HH: A very special two hours ahead, a prolonged conversation about the state of the election, the state of the parties, the state of the world, the state of the war with historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson. If you’re just joining in, though, I remind you our good friend, Dean Barnett, is in the fight for his life right now in ICU in Boston, so any prayers that you can offer up for Dean and his treatment would be much appreciated on these special days. We’ll keep you posted as we get word of that. Victor Hanson, welcome to the studio. I’ve probably talked to you a hundred times, a couple of times in person, but never in the studio. It’s good to have you here.
VDH: It’s good to be here, Hugh.
HH: Now you will be talking tonight at Biola University at 7:00 in Orange County, California, Southern California, about Obama V. McCain in the classical context. It’s open to the public, I believe, and people can get there. And I will give directions a little bit later in the show. In a nutshell, in the classical context, what’s the message you’re going to be expanding on for that audience tonight?
VDH: Well, I’m going to try and look at foreign policy, the war against radical Islam, and take into consideration the meltdown on Wall Street, and what lessons we can learn about the human condition, what happened to our education system that didn’t allow us to appreciate these developments, and then like it or not, we’re back in the culture wars, and we’re wrestling with this question – what is wisdom? And after…my favorite illustration of that dilemma is when I saw Barney Frank in the 2003 clip, the overseer of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac monstrosity, Harvard Law School, interrogate Franklin Raines, Harvard Law School, and he says do you feel that you’re under-regulated at Fannie Mae and he says no, sir. And Barney Frank says why are we here? There’s no reason to be here. And that summed up the best and the brightest got us into this mess. It doesn’t mean that a Harvard Law degree is synonymous with ignorance, but it doesn’t mean necessarily it’s synonymous with excellence. And we’re seeing people that we’ve put our trust in that were educated, highly-credentialed, certified, and yet they had no common sense. And does this involve Sarah Palin? Well, we saw that when she was debating Joe Biden, he was far more impressive with recall of apparent facts, and he seemed that he had gravitas from his years of experience. He was a law school graduate, she was the Idaho commoner. But the more the debate went on, we found out that it would be much better to have someone with common practical sense who knew a few things, and could talk to the American people truthfully rather than to make up a whole plethora of assertions which in retrospect, almost everything Biden said was false. Again, what is wisdom? Is it certification of a particular school? Or is there wisdom to be found having five children and snowmobiling and running a business? And I think at this time of uncertainty about Wall Street, these issues about culture are coming back to haunt us.
HH: Victor Hanson, how old are you?
VDH: I’m 55.
HH: In your…and then let’s say in your 45 years…
VDH: Yeah.
HH: …of being aware of the world, do you recall a time as fraught with peril other than 9/11? 9/11 is of to itself, but other than 9/11, a time such as this?
VDH: I ask myself that all the time. I ask people, didn’t they hate Reagan the way they hate Bush? Or didn’t they hate Nixon, remember the Watergate, gosh, the Vietnam War, I remember I was walking across as a high school student at UC Berkeley. I went up to visit, and it was just almost a war zone. We’re not having that. But I don’t think that we’re still, it’s not so multi-dimensional with the war, with a cultural divide, with a hatred toward a sitting president, with this complex financial meltdown that nobody can make sense of. And then the sense that America is at odds with almost all the world, and there’s these insidious pressures that are telling us here at home you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’ve got to emulate the EU, you’ve got to emulate Africa, you’ve got to emulate Asia. And it’s almost as if we’re 5th Century A.D. in North Africa trying to resist a tide that we can’t resist. And so I think you’re absolutely right, it’s a phenomenal time to be alive.
HH: Now do democracies have…we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and I’m so happy to have a generous allotment today to try and cover this. But do you think democracies have an inability to see beyond their nose, and to always think they’re on either the best of times or the worst of times, to overreact to everything?
VDH: That was the complaint, the classical complaint of thinkers as diverse as Plato and Aristophanes that democracy inherently would always try to satisfy 51% of the people, and it would have an instantaneous referendum in the heat of the moment, that great passage in Thucydides where they vote to execute everybody on the island of Lesbos, and they changed their mind the next day and sent another trireme to revoke that order, or to executing Socrates for gratuitous reasons. So that’s the complaint. But I have…and then this is the hyper-phenomenon of that. It’s energized, fueled by the internet, and this technology that we’ve gotten addicted to with cell phones and the internet and cable television. But that being said, I still have faith in democracy that the average person, if he’s given enough time and enough information, will usually come to the right decision. After all, we rejected Carterism for Reagan, and we rejected a series of people, whether it was Mondale or McGovern or Dukakis, or Kerry who had a very different view of where America should be going.
HH: You know, I’m actually, along with Mark Steyn, one of the few optimists about this election for the reason you just mentioned. Now it’s not much time. It’s four weeks. But there’s a lot of information about Barack Obama, there’s a lot of information about his tax policies, his anti-trade policies, which align him with Herbert Hoover’s misguided approach to the great crash of ’29, that I think the American people are going to step back over the next four weeks. And we saw a little bit in a couple of polls, and say can we really entrust the United States of America to this very outside of the mainstream political figure? Are you as much an optimist as Steyn and myself?
VDH: I am, and I get criticized by a lot of conservatives for that reason. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said time. I think people were mad at Bush, they were mad and confused by the wars and the economic meltdown. And then suddenly, they do not want to vote for Obama, but they feel that they have to to express their dissatisfaction. But that being said, the more they’re starting to learn about all of these various manifestations of…I say manifestations, because we’re talking about FISA, public campaign financing, NAFTA, town meetings, guns, abortion, capital punishment. You and I could go on and on of the things that he’s flipped or moderated or adapted, rejected his former positions because…and the question is why is he doing that? And the fact is he had to go further to the center than almost any modern candidate. He was so far in that coterie of Chicago leftists. And then we find another disturbing pattern is that he only will disown these people when they come to the public attention in sort of a meltdown. So Reverend Wright, he could no more forsake Reverend Wright or give him up unless Reverend Wright is stupid enough to go to Ground Zero at the National Press Club and let the world see what an odious racist he is. Then suddenly, he’s gone. Bill Ayers, this man was e-mailing and phoning Bill Ayers up until 2005 after everybody had known that Ayers had said these ridiculous assertions that he was not going to feel guilty, he was unrepentant. And when did he throw him under the proverbial bus? Only when he ran for Senate, or he was elected to the Senate and he was going to start this presidential run. So there’s a very disturbing pattern that the people themselves intrinsically do not bother Obama. He feels comfortable with them. He only distances himself when he feels that they become a political liability.
