; but in all circumstances, whether good, bad, or whatever, we are called to do so, and asking God to meet our needs is an important discipline in learning to do so.In the second place, people who ask of God selfishly do so in a spirit of entitlement; they believe they deserve to get what they want, and regard it as nothing more than their due. By contrast, Paul tells us to pray in a spirit of thanksgiving. This doesn’t mean simply to thank God in advance for the things he will do for us, or even to thank him for the things he has already done, though both are important; rather, this is to be our basic attitude in prayer, and in all of life. This too is a recognition that we are completely dependent on God, that everything comes to us as his gift; this is the truth that James captured when he said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Because of this, because of God’s goodness and generosity to us—yes, Paul assures us, even in the midst of our suffering—gratitude should be our fundamental response to life.Whatever our circumstances, in a grateful spirit, we are to bring all our requests—our wants, our needs, our concerns, the deepest desires of our hearts––all the things which lie at the roots of our anxieties and fears, as well as those anxieties and fears themselves and everything to which they give rise—into the presence of God, trusting that he’ll take care of us. We don’t do this because he doesn’t know what we want, or need, or fear; we don’t pray for his sake, we pray for ours. We do this as a formal, deliberate acknowledgement of our dependence on him, and to give us the assurance that he knows what we want, what we need, because we have told him. Perhaps most importantly of all, we lay our requests at God’s feet because doing so draws us closer to him, and focuses our minds and our hearts on him; and so doing, it involves us in and connects us to the work he is doing in and around us.Third, if our prayer is truly kingdom-centered, then it keeps us aware of the bigger picture, which we see in Ephesians 6 ; we understand that we don’t just pray that God would bless us, or that he would bless others, so that we and they would be happy and fulfilled and healed and free from pain and could go on to enjoy our lives. Rather, we pray for our needs and the needs of others in part because each of us is involved, individually and as part of the church, in the great struggle which is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God into this world. The kingdom is resisted, both openly and subtly, by the forces of the prince of the powers of this present darkness, and so Paul tells us that we need to be armored up and armed to deal with that resistance; and the foundation of that is prayer. We pray for our needs and wants, and for the needs and wants of others, so that we might be strengthened, and so that opportunities for the enemy to undermine us or weaken us would be closed off. And because the enemy is always looking for ways to do that, and the spiritual struggle we face is continuous, so too we must pray continuously. Ultimately, as we do so, we find that it trains us to depend on God, and to use the gifts that he’s given us not on our own initiative, but on his; and it prepares us, as the Rev. Tim Keller put it, “to have our hard hearts melted,” to have the barriers in our lives torn down, “to have the glory of God break through,” so that we may see his glory in our lives.This isn’t something you can learn how to do by having someone tell you, or by reading a book; the most I can do, or anyone can do, is point you in that direction and invite you to do it. We can only really learn this by doing it—by asking God to teach us to live in the awareness of his presence, so that we learn to be in prayer throughout everything we do, and by setting aside time just to pray, for focused conversation with him. We can only learn to trust him with the things that are on our hearts by trusting him, by praying about them whenever they weigh on us; we can only learn to listen by listening. That’s why stubborn prayer is so important—it’s not about wearing God down, breaking down his resistance; it’s about wearing our egos down, breaking down our resistance. It’s not so much about storming the gates of heaven as it is about opening our own gates and letting heaven storm us.
Open letter to John McCain
An open letter is, of course, the thing you write to someone who’d never read an actual letter if you sent them one, and that’s certainly the case here; as the son of a decorated Navy pilot, I know people whom Sen. McCain considers good friends, but that doesn’t mean he knows me. That said, this is America, so I’m allowed to have opinions anyway, and I have a blog, so I might as well publish them. 🙂 Therefore, here’s what I’d tell Sen. McCain to do if he asked my advice:Name Sarah Palin your running mate. Everyone knew that was coming, of course, since I’ve been beating that drum for a while; I’ve stated my reasons elsewhere and I don’t see any reason to repeat them here.Beginning with Gov. Palin, name your whole team early. Specifically, line up the major Cabinet appointments now, with acceptances, and get those people on the campaign trail. Have your future secretaries of state and defense out across America talking about how you’ll manage foreign policy, and what their part in that (and their approach to it) will be; have your presumptive treasury secretary on the road talking economic policy and solutions to America’s problems, and building trust with voters that the government’s role in the economy will be managed well if you win; put up a well-respected candidate for attorney general and let him calm the waters that were roiled under John Ashworth and Alberto Gonzales. Let them campaign for you by campaigning for their own jobs, making their own cases to the nation for how those jobs should be done.Build a national-unity government. Use the opportunity of picking your senior advisers early to showcase the fact that you, not Barack Obama, are the person in this race who has a history of working effectively across partisan divides. Begin with an intraparty split by choosing Mitt Romney as your intended secretary of the treasury; let him go out there and focus on his economic-policy credentials (thereby shoring up yours) and sell the idea that a McCain presidency will be better for the economy than an Obama presidency.Having done that, work outward: get Sam Nunn to agree to serve as Secretary of