Barack Obama: A Man of His Word

I truly believe that - honest. Throughout this campaign, Obama has promised "Change you can believe in." And I think he'll deliver on that promise. In fact, he already is.

He's changing positions on everything from the economy to (gasp!) Iraq, the topic on which supposedly he and he alone was steadfast from the get-go.

And he's doing so only in part, methinks, for the reason all politicians do when they switch from primary to general election mode; that being the tendency to run toward the middle come general race time.

I believe the other reason - the more ominous reason - for the waffling is that the relatively inexperienced Obama is feeling his way on these topics, testing the economic winds, realizing that many of his initial pie-in-the-sky idealistic visions are simply unworkable in practice.

And I believe - I believe that is the real Barack Obama. I believe sitting at the big desk in the Oval Office would expose his inexperience painfully, and we'd get more switching of gears. And I don't think we want that soft underbelly exposed to potential nuclear rivals like Korea and Iran, nor to economic rivals like Russia and China.

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Lest I be accused of partisanship, McCain is playing his own tricks. Demonstrating his firm establishment as a Washington insider, part of The System, The Machine, he's promised to balance the budget by ... 2013.

Brilliant. One of the oldest campaign gambits in the book. "I promise that if you elect me - then re-elect me - one year into my second term I'll deliver the goods." But there's the rub - you gotta promise two terms, or it won't get done.

Besides it being an old political gambit, in this instance it's just plain impossible. No way is the US budget balanced by 2013, I don't care who's President. I liked McCain better when he was saying the cure for the housing crisis was time.

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One more politician in my sights today: Bill Clinton, who stooped to what is, even for him, a new low. He was talking about Nelson Mandela's captivity, and managed to segue that into a general observation about POWs: that at some point, their experience will come back to haunt them, and they'll snap.

Poppycock. We've all seen Bill Clinton snap, plenty of times, and he wouldn't have lasted a day as a POW. He'd have given up every secret he knew, from military intel to the phone numbers of every intern in the Beltway.