HH: Victor Davis Hanson, we’ve got two minutes to our first break here. Would you define for the audience hubris?
VDH: Well, it’s a classical concept, and it’s over-weaning arrogance. And what it means is that when things, it’s a very complex idea, but it means when things are going good, the person feels somehow that those good developments, that positive feeling is because of something he did. And then does something in excess more and more. They have another word, koros, excess. And then this finally is sort of a self-delusional process, and there’s gods in the world that egg this person on because he lacks, the word is sophrosyne or moderation. And then of course, he implodes, and the words atte (sp?). There’s a succession from hubris to atte, destruction, and this is the result of Nemesis. There is a god, Nemesis, that deludes people into thinking that whatever positive things that have happened to them is entirely because of their own rarely-answered genius and not because of accidents or fate or luck. So we all, the Greeks tell us when things start going well, do not think that you necessarily, if you’re a Wall Street financier or a Fannie Mae, that you are responsible, because you’re going to just keep doing to excess. I think Obama’s had that problem when things have gone well most of his life. He’s been able, as he said in his memoirs, to talk people into trusting him, or to talk people into doing things they otherwise might not do given his record of achievement.
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HH: Victor Hanson, let’s talk a little bit about John McCain. As I watched last night, I shared a frustration with many conservatives that he did not articulate arguments. He almost simply referenced them as though the American public should know of which he spoke, should have the same frame of reference. And I thought to myself, this is very frustrating, but on the other hand, it’s very noble. He just assumes the American people understands what he’s talking about. Did he make a huge error in doing so?
VDH: Well, my problem is incrementalism, that incrementally, he seems that he gains ground on Obama because people in their natural states would prefer his approach. And he’s not by nature mean-spirited or disingenuous. So he doesn’t like to go negative. He assumes people have a certain level of common knowledge. But the problem is that events are overtaking him. The headlines about Wall Street, Fannie Mae, the whole Washington-New York in pretty much a cesspool, and so what happens is Obama shoots ahead because of the events of the day. And you said it a moment earlier when you said it was time. If we had eight more weeks of this campaign, and the focus on Obama, I suppose, McCain could catch up. But he’s going to have a great deal of trouble catching up unless he decides to be much tougher, to draw distinctions between the Obama of Chicago, the Obama that voted the most liberal Senator in the U.S. Senate, the Obama who had a particular view of the world. It’s no accident when Obama’s wife, I don’t want to pick on his wife, but when she serially says that she has no pride in the United States until her husband ran, or she’s mad at the United States, or this is a mean country, all of that is, is just a reification of the type of people they met, the type of conversations that were going on, the type of worldview they had. And that has to come out, or McCain is going to lose. And he’s going to have to tell people this is the biggest contrast since McGovern-Nixon in ’72, culturally, socially, politically, economically. We’ve got a European socialist who believes in statism and collectivized health care, high taxes, entitlements, and we have somebody who doesn’t. We have somebody who believes in world governance and deference to the United Nations, and utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, multiculturalism, oppression studies, and someone who doesn’t. But if he’s not going to walk the American people through that labyrinth and tell people very simply that if you vote for my opponent, the following is going to happen in your lives. And if you don’t, this is what’s going to happen if you vote for me. He needs…he needed to say in five seconds Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are not the entire problem with the economy, but they were the catalyst that started this, and here’s why, because greedy people on Wall Street piggybacked on the assumption that the federal government would back bad loans. Why did they back bad loans? Because Barack Obama and Barney Frank and this whole group of Democratic apparatchiks, under the guise of political correctness, lent money to people who had no business borrowing it, and who walked away from their obligations. And that caused a chain of events that now we’re supposed to think discredited capitalism. And he needs to tell people how that started. And if he can’t, then he’s going to be into this, you know, gecko and Wall Street did this, and this is typical greed, and this is, it’s not going to work for him. If he gets into that paradigm, the Republicans will be just blamed for not believing in regulation or statism, and he’s going to lose. He needs to get back to what caused this meltdown in the very beginning, and that really disturbing circular process where somebody from a Democratic administration is given a plumb sinecure, and that person, to keep his job, gives money from that quasi-public institution to the Congress, who oversee it, and then cooks the books so that he or she and their friends can take multimillion dollar bonuses. And once that’s established at a trillion to two trillion dollars, then the ever-ready profitmongers in Wall Street see that, and they see the guarantees, and then they start to participate in it.
HH: Now that argument is, I’ve been making that argument for weeks now, and it’s an argument I’m familiar with, because it’s an argument against the elites of Manhattan and Washington.
VDH: Absolutely.
HH: And I’ve always been comfortable broadcasting from the West Coast, because I’m not part of the Manhattan-Washington Beltway media elite. But it seems to that that elite, that media elite, has been engaged in a cooperative cover-up that keeps accountability far removed from an elite that’s really not a business, it’s not a Republican elite, it’s not a country club elite, it’s a hyper-privileged elite, Victor Hanson. And as Kissinger said about a different argument at a different time, this argument has the additional benefit of being true. And I think it’s intuited by the American people, but do they connect it with Obama?
VDH: Well, we all know that from all of these informal polls that hedge fund directors, for example, the people who deal in highly speculative and highly remunerative investments prefer Obama. Goldman-Sachs is a sort of liberal Democratic stamp to it. And so people who make the mega-profits, think about it. It makes sense. They’re immune from worries about taxes. They’re immune from worries about making a payroll. The Republican constituency is the guy who owns a hardware store, a paving company, sells cars, because he might make up to $250 or $300K, but to make that $250 or $300K, he’s got to work eighty hours a week, he takes risk, he can lose everything. The man at Goldman-Sachs who takes a thirty, or Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae who takes a $30 million dollar bonus, he doesn’t care if taxes are 50% or 70%. In fact, he feels better when they’re higher because it gives him a psychological cover that he’s liberal, that he’s caring, that he wants the government to do something that he in his own life doesn’t want to do. He doesn’t want to live in the ghetto, he doesn’t want to tutor a kid from the barrio. He doesn’t want to contribute very much money. We saw that with the comparative charities of Biden V. Palin.
HH: Wasn’t that shocking?
VDH: Absolutely, but it’s been repeated again and again. We saw that with the Clintons when they gave their underwear and claimed them as deductions in the 90s.
HH: I think that was the Gores, wasn’t it?
VDH: Gores, yeah.