Defense, and Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State. Put moderate Democrats, senior statesmen who are foreign-policy realists, in the two main foreign-policy positions in the Cabinet. They’re people you can trust—both their character and their competence—and they’ll highlight the fact that you don’t intend to be the president of (or for) Republicans only. Sen. Obama talks the uniting talk; you can one-up him by walking the walk, in meaningful fashion.If you can find other ways to carry that forward, do so. Bob Casey Jr., for instance, is the son of a pro-life legend in Pennsylvania politics; if he’s still solidly pro-life, offer him a job on the social-policy side, perhaps as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s endorsed Obama, so he wouldn’t campaign for you, but he might be willing to accept the offer anyway, if you didn’t ask him to campaign. Fringe benefit there: if you won, Rick Santorum might get his seat back.Tie Sen. Obama so tightly to Nancy Pelosi that he can’t get loose. Right now, he’s trying to win by running to the center, which is what he needs to do; but if he wins, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll govern from the center. In the first place, his slim voting record to this point suggests no such instincts; in the second, all the political forces around him are going to pull him to the left—hard to the left. A veteran politician with a strong centrist track record and base of support might be able to resist those forces and chart his own course; Sen. Obama has neither the experience to know how to do so nor the power base on which to stand, nor for that matter does he have the centrist instincts. I strongly suspect that Speaker Pelosi and the rest of the party’s leaders do not regard Sen. Obama as the leader of their party—he’s too new, too unproven, and he doesn’t have much of a track record with them, either—but rather as its chief PR man, as the guy they intend to use to sell their program. If he wins, it’s more likely to be the Pelosi administration in all but name than a truly independent Obama administration.The key, then, is to make that case. This is Jonah Goldberg’s “pin Obama on the donkey” strategy, but in a more specific form. Make the case to the voters of this country that the person they should be listening to if they want to know what an Obama presidency would look like, in at least its first two years, isn’t Sen. Obama, but Speaker Pelosi, because she’ll be the one calling the shots. Granted, it’s possible he could assert and maintain his independence from the congressional wing of his party—but if he wants to sign any bills, probably not.Remember, this is the 2008 election, not 1976. If you try to run on your biography, you’ll lose. If you try to run on your experience and qualifications, you’ll lose. Yes, you’re far and away the most qualified candidate in this election, but it doesn’t matter. You need to run on vision and foresight, and you need to make that vision clear and compelling. Tie it to your biography, yes—people love stories, if they’re told well and connect with their own lives; tie it to your experience, yes—when you can show that your vision has been right before, as with the surge, it makes your visioncasting more compelling; but it’s your vision for this country that needs to be out front and center, dominating the view. This, really, is where your opponent’s inexperience is relevant: he doesn’t have enough experience for a clear vision, and so his is fuzzy, hazy, long on platitudes (“we are the change we have been waiting for”) and short on concrete details and plans for implementation; as such, whatever he might see in our future, he lacks the ability to get us there.Hire a preacher or two for your speechwriting team. That might sound like I’m bidding for a new job, but I’m not—I like where I am just fine, thanks. I am, however, serious about this. It might be idiosyncratic, but I think you would do well to learn the cadences, and to some extent the rhetoric, of the pulpit in your public speaking. A presidential campaign, honestly, is a much better audition for Orator-in-Chief than it is for Commander-in-Chief, and when it comes to prepared speeches, Sen. Obama has a real edge here—and I’m inclined to believe that he owes a lot of that edge to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who (regardless of what you think of the content of his message) is a fine, fine preacher. I don’t say that Sen. Obama speaks like a black preacher, because he doesn’t, but twenty years of the cadences and rhythms of that pulpit have soaked into him. I think you’d do well to find some equivalent experience to draw on. To the extent that America is still, as de Tocqueville called us, “a nation with the soul of a church,” we prefer a president with the tongue of a preacher; the presidents we’ve elected without that, at least in recent decades, have had special circumstances in their favor. You don’t.Remember Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not his racism, but his view of tactics: the winner is the one who gets there firstest with the mostest. Fight clean and keep your blows above the belt, but strike first and strike as hard as you can; seize the initiative by all ethical means, and do everything you can to keep it. You have already been defined, and by and large that’s not that bad—except for the “he’s old” thing, which can largely be countered by adding a young, charismatic VP (see heading 1, above); Sen. Obama really hasn’t been, and most folks in the media would like to keep it that way. You need to find a way to define him as what his meager record shows him to be—a hard-left politician and a creation of the liberal Democratic Chicago machine—and to do so in a way that will stick in people’s minds. Tying him to Pelosi is part of that (though it’s also for other purposes), but it’s not enough. Sen. Obama’s great political advantage is that voters can look at him and believe that he will be whatever they want him to be; you need to take that away from him, and make it clear that the emperor does have clothes: standard Democratic Party uniform.That’s just a few thoughts, offered free of charge from someone with no more experience than a couple decades’ deeply-interested observation and study of the American political scene. Sen. McCain, I hope they serve, and I wish you success, confident that whatever happens, you will continue to honor the uniform both you and my father once wore, and the country you both served and continue to serve.Sincerely yours, &etc.