The World

So the race goes on. Hillary’s victories in Ohio and Texas are both embarrassing and pleasing for political pundits. Pleasing because this is fantastically exciting election – and now we well get some more of it. It’s like being told there will be an extra series of The Sopranos. Embarrassing – obviously – because once again the conventional wisdom has been turned on its head.

I did a BBC Radio programme yesterday morning in which it was all but assumed that the race was over – and it was clearly going to be Obama v McCain. To his credit my fellow guest, Robert Kagan, insisted that Hillary had a good shot of re-opening the race by winning both of last night’s primaries.

Since Kagan was right about that, let me also quote him on the question of presidential character and foreign policy. This is something that both the Clinton and McCain campaigns are going big on. McCain last night insisted that he is by far the most experienced candidate to deal with a foreign policy emergency. And the Clinton campaign has been running TV ads, showing Hillary answering an emergency 3am call at the White House.

Kagan’s argument is that the common notion that McCain will necessarily be a more bellicose and trigger-happy president than either of the Democrats is not necessarily right.

Now Kagan is a strong McCain supporter. But he is also a historian of American foreign policy. And he reckons that history shows that candidates with strong national-security credentials are less likely to feel the need to demonstrate their “toughness”. The comparison he draws is between Eisenhower and JFK. Eisenhower was the victor of world war two – and did not have to prove anything to anyone. Partly as a result, the 1950s passed without major confrontation with the Soviet Union. Kennedy, by contrast, seemed young and untested. He needed to show that he couldn’t be pushed around. And so within a couple of years we had the Cuba missile crisis and the first steps into Vietnam. The clear implication is that a young senator from Illinois (Obama) or the first woman president (Hillary) might be more likely to do something rash than McCain – despite his disturbing lapse in singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of Barbarann.

Hillary’s ad left unanswered the question of what she would actually do, when she got the 3am call. Presumably, we are not meant to think that she would respond by turning over, and plumping up her pillow. Perhaps she would turn to Bill and ask what he thought?But surely there is no guarantee that he would be there at 3am? No, I think the clear answer is that if phone rings at three in the morning she would do something TOUGH.