HH: Okay, okay.
VDH: It’s the same thing. It’s a sort of remote control charity of feeling bad, feeling guilty as long as it’s distant, and it’s the government can do what the individual should.
HH: By the way, you’re going to Europe in 2009…
VDH: Yes.
HH: …and leading a group of people that will be touring what, Athens and Rome?
VDH: Yeah, I do that every year. I take about 60, first come first serve, and then we have a waiting list, and we go to great battlefields. This year, we’re going to do some places outside Rome, Sorrento, and then we’re going to go to Crete and Chania, and talk about everything from the Minoans to World War II and the airborne invasion, and end up in Athens at Marathon.
HH: And extraordinary opportunity at www.victorhanson.com, and an extraordinary conversation continues because Victor Davis Hanson is in it. Don’t go anywhere.
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HH: Victor Hanson, how many times have you met with George W. Bush?
VDH: I think four.
HH: Have you ever been alone with him for these conversations? Or is staff always present?
VDH: Once alone, but not more than five minutes.
HH: At this juncture, at almost the conclusion of his term, how do you assess him?
VDH: Well, I agree with him that we’re not going to be able to assess him until later on. I think that his chief achievement was that at a time when everybody thought we were going to be struck in succession by terrorists, he and he alone guaranteed that we would not by the things he was willing to do – FISA, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act. All of these are caricatured now that they had worked, and they’ve stopped terrorism. Had he not stopped terrorism, he would have been criticized for not doing enough. He took out the two most odious regimes in the Middle East. There’s constitutional governments there. And I think that’s going to be his chief, he’s going to be like Truman. He’s going to go out in the 20s approval rating, we’re not going to like him for the next ten years. We’re going to look back in the context that he really did dismantle al Qaeda. They’re not able to repeat these assaults on us. And I think that’s the way to look at it, because I think a lot of our criticisms of what he did, my chief criticism is the increase in domestic spending at twice the rate Clinton did. And I think the reason he did that is he was willing to compromise too liberally with Democrats across the aisle, because he thought that in those critical years, 2003, 2004, 2005, and he was right, they would not pull the plug on the effort in Iraq, and he was willing to sacrifice a domestic agenda in some sense for that. I had criticisms with him on his open borders policy originally. There’s other things that I thought…I don’t think that no child left behind was wise, or prescription drug…he didn’t address the entitlement problem, he spent too much. All that being said, I think that there were very few people given the pressures of the office at this particular time and this particular place in history that could have withstood that pressure, and he did.
HH: There’s an aspect of his character I want to throw out to you which I think is under-remarked upon, but will end up being a large part of his legacy, is that he has, though a victim of relentless fury and almost derangement on the part of his enemies, he’s never gone in for that. He’s almost a non-partisan president here at the end of his term, down to 25% approval, maybe even to the detriment of his party, he has refused. And I think it’s because of the briefings he gets every single day, he understands the world, et cetera. What do you make of his character?
VDH: I think that he sincerely believes that history later on will justify what he did when history is given the same facts at he was. I think he actually believes that he gets this frightening intelligence every day. He talks to these leaders abroad candidly that tell him horrific things that could happen. He makes these decisions, and he feels either that people share these same anxieties that don’t have the same information, or there will come a time when they’ll be privy to this knowledge, and they’ll see that he made the right decision. But even Saturday Night Live, if you’ve watched those skits the last five years, he’s never portrayed as Machiavellian. He’s always portrayed as sort of somebody that Nancy Pelosi or a Barbara Boxer or a Harry Reid is taking advantage of because he refuses to get down to the same level. He’s not calling people communists in the way that people are calling him a Nazi or worse even. So I mean, this is a very strange time, Hugh. I can’t think…in the last five years, think of every genre of expression. Novels, we’ve had Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, who’s them was how to kill George Bush. We had the documentary, the Assassination Of The President.
HH: We have the new W film coming out by Oliver Stone.
VDH: Yes, absolutely. It was about how to kill a president. And we’ve had comedians, we’ve had people who’ve said the most outrageous things about killing him and harm to his person, and he has never retaliated, or he’s never got angry about it, and I think that there’s some kind of philosophical perspective he has that when everything is said and done, and on the rare occasions I’ve talked to him, that seems to be the theme, that Truman’s evoked, Eisenhower’s evoked, as people who…
HH: Lincoln has been evoked when I’ve been with him.
VDH: Lincoln, absolutely. And he seems to be cognizant of critical periods in American history, the summer of 1864, the winter of 1776-77, the period in 1950 after we were almost pushed out of Korea. At key points where a lesser person in office would have capitulated to the pressures and the demands of the age, and that he didn’t, and the people of that age, whether it’s a Robert Taft, or it’s a Horace Greeley, we don’t remember those people. We only remember the people who said no, I’m not going to cater to public opinion.
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HH: Victor Hanson, if Obama maintains his lead and wins, and the pollsters are correct, he will be joined in Washington probably with a filibuster-proof Senate, or very close, led by Harry Reid, and the House of Representatives led by Nancy Pelosi. I cannot honestly recall a period in American history where three such extremely partisan and differentiated in terms of the extreme of their ideology, conservative or left, would be in charge. And I can’t even come up with anything like it in Great Britain, excepts perhaps immediately after World War II when the Labour Party came in. Can you, and what does it portend for the country if in fact the pollsters are right?
VDH: I think there was a period in 1933 and 1934 where the Roosevelt administration felt that a socialist National Recovery Agency and things like that, a socialist approach, and they went with that pretty much, and it didn’t really bring results until the War, and then the War sort of stopped that. And the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic Party was shunned aside. But there was a period in the 30s where they were trying things that nobody imagined that Americans would try, and they didn’t work. But they did leave, I think, a pernicious legacy. Same thing, I think, is going to happen here. We’re going to go into a recession, probably. And if Obama’s elected, we’re probably going to see a cap taken off FICA for people over $250K, small businessmen will see their marginal rates and sales taxes in the states, and it’ll give the green light, people don’t remark on this, it’ll give the green light to state governments and local governments that higher taxation is the answer for their own fiscal problems. And so I think that we’re going to see something akin to what Europe did in the 80s, where you’ll have slower growth, larger state bureaucracies, and you’re going to see, if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac frighten people, and they saw the people who were attracted to that type of government service, the elites, and the inefficiency, that model of a quasi-private-public partnership is going to be the model for health care. We’re going to see an expansion of federal control of education. I’m worried about other things that people don’t remark about. He’s rarely said anything about his educational philosophy, but on the rare occasion that he has, it’s quite frightening. He’s said that we needed, for example, more oppression studies. He went to an ethnic school, and I think it in New Mexico, and said this is a model, a Chicano ethnic school.
