One of my, ahem, “deep cover” sources in the Obama campaign has sent me a list of approaches Obama considered but rejected before settling on the “no zone of silence” allegation:

1.  McCain got the questions when one of his old buddies from the Hanoi Hilton finger-tapped them in Morse Code through the wall of the room in which McCain was staying.

2.  Pastor Rick Warren is really a Karl Rove operative promoting McCain to bring about a “third Bush term,” and the questions, as well as McCain’s powerful answers later, were beamed to McCain through the chip implanted in McCain’s brain by Darth Cheney himself, with help from the Secret Service agents in control of McCain’s transportation.

3.  What’s the big deal about McCain? Anyone can give clear, direct, and emotionally gripping answers to straightforward questions. It takes a complex and agile academic mind of a higher dimension to give nuanced and detailed circumlocutions and deceptive non-responses.

4.  McCain is 72 years old and has had 26 years in the Senate to build up his resume and provide solid responses of substantive achievement and strong character to these questions. Obama has had fewer than 4 years, so his reserve of experience from which to draw is much less. Even if McCain’s answers were twice as good as Obama’s, McCain has six-and-a-half times as much experience in national and international matters. So, Obama still performed more than three times as well as McCain did with what he had.

5.  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright warned Obama about how churches in these White communities operate.

6.  Comparing Obama’s performance to McCain’s is an example of the old politics of competition and conflict. People are tired of that. It emphasizes what divides us, instead of what unites us. When Rick Warren asked about having acted against his political interest, Obama reached across the aisle by talking about what he and John McCain share. When John McCain was asked about himself and his views, McCain just talked about himself and his views. In similar vein, McCain said that his most gut-wrenching decision was not to take the easy way out for release from the Hanoi Hilton, while Obama pointed out his opposition to the Iraq War while in the Illinois state senate. This shows, once again, McCain’s selfish concern about how decisions affect him, whereas Obama as a citizen of the world is concerned about how his decisions affect the people of Illinois and Iraq if war breaks out between them.

7.  Look, Michelle threatened to open a can of whup-a_s on Barack for his lousy performance, so we had to come up with some explanation that appealed to her paranoia about the way that The Man keeps down her people.

8.  In every previous presidential debate or interview of this type before this campaign, a White man was the winner. We need diversity among debate winners, so the quality of the responses should be only a part of the evaluation of who won. Clearly, in line with the Supreme Court’s decision on law school admissions, under a “holistic review” that considers race and diversity along with quality of performance, Obama won. Obama’s racial composition, along with his experience of having lived in many states as well as in Indonesia, clearly outshines McCain’s blinding Whiteness. And the only serious time McCain has spent outside Washington, D.C., is a few years in Hanoi.

9.  “Has anyone seen Hillary recently? Whaddya mean, you’ve lost her? Are the Superdelegates still under lock and key? No, I mean literally.”

10. McCain has had decades to prepare himself for this occasion. For more than five years in Hanoi, he had nothing to do but lay the groundwork for what he was going to say, even surreptitiously using his Communist captors as players in his underhanded scheme. In those years, Obama was barely out of diapers, and up to that time, he just remembers his mother saying repeatedly, “I hope I don’t have to change any more of those.” So, while McCain could draw on riveting stories of religious faith, all Obama took from those years was his theme of hope and change. McCain may have done a lot with a lot; Obama has done a lot with very little. Advantage: Obama.

I think that he raises some valid points. Too many people are going to college for little discernible reason other than it gives them something to do to delay adulthood, all their friends are doing it, their families expect them to do it, and employers require the BA if they don’t want to end up having to take fast-food orders until social security kicks in. As I’ve noted before, the declining appeal of college for men also will eventually lead to alternative proposals for skills training. And, broadly speaking, males prefer to learn by doing, by more individualized supervised training, and through their own efforts. Studies have shown that classroom settings of long-term passive intake among a co-educational group are not as conducive to males’ learning as to females’. This is more of a problem among middle- and high-schoolers than among the more self-selected college cohort. But as more marginal students have entered college, this group has taken on more of the disconnected, seat-warming attitude of those secondary school students. Moreover, Murray’s point then also applies to secondary schools. Why, other than for baby-sitting reasons and to avoid overloading the job market too early, do we require everyone to attend school for twelve years? Those destined for particular academic pursuits and taking honors classes might have a reason. But the bored kid who would be better off in some apprenticeship or some more particularized certificate training program is just wasting time.

