Fallows: Clinton, Obama, and the OODA loop

James Fallows, an Atlantic blogger, is one of the reasons why I subscribed to the dead-tree magazine. While very young, he was a speechwriter for HGM Carter - but I don't hold that against him. He's currently in China and has been many other places in his reportery career. He's also, and I say this with actual respect, very goyish (which means that he has many friends in the military and the business world, has traveled all over and is a pilot - many things that I can't/don't have/do because of my non-goyishness). He knows a lot about politics and speeches, so his political analysis in the primary is instructive. I just wish he could post more often.

If you've heard anything about the OODA Loop, it's because of Fallows. Read this excellent take on the current battle between Obama and Hillary (it's brilliant because, as usual, he's saying things that I've been saying. I admit that, so sue me): More on Clinton, Obama, and the OODA loop, James Fallows (March 05, 2008), with this especially important bellow:

In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the "Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002" line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the "Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience" part of that sentence? And I guess with her nonstop references to 2002 she must be talking about Obama's anti-Iraq war speech, not the 2004 convention speech that actually put him on the map.)

I have reached the point of wanting to scream every time I hear about the primacy of "experience," knowing how skillfully the 46-year old Bill Clinton waved that argument away when it was used against him 16 years ago by a sitting President who simply dwarfed him in high-level experience.* But to pose it in a form that is poison for the party should Obama be the nominee??? To produce a clip that the McCain campaign could run unedited every single day of a campaign against Obama? That is something special. (Also, I think she means 2004 for the speech.) If Bill Clinton poisoned the well for other possible Democratic nominees in quite the same way back in 1992, I can't think of it now.

The conclusion of Spinney's (and Gerson's) analysis was that Obama had put Hillary Clinton into a position where in order to win, she had to damage not just him but the party. That is why, as everyone is saying, the big victor today is John McCain, and not just in the obvious way.

Fallows asks implicitly what I will say explicitly: will Hillary come to her senses, and even if she does, has she gone too far to be accepted by the party again?

Pic from here. Backpost finished 2009-11-29.