(THE BLOG)

HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
STAR GAZING
Posted, September 27, 2008,  12:01 p.m

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“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder who you are,
Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky, Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder who you are.” – Jane Taylor

                  He’s reverential, he’s deferential, he has begun to look presidential.

Barack Obama with the movie star good-looks perfectly dapper in his custom tailored suit, dazzling, dazing, amazing, a commanding presence, tall, lean, a fighting machine, the Land of Lincolner went twinkle toe-to-toe with the hero John McCain on the stage of the debate at the University of Mississippi, moderated by the delightfully bland I have-no-pony-in-this-horserace, Jim Lehrer.

Obama missed nary a step, the young Senator vying for the presidency against the venerable old guy, John McCain. They taught, they fought, neither was caught saying or doing anything that would either hurt their chances for becoming president or lose them the presidency.

The man who has a way with words, however, was overshadowed by a man thought to be boring and emblematic. It was McCain who spoke poetry, engaging the audience with more than one tale reaching back to the days when Presidents were heroes and invoking the memory of Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower.

“President Eisenhower, on the night before the Normandy invasion, went into his room, and he wrote out two letters. One of them was a letter congratulating the great members of the military and allies that had conducted and succeeded in the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever.

And he wrote out another letter, and that was a letter of resignation from the United States Army for the failure of the landings at Normandy.”

While there is some question as to the complete veracity of the story popular in military circles, what is true is that when John McCain told the story he had the full and undivided attention of the audience, as well as Barack Obama. McCain proved there is something to be said for having lived long enough to remember first General and then President Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps the last president elected before the age of the Telegenic candidate.

McCain later told another anecdote, this a story recounting how he came to be wearing the bracelet of a fallen soldier.

“And I'll tell you, I had a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and a woman stood up and she said, "Senator McCain, I want you to do me the honor of wearing a bracelet with my son's name on it."

He was 22 years old and he was killed in combat outside of Baghdad, Matthew Stanley, before Christmas last year. This was last August, a year ago. And I said, "I will -- I will wear his bracelet with honor.

“And this was August, a year ago. And then she said, "But, Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that my son's death was not in vain."

“That means that that mission succeeds, just like those young people who re-enlisted in Baghdad, just like the mother I met at the airport the other day whose son was killed. And they all say to me that we don't want defeat.”

Not to be outdone, Obama piped in sounding much like a kid, “I've got a bracelet, too, from Sergeant - ah -from the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopeck, sure another mother is not going through what I'm going through.”

It is in the telling of those two stories that we learned who both men truly are. Take away the glitzy suit, take away the talking points, strip the men of their pr contrived illusion and therein lies the man.

Surely there is no doubt that both men are smart. Obama is young and inexperienced and maybe a little naïve, but he proved he is capable of learning. He did an admirable job holding his own against McCain when debating foreign policy issues, the weakest part of Obama’s resume. Both men avoided getting into the trenches on the financial issues of the day. There is, after all, that pesky little bill waiting to be hammered out on Capitol Hill, which is still a political minefield for both candidates to navigate.

But who knew that John McCain is a raconteur? Or that the man with the celebrity persona is actually a stiff.

The pundits have been parsing the debate to death. McCain never looked Obama in the eye; oh my. Obama came across as “smug, arrogant and condescending,” one commentator said. “Obama's expression was one of disdain and he had a tendency to interrupt and talk over McCain.” The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who often sounds like he’s on Obama’s payroll asked if it was politically correct to refer to McCain as a “Gumpy Old Man.”

Still, the commentariat miss the point.

It remains the fact that with a certain segment of voters, Barack Obama has failed to close the deal. And while many die-hard Democrats who would have preferred Hillary Clinton have elected to vote for Obama, they did so under duress. Others say they will not.

And then there are the undecideds, the ones Obama was hoping to win over during the debate.

“Something is missing in Obama,” people say to each other at cocktail parties. “I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but something just isn’t right with the guy.”

Last night’s debate pointed out the problem and it is not that Obama lacks foreign policy credentials or that he leans too far to the left. What Obama is missing is something much more esoteric but nonetheless critical for the leader the free world to have. Obama is missing the twinkle factor. 

What is the twinkle factor? It’s that beam of dancing energy that twinkles from some people’s eyes. In Jewish circles it’s called the Mench Factor, in Irish Circles it is often referred to as “The Blarney.” John Kennedy had it, so did Ronald Reagan. Though Obama has been compared to both the reason he hasn’t continued on his once meteoric rise is that the more the public gets to know him the more they come to realize he’s missing the factor.

At the end of the debate, Obama began his closing argument.

“You know, my father came from Kenya. That's where I get my name. And in the '60s, he wrote letter after letter to come to college here in the United States because the notion was that there was no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried. The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire world.”

Good so far, but then the darkness where the light of the twinkle should have been.

“I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same.”

Ka-ching!

Didn’t we hear the same anti-patriotism sentiment from his wife Michelle?

Compare Obama’s closing remarks to McCain’s closing words and you’ll see who the mensch is, the one of the two with the touch of the blarney, the twinkle if not in his eye then his heart; the man who at the end of the day could charm even Ahmadinejad to give up his nuclear pursuits.

“When I came home from prison, I saw our veterans being very badly treated, and it made me sad. And I embarked on an effort to resolve the POW-MIA issue, which we did in a bipartisan fashion, and then I worked on normalization of relations between our two countries so that our veterans could come all the way home.

I guarantee you, as president of the United States, I know how to heal the wounds of war, I know how to deal with our adversaries, and I know how to deal with our friends.”

I believed him.

Why? Because I saw the twinkle in his eyes and felt the pathos in his heart.

On the other hand, when I gazed at Obama the star, I saw nothing. And it scared me.