HH: I think it was Colorado.
VDH: Colorado, yes. And then he, in addition to this, he called for reparations, and he quickly sort of sidestepped that issue. And you get the impression that right now in the United States, the problem that we don’t, the problem is not that we have too much of a therapeutic curriculum. We have these courses – peace studies, ethnic studies, leisure studies.
HH: Gender studies.
VDH: Gender studies. And what’s happening is the public, when they send their children to school, they can’t be ensured that they’re going to have philosophy, literature, reasoning, logic, writing. And so the public itself, and we’re starting to see the deterioration in things as diverse as the post office to the DMV, we’re not turning out an educated, competitive citizen. And the worst thing you could do is A) accelerate that process, and then add more envy, anger, grievance to it, because you’re going to get somebody who will not be able to compete, and then get angry as if he should be able to compete. And I’m really worried about that.
HH: In terms of that dynamic working its way through the political system, though, in the Great Depression, people didn’t get angry. The revolution was expected, it didn’t come. It self-corrected in many respects. Do you see a rapid bounce-back against statist policies if in fact it becomes Obama, Pelosi and Reid? Or do you see a prolonged period?
VDH: I think that’s what you were getting at when you asked the questions about hubris. I think that if you get Reid together, and Pelosi and Obama, and the people who surround them, the legal team, the people who are going to be in the State Department, the people that are going to be at the Attorney General’s office, maybe right below the radar that the public won’t immediately fathom, I think you’re going to see an intensification of an ideology. They’re going to get further and further to the left. And it’s finally going to reach a critical mass, and people as they did in the Reagan revolution, are going to react. But I think that we’re going to have to go through this catharsis, because rightly or wrongly, people right now are blaming the conservative movement, Republicans, for things that I don’t think they’re culpable for. And I’ve never seen a period in my lifetime where all of the engines of the media, PBS, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New Yorker, the New Republic, all of these things that while they don’t reach as many people perhaps in terms of talk radio or Fox News, they have enormous cultural capital, and they set the tone, and I’ve never seen them all together working in concert to such an affect, that they’re saying George Bush is a Nazi, George Bush is a buffoon, Sarah Palin is a yokel, these people want to burn books, they want to cram down fundamentalist religion or else down their throat, and they’re scaring the people in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime in the United States.
HH: Are they scaring all the people? Or are they scaring what I think it looks to me like, is a combination of critical mass of the underclass, who have grievances.
VDH: Yes.
HH: …and the uberclass, the academic class, with whom you’ve been associated for thirty years, and I’ve been doing it for fifteen, almost uniformly to the hard left, and that they’re taking the margins off, but that vast center remains not at all aligned ideologically. Or have I just got on rose-colored glasses?
VDH: No, you’re right, but I think the problem is that the 51% that we see in the polls that are for Obama, that coalition for some reason is getting larger of the underclass. And they’re not really the underclass anymore. They’re the people in the lower middle class who have grown up on the expectation of more and more entitlements, more educational loans, more home owners relief, more federal money. We’re in a serious situation where 35% of the Americans are not paying any money when they file a 1040. And they’re not necessarily poor. So we’re getting to a situation where that nexus that you described is getting at least 50/50, and what I’m especially disturbed about is I don’t remember what I would call the boutique liberal, the person making $200,000 or $100,000, whose so radically left on the expectation that all of his bromides won’t affect him because of his capital, but he has a disdain for the upper middle class that it will affect.
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HH: Victor, we’re talking as though the Democrats are going to come in, and I actually believe a self-correction’s already underway, and that some of the polls show that, and that the Senate races will resolve, and Norm Coleman will win, and John Sununu will come back, and that we’ll have a filibuster even if Obama wins. But I want to stay on the prospect for just a moment. It really wouldn’t frighten me if I thought that they had an agenda worth experimenting with. But I don’t…when Reagan arrived, and I was part of that in 1980, he had a number of big ideas. The Heritage Foundation put out the blueprint for America. They wanted to do a number of things. I don’t see the Democratic Party wanting to do anything that I can articulate other than punish and redistribute. Do they have ideas?
VDH: No, that’s why they were so angry at Clinton in the primary. For all of the pathologies of Bill Clinton, you could see that he understood, maybe it was the process of triangulation under the guidance of Dick Morris, but he understood that welfare had gotten out of control, and that there were political benefits, for whatever reason, of having a balanced budget and a surplus. I don’t get that at all from these people. I get the impression, as you said, punitive. I think they’re going to try to have sort of war crimes trials, that they will have Senate and House hearings about the Bush administration. I am very worried about certain things in Europe. They’re going to be closely aligned with European socialists. I think that they’re going to inordinately defer to the United Nations, which after the reception we saw with Ahmadinejad was quite frightening as well. And I think they have a different idea about taxation. They don’t believe the individual creates that capital. If you talk to these people, they believe that because of some nebulous, arbitrary process, somebody who makes $200,000 due to his intellect or his expertise or his value to the economy got lucky, or it was a rigged system in which someone, let’s say, who paints a house and makes $40,000 deserves $200,000. I was recently in Libya, and I had a ruptured appendix, and I was operated on in a country in which by fiat, the person who cleaned the floor made the same as the surgeon. And as I watched the manifestations of that all through the economy, I realized that the reason that an oil exporter can’t fill potholes on the road on the way to the airport was simply that there was no incentive for anybody to do anything. There was no distinction. There was no recognition of talent or expertise or luck or sacrifice. So that’s what I’m worried…I guess it would be summed up under the rubric that people around Obama, from what they’ve said, seem to believe in an equality of result rather than an equality of opportunity. And anytime that happens in history, you know the results of it, human nature being what it is.
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HH: Victor Hanson, the intellectual terrain of the United States over the last seven years was marked by the sudden appearance of people who understood the war, you among them. Mark Steyn also rose to preeminence, a number of people on the internet rose up, the Powerline guys, et cetera. There was a seriousness about the war which I think in recent years has been fully and almost completely eclipsed by anger that it’s not over and we can’t go back to the 90s, and to the party that was the 90s. But we haven’t stopped writing, and we haven’t stopped reading what you and others have written. My question is did it make a difference? Did that argument that we had, and that understanding that we reached, make a long term difference with the American understanding of the war that we’re in?
