They Can't Be Serious

As I think ahead to the 2008 election, the overarching quality I want in the next president is seriousness. That word can mean different things. For a president, it's marked by the ability to express ideas in terms that go beyond easy bromides and breezy, grating colloquialisms -- and to do it on one's feet, sans teleprompter. Words usually reflect both the substance and structure of thoughts, and that's particularly true for those who are well-educated and have a larger vocabulary at their disposal. All of the candidates at Tuesday's Republican debate fall into that category.

On Iraq and foreign policy, most are running as Bush third-termers. For some of them, that's true for the seriousness issue as well. A telling snippet from Mitt "Null Set" Romney during the debate (transcript here):

Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what I mean by that — or a null set. And that is that if you’re saying let’s turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn’t be in the conflict we’re in. But he didn’t do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in. I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time. I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.

By the way, Harry Reid was wrong. We did not lose the war in Iraq. And that’s not the sort of thing you say when you have men and women in harm’s way.

We did, however, not do a great job after we knocked down Saddam Hussein and won the war to take him down, and his military. And at this stage, the right thing for us to do is to see if we can possibly stabilize the central government in Iraq so that they can have stability and so we can bring our troops home as soon as possible.

"The decision to get in." "We knocked down Saddam Hussein." "Won the war to take him down." If you didn't know the words were Romney's, who would be your first guess?

Romney had company. Jim Gilmore:

Saddam Hussein was unstable, and so taking him out was good there, but we certainly didn’t anticipate the further instability that was to come out.

And Duncan Hunter:

When the Osirak reactor that was hit `86, when the six F-18s came over the horizon and knocked that out, they didn’t need anything but conventional weapons.

Sloppy words, lazy minds.