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Lileks on the candidates
It’s New Hampshire day; flinty residents of one of America’s narrowest states will chose the next leader of the free world today, if you believe the hype. I’m undecided. This being the age of Feeling, here's my emotional reaction to the candidates:

Fred Thompson has that Emperor Palpatine thing going on . . . And I like that. Makes you want to say “yung SKYYY-wokkah,” does it?

Hillary – well, I feel sorry for her, in a way, because her time in the sun seems to have coincided with the exact moment the electorate decided it was tired of being ruled by Boomers. If someone grew up accustomed the sound of mom burping the lid on some Tupperware, people don’t want to have anything to do with them.

Huckabee: he makes me recoil, instinctively. Some of this has to do with his positions, but it’s mostly the particular flavor of his religiosity and the thickness of its application to his campaign. People who think he’s some Elmer Gantry-type who’ll run around tossing flag-wrapped Bibles into the crowd overstate the case, but still: he just strikes me as one of those fellows who’ll treat you with respect and friendship and good cheer, and you know he thinks you’re going to hell. No, that’s not fair, but there it is. I don’t think he’s a phony - Bill Clinton was a phony, but he was such a genuine heartfelt phony it didn’t matter. Huckabee just rubs me the wrong way. Nothing more profound or irrational than that.

Mitt Romney? Super-brainy smart, a proven administrator, impeccably decent. In some parallel universe where good is bad and bad is good and James Bond serves Satan, Mitt Romney is Blofeld. He’s an admirable man in many ways. But my favorite finely-crafted piece of Stickley furniture is an admirable piece of wood in many ways, too. I cannot warm to Romney.

I like John McCain. He seems like the sort of guy you could have a beer with, right up to the moment where he smashes the bottle on the table and jams it in your face over something you said six years ago.

I like Rudy Guiliani, partly because his second-term sex scandal would involve someone closer to Teri Hatcher’s age than Jamie Lynn Spears. But mostly because he is smart, agrees with me on enough things, and does not appear to have a heart ruled by sentiment. I do not want a National Dad or even a Cool Brother (double-meaning unintended) for the President; I want someone with JFK’s optimism, Roosevelt’s steel, Truman’s irascibility, and so forth.

But it’s all for naught if the Obamaboom continues, because he has the zeitgeist at his back and a sail the size of an IMAX screen. People will vote for him because they want to be part of something larger, and that’s a rare and potent thing these days. Whether that’s a wise thing to do in perilous times depends on whether people think we’re living in perilous times, I suppose. We’ll see.

In the end, I think of the person I'd like to see behind the big desk the night the President addresses the nation after the nutwads pull off something big. It's certainly not Ron Paul. He'd probably bitch us out for starting it all by enraging the Barbary Pirates.
Posted by: Mike 2008-01-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=217977