VDH: I think so. If you look at what’s happened in Iraq, all the things that Mr. Obama and his associates said would not happen, did happen. The surge worked, and not just the surge, but the change of tactics and the grassroots repulsion at al Qaeda by Sunni peoples, tribes. There was a reconciliation in the government. It’s a constitutional framework. They’re working out oil, they’re working out district representations. Iran did not go in and take that as part of its fiefdom. It’s now isolated. And in fact, Iraq could be as destabilizing to Iran as Iran has tried to be to Iraq. But more importantly, the question was after 9/11, where were we going to fight al Qaeda? We went into Afghanistan and properly so, and we found immediately they had this sanctuary in a nuclear Islamic country where they were untouchable. And it would risk, really, a type of escalation that we weren’t willing to take to go in there, at least overtly as Obama wanted to do. So we went in and we got rid of somebody who had been a long abettor of terrorists in Saddam Hussein, and immediately our enemies announced this is the new battlefield. They flocked to it, and we killed them by the thousands, we discredited them, not only discredited them militarily, but we discredited them culturally, socially, politically, ethically in the eyes of their natural constituency, the Sunni tribesmen, right in the heart of the ancient caliphate. They suffered a terrible defeat, they’re disorganized, and during this whole process, they were not able to come over and attack us, which they promised was going to happen in a serial fashion. And yet, and if you look at all of that, the obstacles to that, we tragically lost over four thousand, but this is like trying to conduct the one campaign in World War II in the Marianas or something, where we lost commiserate casualties. So for all the mistakes that were made, and there are mistakes made in every war, it turned out to not only be valuable for our strategic interest in the Middle East, but it had a direct affect in attriting and hurting al Qaeda in a fashion that we had no other theater of operations to do that in. And that’s lost on the American public, I’m afraid.
HH: Not only lost, but the level of imbecilic analysis of Pakistan, for example, last night as I watched Barack Obama talk about Musharraf and the whole Pakistan situation, and I thought to myself, does he not know that we partnered with Stalin in the…Musharraf was not Stalin, that you have to take your allies when you can get them, and you can’t overthrow your allies. It seemed to me to be imbecilic, Victor Hanson.
VDH: Absolutely, and we not only partnered with Stalin, we did so with Obama’s icons who made that decision. It was the people in the Democratic Party, rightly so, who saw that we had to use an evil force to counteract an evil force. And the other thing that was striking in the debate last night, when he talks about Musharraf in being a dictator, we forget where did Musharraf come from? He didn’t come from in the Bush administration. George Bush was ridiculed by an elite journalist for not having instant recall of Musharraf, why he was running for election. He had been installed during the Clinton administration. Where did they get the bomb? This was the greatest foreign policy disaster in the last fifty years. They got the bomb under the Clinton administration. What did George Bush do? He came in with a nuclear dictator in an Islamic country, and what happened? As we know now, Dr. Khan’s nuclear laboratory was shut down, and we understand that as imperfect as North Korea, there is a mechanism to control it, and it probably does not have more than one or two nukes. And Libya gave up an arsenal. Contrast that with the proliferation that went on during the Clinton administration. I’m not blaming the Clinton administration, but I’m just suggesting that when Obama says these incredible assertions, he doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
HH: You see, a question that went unanswered, because it’s been such a dismal series, maybe Bob Schieffer will ask it, Libya opened their kimono and turned over the Khan network products after the invasion of Iraq. We got their chemicals, their biological, we got their nuclear designs, we got their operational designs for the warhead that Khan had sold them. It was a huge strategic victory to disarm Libya. I would love to see a candidate asked, both of them, to what do you attribute that retreat from brinksmanship on the part of Qaddafi, and did it have to do with the successful use of force. And I want to ask you first, A) do you think it did have to do with the successful use of force, and B) do you think Obama has any idea that that happened or why it happened?
VDH: I don’t think he has any idea, and we know that Mr. Qaddafi called the Italian prime minister and said just what you said, that he didn’t want to end up as did Saddam Hussein. And remember, it didn’t happen just after the invasion. It happened about six weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein, and that had a powerful effect on a similarly-minded dictator when he saw the fate of Saddam Hussein. That’s when he made the decision. When I was there in April of 2006, I talked with a number of people in the Libyan government. And off the record, they all said that. These were very hard people. They were no-nonsense pragmatists, and they said basically that the government has switched positions, that it was allowing cell phones in, that it had this natural oil wealth, that it was tired of the embargo, that it didn’t want to deal with George Bush anymore in a confrontational manner, and they said this to me, that we have more WMD arsenals than you’ll ever find in Iraq, and they were bragging about it as if this will be a bonanza, and this will open up relations, and we have more. And one man said to me you know, we’re only pumping a million three, and we can have four million barrels of oil a day, and it’s going to work out great, because the price is up and this is going to be one...they were saying things that were absolutely incredible had you broached them in 2003. But the problem was that all this came in a context where George Bush was a unilateralist preempter, had done nothing good but make the world hate us. And yet when you look at the world and you don’t listen to the BBC or read Le Monde in Paris, you start to see that a billion people in India appreciate free trade with the United States, that China is not necessarily anti-American, that Russia, to the degree that it fears us, it’s because that we’ve stood up to them in a way that I don’t think Obama will. So I don’t get by this idea that because there’s people in the Middle East and Europe that don’t like us and they’re far more vocal, that this is a referendum on the morality of the United States. I don’t want to be liked by people necessarily in the Middle East. I don’t really necessarily want to be liked by people in a Paris salon. And to the extent that George Bush is not liked by those people, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
HH: There’s a choice in front of the United States, and it’s McCain-Obama. And they will then direct the foreign policy of the United States. And people in Israel are watching this choice, and people in Iran are watching this choice, and our enemies in caves in Waziristan are watching. What do you see is those two paths? How will be different if we select McCain than if we select Obama vis-?-vis Iran and Israel? Will the path of history be different, Victor Hanson, in your assessment depending on the outcome of this? Or is the confrontation coming regardless of who we send in?
VDH: Well, the difference is it’s easy to voice cheap rhetoric, as we saw in the debate last night. It’s easy to say, as Obama says, it’s a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That’s intolerable. What he’s not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don’t have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour, or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, must be hated by people in Berlin. There’s no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There’s no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It’s going to be hatred from those people. I’m going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I’m going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I’m willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he’s going to be willing to do that, or John McCain? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that all of that cheap rhetoric about invading Pakistan and a game-changer in Iran is anything other than rhetoric, because I think the problem with Obama is he’s bought into the idea of Vero Possumus, the new presidential seal that he’s promulgating, that the seas are going to cease to rise, that the planet won’t heat up, this is the change that we’ve been waiting for. And he really believe in this Messianic sense that people love him for himself. And he’s not going to be willing to give up that easily.
