WHAT'S AT OBAMA'S CORE?

I've said it over and over, and now Richard Cohen says it too:

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don't know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain's decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That's why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.

A presidential race is only incidentally about issues. It's really about likability and character. Obama is, to paraphrase what he said about Hillary Clinton, more than "likable enough" -- in fact, so much so that he is the most charismatic presidential candidate I've seen since Robert F. Kennedy. But the character question hangs -- not because of any evidence to the contrary and not in any moral sense, either, but because he is still young and lacks the job references McCain picked up in a North Vietnamese prison. McCain has a bottom line. Obama just moved his. [Emphasis mine]

SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST

Richard Cohen has a great post today in which he scolds Mayor Rudy for rhetoric calling for war with Iran.

Giuliani ought to recognize that he is no longer the big-mouthed mayor of New York but a serious contender for the White House. All that his talk can accomplish is to make Iranian moderates rally around Ahmadinejad.
...
The next president is going to have to use his noodle. Iran may be trying to go nuclear, but Pakistan already is -- and it's so unstable the present government may not last long. The United States cannot make war all over the globe, leading the West in a resumption of the crusades against the Islamic East. War should be the last resort, spoken of with the respect it deserves and in terms that acknowledge the dizzying chaos, widespread terrorism and grievances that would haunt us long into the future. War with Iran will not turn out to be the applause line it is in the campaign. That, Mr. Giuliani, is not a threat. It is a promise.

It seems the Republicans have learned nothing from seven years of a cowboy-wannabe running the government. Can they really believe that replacing him with a big-city motor-mouth bully will be an improvement? One is almost forced to believe that the 28-percenters are still so enamored of W that they're opting for the man most likely to repeat his mistakes.