I do see some problems with Murray’s proposal of getting on-line certification when he begins to extend this to laboratory science disciplines and to some of the liberal arts and humanities disciplines that stress creativity, abstract reasoning, and dialectics and other argumentation. Such classic academic disciplines go beyond a rotely fact-based epistemology. The learning occurs in a guided group setting done frequently over a long time. That setting may have varying degrees of formality, from the peripatetic approach of Socrates to the classroom seminar that meets in room W311 on Mondays at 10:00 a.m. While such learning is not inconceivable through an on-line “university,” it is more accessible through a traditional school. On-line “discussion groups” don’t have the same pedagogical effectiveness for such endeavors.

Still, technological advances, the increasing use of on-line courses even at traditional schools, the success of “universities” such as University of Phoenix that cater to older and second-career students, and the mushrooming of certificate and degree programs through non-conventional deliverers of knowledge, point to changes and flux at least in post-secondary education. One possible good result from such changes would be to lessen the power of so many “progressive” professors to re-educate their students in a (in their view) properly “critical” perspective of America. Teaching for outcome-based certification testing lends itself less to indoctrination than the commonplace American college classroom.

Putin is a masterful politician (being head of the secret police tends to demonstrate a certain skill at ruthlessness and survival) and showed his political acumen in his planning of the Georgian crisis. His manipulation of events clearly outclassed his lightweight counterpart in Georgia. He correctly calculated Western impotence to change the outcome from whatever he wants. On the other hand, the Russian military campaign in Georgia, while obviously successful at destroying things and punishing a country that has 3% of the population of Russia, from what I have been reading was not executed particularly professionally. If this is an indication of their prowess, I doubt that our military tacticians (not our strategists) are losing much sleep over them. So, it seems to me that Douthat’s analysis is correct. It is foolish for the West to challenge the Russians in their backyard. And the Russians still have nuclear weapons. And they still cause mischief with their support of Iran and various other enemies of the U.S. So, they bear watching and containing. Perhaps, on occasion, they need push-back, such as, say, on their increasingly significant arming of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela with offensive weapons, and on the rumors of military bases in Cuba. Moreover, our flight from history, one hopes, has ended. Putin has exposed his game very clearly. From now on, when W looks deeply into Putin’s eyes, he will see what McCain wisecracked he saw, “the letters K and G and B.”

While the West cannot do much right now about the military situation, the political stage has suddenly been lit to show relations with Russia in a very different light that will be difficult to forget. If more realistic policies toward Russia emerge from this (and McCain has been far clearer about this need than Obama, to no one’s shock), the West’s temporary political embarrassment over Georgia will be a cheap price to pay.

The answer by Obama that annoyed me the most (among a number of them) was the one that dealt with various Supreme Court Justices. He wouldn’t have appointed Clarence Thomas because of a lack of experience? Actually, Obama began to say that word and in the middle changed it to intellectual capacity, calling Thomas a moron, in essence. I think that Thomas is very bright and the most original thinker in a number of constitutional matters on the Supreme Court. Even intellectually honest scholars who are not disposed to his views give him credit for his intellectual acumen. For Obama to challenge Thomas’s lack of experience and intellect is rich, indeed. On his worst day, Thomas runs circles around Obama on substance, especially in constitutional law. And then Obama mentions himself and Justice Scalia as both having taught at the University of Chicago, suggesting that they are of equal intellectual quality. Sure, just like a KIA is a performance car like a Ferrari. Powerline has a similar evaluation. I disagree with the Powerline guys, though, in that I remember Obama also mentioning Chief Justice Roberts as someone whom he did not support because of Roberts’s alleged strong executive branch leanings to the detriment of Congress and the Court. Hmm, I think that the dissent Roberts wrote in the Guantanamo detainee cases was over the fact that the Supreme Court struck down in an illogical opinion an act of Congress signed by the President.

On a related matter, I am not entirely comfortable with the role played by Pastor Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in this intensely political matter. This was far more than some informal appearance by each of the candidates for an interview geared to matters of interest of evangelicals as such. This was purposely much more like a political forum and has been treated that way by the public and the press. There sure wasn’t this type of coverage when a candidate met with Jerry Falwell. Nor would the event have passed muster in the same way had this been conducted by, say, the Catholic archbishop of Denver. I don’t know much about Rick Warren, and by all accounts, he conducted this fairly, assuredly more fairly than would have been done by the media wing of the Democratic Party that normally supervises these types of events.

But I have also read some articles that point to his odd takes on Christianity and and questionable, or at least naive and ignorant political positions. In politics, at least, and perhaps even in fundamental matters of faith, he seems to be playing above his competence, similar to his “friend,” Obama.