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HH: Let’s go back to this conversation about Israel. Ahmadinejad has been here three years in a row. He says crazier things every time. At least this time he wasn’t feted by Columbia University. I don’t doubt that we’re in for a confrontation. Do you?
VDH: No, I’m afraid that we are, especially when he feels emboldened enough to go to the United Nations just a few blocks away from the Wall Street meltdown, and for the first time not just say the Israelis are culpable, but Jews in general, and talk about in Hitlerian terms an international Jewish banking conspiracy. It’s what he basically was saying, and he felt not only would he get applause, but there would be liberal people in the United States, as happened, that would take him out to dinner in congratulations for that speech. So I’m very worried. I’ve never seen this level of anti-Semitism, I’ve never seen this level of appeasement among our elites. And he’s basically really read the Western mind. He’s basically said do you want a nuclear Iran to threaten you? Do you want a missile that can threaten Frankfurt? Because that’s what I’ll do unless you are nice to me, unless you call off George Bush and Dick Cheney, and then we can live together. And then once we get into that mindset, it’s going to be very easy to obtain that goal.
HH: Are you amazed that people immediately begin to discount him, and they say well you know, he’s not really in charge of the government, that’s the mullahs, and he’s a figurehead, and there’s opposition to him, and the reformers exist. We’ve seen this for eight years. He is an expression of the inner elite in Iran, though, regardless of whether he’s running the Revolutionary Guard, and there’s some question about his influence there. But he’s a perfect expression of that mindset.
VDH: Absolutely, and it reminds me so much of the 1930s when Hitler was making these absolutely atrocious statements and making a fool of himself at Nuremberg. And what did the people in France and England say? They’d say you know, the Prussian Junker class is really running Germany, and these are the old Hindenburg-Ludendorff people. Or they’d say the industrial is corrupt and these people are really running Germany. They wouldn’t, this man is not typical. And what they didn’t understand was that these people thought they may, but they found out that A) he was either useful, or B) he was far smarter than they were, or C) and most likely of all, that Hitler was an expression of the resentments and the anger of a whole humiliated German nation in the way that Ahmadinejad has sized up the Iranian people’s frustrations, and how they can be manipulated in a way that’s even more effective than the mullahs themselves.
HH: So here’s my question. You know, if we post the transcript and the podcast of this conversation, immediately voices on the left will attack you, and me for hosting you, and they will deny the reality of what’s just been said, even though it’s not deniable. They will invent a reason to deny it. Why is that? Is it fear that they just don’t, that they can’t understand what we’re up against? Or is it ambition? Or is it just stupidity?
VDH: No, I think it’s, and it’s fear. I mean, who wants to face that awful reality that this man is unstable, and there’s a slight chance that he might welcome a nuclear exchange, because then he could tell the Islamic world that the downtrodden Shia, of all people, destroyed the Zionist entity when the Sunnis could not, and that they are now with, in martyrdom in Heaven. So there’s that fear that you might be dealing with something that right after Afghanistan, Iraq, this financial problem. Who wants to deal with it? It’s the same mindset that after going through the horrors of World War I, you weren’t going to ask the French people to say look, you didn’t do that in World War I. You really didn’t win. Now you’ve got a bigger problem with Hitler. They were not up to it. And it’s very hard to do. I have empathy in some ways for the liberal left, because you’re trying to say to them okay, Iraq is a mess, Afghanistan is a mess, in your way of thinking, the economy’s a mess, and you know what? There’s somebody out there who does not believe in the world court of the Hague. He’s not going to believe in the United Nations, and you can’t just do a Milosevic on him. It’s a very fundamental problem, and he wants to destroy the survivors of the Holocaust. And we have to deal with him. We either have to get the Europeans and the whole world to stop commerce completely with him. And if we can’t do that, we have to blockade his country and shut off his trade. And if we can’t do that at the eleventh hour, we’re going to have to use some type of military option. And boy, once you do that, you sort of negate the whole idea of peace and conflict resolution studies, dialogue, he’s sane, look, he went to Columbia, we talked to him, and the United Church of Christ, Unitarian ministers, they all said you can deal with him. We’ve been there. It goes all the way back to Demosthenes and Philip. Nobody likes, the left thinks that everybody wants to have a war with…nobody wants a war with Iran. But what we don’t want to do is have a war with Iran. And the only way you’re going to guarantee a war with Iran is if this man gets a hold of nuclear weapons, and he has guided missiles, and he starts pointing them not only at Israel, but he starts to dictate the oil production levels, or the type of governments with large Shia minorities in places along the Gulf, or he’d start to tell Germany that he wants more favorable trade policy. And given what the Europeans have showed the last eight or nine years, it’s really, it’s very depressing, because it’s a very amoral foreign policy that’s based entirely on local and regional self-interest and real politick. And Ahmadinejad has sized up Europe as no other person has in years.
HH: In the 30s, Chamberlain was supported by a phalanx of appeasers. In that time, it was not a dirty word.
VDH: No, it wasn’t.
HH: Samuel Hoare and you had Halifax, and you had a bunch of people who honestly believed that you could buy off Hitler, and you could even make common cause with Mussolini to buy off Hitler. They were not disabused of that until the very end when it was too late. But they were not fifth columnists. There were some fifth columnists in London, but they weren’t part of the government. Are you worried that we have actually people who hate America so much in the ranks of the Obamians that they wouldn’t mind strategic defeats delivered to this country?
VDH: No, I don’t think that we have people…I think that there are people in the United States who would like to see, for a variety of reasons, radical Islam defeat the United States. And they live in the United States. But I don’t think that necessarily they’re in the Obama campaign. I think the people in the Obama campaign really do believe that all of the problems in the world today are caused by either a lack of communication or a bellicose stance by the United States. And what’s scary about that is in a pattern of moral equivalence, they don’t see anything exceptional about the United States. They don’t think our Constitution, our multiracial Maritocratic society is any different than Indonesia or Brazil, and that’s scary. But I don’t think that they want, it’s even scarier in a sense because they think by dialoguing and having this moral equivalence stance with our enemies that therefore it’s going to enhance our popularity…
HH: I agree with you. I just wanted to get it out there that we are not attributing to them an anti-American…but I’m wondering, that naivet?, is it remediable? You know, he will sit down, if he is the president on the first day, he will get the CIA briefing, or preferably during the transition, and he will see what we’re up against. Does he strike you as the kind of individual who can change and immediately understand that the world is not as he wishes it would be?
VDH: No, what worries me about Obama is that, and he said this in his Dreams From My Father, the first memoir, that he had an uncanny ability, he even couched that ability in terms of race, he said a black man like me could reassure white people because of the powers of his rhetoric. He believes that he’s so charismatic and so rhetorical that almost anybody would see the logic of his ideas. That’s what’s scary.
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HH: Victor Hanson, when we went to break, we were talking about the war. And now I want to focus on the American military with which you are very, very familiar. You’ve written a lot of military history in your time. And the American military has shown itself again to be an extraordinary organization. It’s adapted to such a changing environment. Robert Kaplan’s written extraordinary books about it. How do you think they view this election? And they’re not political, and they will never be other than not political, I know too many, I married into a military family of five generations. They’re simply not ever going to be other than apolitical. But how do you think they view this conversation?
VDH: Well, I think that first of all, they’re a little astounded that people don’t recognize the extent or the degree of their achievement in Iraq. I mean, they not only went over there into a foreign landscape, they understood Islam finally, they figured out the tribal system, they did reconstruction. And then what’s never remarked upon, they went into the allies of Baghdad and Fallujah and Baquba, and tried to help people who were suffering, and did that simultaneously while fighting hand to hand against some of the most wicked people in the world, and defeated them on their own terms and their own turf. And it was an extraordinary achievement. And I feel that to the extent that they don’t get credit for that, they harbor, the proper word’s not resentment, but they feel a yearning. Why don’t people recognize us? Why do they keep saying that Iraq was the worst decision, it was a mistake, it was terrible, that you go over there, and you see what they’re doing, and you just don’t get the impression that their the Wehrmacht terrorizing people. I think that Obama said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is killing innocent civilians so that we’re putting pressure on the government. We’re not doing that. There’s never been a more careful, more scientific, more surgical military than our own. And they did a wonderful thing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they did the near impossible, and that message is totally lost on the American people.
HH: I want to ask you, there’s a patch here which I keep for J.P. Blecksmith who was killed in Fallujah on November 11th, ’04, and I know his family, and I know how proud they are of the contribution he made. And I know the American people love their military. But does this in any way affect the willingness of people to serve in it, that we are so cavalier about the sacrifices rendered, and the achievements obtained?
VDH: I hope not. I’ve been there twice, and I went there with H.R. McMaster for a week, and we drove all over that Anbar Province and Baquba, Fallujah, that area. And just to talk to those people, they’re just excited about having people come over, and they’ll take you on a tour. And it was very eerie to walk in places, and I went with a Marine colonel, and he said look at this house. In 2005, this man was killed here. And then we went down a road, and he said this IED blew up here. And it was almost a ghost land of the accumulated experiences that all these brave people, and he said something I’ll never forget. He said the surge worked, yes. The Anbar awakening worked, yes. Change of tactics was necessary, yes. Petraeus was a savior, yes. But please remember that in 2003, ’04, ’05 and ’06, there were unknown Americans who went out with the wrong tactics, the wrong type of knowledge, and they still defeated the enemy, and they killed some very, very evil, powerful people. And their absence today allowed this to happen, and we want to remember them. And I think that was very poignant.
HH: We do want to…Zarqawi was killed before the surge.
VDH: Absolutely.
HH: And the number of people he would have killed had he remained and trained are numerous.
VDH: Yes, yes.
HH: What about the idea that we have had a deterrent effect? I remember your writing, your reporting at the time of the invasion of Iraq, and how you marveled as a military historian at how far and how fast we went. Do our enemies remember that? Or do they understand, as the North Vietnamese did, it’s not really that capability that matters, it’s the political will of the people behind it?
VDH: Well, every war, all war is is an intensification of the existing status quo. So to the extent the United States is sccessful, that enhances our world prestige, and it provides greater deterrence. And to the extent that we’re not successful or are perceived, it has the opposite effect. It’s just intensification is what war is. And so after 2003 in that brilliant three week campaign, and up until December, then we had a deterrent effect, and you saw that with the Cedar Revolution and the events in Lebanon, and Libya, and Pakistan. And then when the criticism mounted and we were told that we were Hitlerian and we were losing, then it had the opposite effect. And now we’re starting to see a restoration of the prestige of the United States, especially when people look at the U.S. military, vis-?-vis the NATO allies. Remember what Obama and others said, Kerry and Obama, that Afghanistan was the good war, Iraq was the bad war. That was the multilateral war, the allies were there, NATO was there. It was all the right war, that was where bin Laden…and we’re finding out that Iraq was more solvable, and that the U.S. military was far more capable than its allies. And the problem with Afghanistan, in some cases, is Pakistan, it’s insolvable, and also the nature of our allies in NATO. They’re not really allies as we usually use that term.
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HH: Victor Hanson, we were talking before the break about the war. Our enemies, and here I’m talking about al Qaeda, not Iran, we talked about them, how do you think they feel at this moment about their position in the world? I think they might actually be cheered by the idea of receding American power and their proximity to the nukes of Pakistan.
VDH: I think so, but that being said, if we try to quantify that question, we look at the Pew International poll, for example. We see that the popularity ratings of bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri are at all-time lows, about 34% on the average in the Middle East, except in the West Bank. And we see the tactic of suicide bombing is at an all-time low vis-?-vis before Iraq, which is quite startling. In 2002, it was far more popular. That tells me that people in the Middle East, it wasn’t necessarily an ethical question whether to like bin Laden or his suicide bombing tactics. It was whether it was successful or not. And now people are starting to see that it caused untold misery to themselves, and the United States is going to win in Iraq and probably in Afghanistan, and governments are starting to stand up to terror. And it’s predicated on the notion that the United States is strong, and it doesn’t really care to bow to critics in the Middle East. And so that’s very important.
HH: There was, however, a moment of time when the West understood itself to be the West…
VDH: Yes.
HH: And there were a number of developments immediately after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, where the West said, and we have to defend, we have to be concerned with demographics, we have to be concerned with borders…
VDH: Yes.
HH: We have to be concerned…is that all gone?
VDH: I’m worried. That’s what I’m worried about. I was getting to that. I’m more confident about our military because of the type of people in the military. The Petraeus mindset is encouraging. But what I’m worried about is, this was a war with a Western enlightenment and the forces of medievalism, if I could use that term, not that the Medieval period was necessarily all bad. But nevertheless, look at all the things in enlightenment. Publish a novel, not just Salman Rushdie, but Jewel Of Medina. We’re self-censoring ourselves. If you think of films, Obsession or Fitna, you can’t even do a film in Europe. How about journalism? We can…Jonathan Chait can write an article in a wartime entitled why I hate George Bush in the New Republic, but you dare not make a cartoon mocking Islam. We’re talking about religion. We’re all worried about whether Sarah Palin burned a book. How about the Pope? All he did was quote, I think it was a 14th Century Byzantine treatise, a letter to an Islamic sultan in the Ottomans, and all of a sudden, people started dying. So if you look at the classic genres of the Enlightenment, in journalism, in religion, novels, film, we in the West are self-censoring ourselves because we’re either afraid or we’re so indoctrinated with the culture of multiculturalism that we feel that no other culture can be any worse than the West. And that’s what I’m very worried about. We are afraid as Westerners to say look, look at the globalized world, look at constitutional government, look at capitalism, look at the stunning advances in technology in medicine. Whether you like it or not, it came from, only came from a paradigm that was political, economic, social, freedom, individualism, secularism, rationalism, constitutional government that came out of Europe, Greece, Rome, the Christian Church, et cetera. And if we’re not going to defend and articulate that, that’s what I’m worried about, and we’re not doing it.
HH: Do civilizations get tired of the burden of that? And you’ve studied…but not this quickly, I hope, but do they just wear out?
VDH: I think the Greeks told us that, that they were like human bodies, that they are young and vibrant, and they mature and they’re wise, and then they become old and decrepit. And the question was to which degree do they reproduce and that cycle continues? There’s always that cycle going on, but each generation is a link in a large chain. And it just takes one generation to give up or to age or decline or to become incompetent, and suddenly the whole civilization is lost. What I’m worried about is, because of our educational system, we don’t a critical mass of individuals who’ll say I’m a Westerner, of all races, all religions, it doesn’t matter, but I’m a Westerner in the way I think, I’m an American, and I’m unapologetic about it. And it has given us not colonialism, racism. Those are the sins of mankind. Look at Islam. Look at China today. But I gave you the remedies for that. And only did this paradigm do that. And we don’t have people in the universities, in politics, in journalism and in the media who are willing to say that.
HH: But Petraeus came from somewhere, and he’s a great military commander. I don’t know if he ever has any political ambition, but he’s 54. He comes out of the Boom, sort of the middle of the boom.
VDH: He does.
HH: …so that opportunity remains. And there are other great leaders around the United States, many of them Democrats, by the way.
VDH: Absolutely.
HH: It’s not political, who have…Jim Webb is an extraordinary, I think, inspirational figure, thought I wish he’s lost to George Allen.
VDH: Yes.
HH: But nevertheless, they come out of this generation. So the question is, does the tide that is flowing right now as we see in this election context worry you that we’ve run out of gas to produce those sorts of people? Or is it just one of these ups and downs?
VDH: I don’t know. I hope that we have more people like Webb and more people like Petraeus. I just don’t see that they’re as common on the landscape as the people who believe antithetically to them. And they’re necessary. But you know, this country, we could have had this conversation in 1861, and all of a sudden, where did Billy Sherman come from, William Tecumseh Sherman? He was a complete failure until he was 39 years old, and suddenly, the right man at the right time. I don’t know where Matthew Ridgeway came, but all of a sudden, everybody thought MacArthur was a genius, and Ridgeway saved Korea. So we always have been saved in our hour of need by people among us that we didn’t appreciate in times of peace.
HH: Do you see any great political leaders out there who are not on the ballot right now who speak to you from a younger even generation than Petraeus and Webb?
VDH: I don’t see them necessarily in the political landscape, but one thing I’m very confident, I spend a lot of time as a professor at the Naval Academy and going into Iraq, and then being involved with a security fellow program at the Hoover Institution. There are some absolutely brilliant colonels in the U.S. Army. These are people with PhDs, combat experience, and they’re not just a dozen. They’re in the very hundreds. And I see them of all political backgrounds, but they’re absolutely brilliant. And their influence is expanding beyond the military. And they’re saying and writing things in an American context that are absolutely phenomenal.
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HH: Victor Davis Hanson, thank you. What is your prediction of the next four weeks?
VDH: I think that incrementally, if we don’t have another complete financial meltdown, and I think you’ll see that the American voter will see a structure emerging that will deal with this process better than, say, the European alternative, and the result of that will be they’ll concentrate more on the difference between McCain and Obama, and you’ll see McCain close the gap to about three points. If that happens, and I think there’s a good chance it could, I don’t see the Bradley effect, or racism involved, but I do think that Obama has a Messianic effect on people, and they tell pollsters, they congregate, they say they’re for Obama. But in the privacy of the voting booth, three to four percent of them at a critical juncture won’t think of race, but they’ll think of experience, and they’ll say you know what? I’ve got all the mileage out of telling all of my friends I’m for Obama. There’s sort of a pet rock effect. But I really don’t want to turn the country over to somebody who’s going to raise taxes in a depression, and follow the dictates of Europe and the United Nations at a time of war. And I think McCain has a very good chance.
HH: What do you want John McCain to say over the next four weeks?
VDH: I want John McCain to say that you may not like George Bush, you may think I’m old, but look, we are in a critical time, and everything that in the past has worked in recession and depression I’m for, and everything that hasn’t my opponent is trying to fawn on you. And we know that in times of war, you need a steady person who has confidence in American exceptionalism, and is willing to be unpopular to get us through this crisis, and my opponent defers too many times to too many people abroad, and he’s not willing to lose that Messianic image of himself to make the hard, tough decisions. He’d rather be liked that do the right thing.
HH: And by this time next year, do you think we will have had a confrontation with Iran, either Israel as a proxy for the U.S. in the world or ourselves?
VDH: I hope not. I hope that we can do it with commercial pressures. But I’m very worried about the period November, December, January should Obama be elected, because I feel the Israelis will think that if he’s president, they will not get the green light, and Bush is a lame duck, and then they will feel they have to preempt, and that’s a very critical period we have to watch carefully.
HH: Victor Davis Hanson, thank you for an extraordinary two hours.
End of interview.