The beauty of being a third-party supporter is that I don't get wrapped up in this faux fight. At any rate, Obama is right, to a point, about Clinton. Ironically, he need only cite Bill Clinton's refusal to place preconditions on discussions with China and its most favored nation trade status, or the policies of George H.W. Bush, to show that his position is not as 'bad' as Hillary describes.

But the frame is there. Just because 'Swift Boaters' use the tactic does not mean that it should be followed. Shame on Hillary.

One of my favorite writers, Pierre Tristam, touched on this 'controversy'. After explaining how democrats were once viewed as hawks, only to be out hawked by republicans, Tristam writes:

That’s what makes today’s Democrats, when they turn their attention to foreign policy, so dishearteningly embarrassing. It’s been frightful, since the Carter years, to watch them try to outdo Republican jingoism with jingoism of their own (Bill Clinton was the exception: the 1990s put foreign policy on autopilot until the 9/11 hijackers flipped that switch). First there’s been Hillary Clinton trying to sound like JFK in his 1960 debates with sweaty Dick — all missiles, all the time. Then there was that that Foreign Affairs essay by Barack Obama, where he talks of “military options” against Iran, bulking up the military, keeping “over-the-horizon” troops in Iraq and “hunting down” al-Qaeda like he’s a neocon with a human face.

And then the inevitable Clinton-Obama confrontation over foreign affairs in last week’s YouTube debate. CNN’s Anderson cooper asked them if they’d meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela “to bridge the gap that divides our country.” Long and short of it: Obama said he would, and was ridiculed for it (“I can see the ad now,” liberal David Corn wrote in the Nation, “Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro, Bashar al-Assad, and Hugo Chavez all strolling into the White House, and a grinning Barack Obama greeting them…). Clinton said she wouldn’t, was called a respectable realist.

Yet the question itself reveals the stupidity at the heart of American foreign-policy assumptions — the kind of stupidity that’s put the country in a corner of its own from not engaging with others, regardless of the enmity quotient. The Bush administration has all of two foreign-policy victories: Getting North Korea and Libya to lay off nukes. Those are the two countries it negotiated with. It’s been failing miserably elsewhere from its refusal to negotiate with anyone else (except when it’s arming Iraqi insurgents). Clinton-type Democrats, of course, are playing to a drum-beating press, and the press is playing to the public’s grade-school foreign policy assumptions. Obviously negotiations are the starting point of solutions.

Obviously hawkish posturing has been proven again and again to fuel enmity and escalate the very dangers we claim to be battling. But in this election as in so many cold war-era elections, candidates, as Obama quickly found out, can’t say the obvious, only the expedient, no matter how deranged and dangerous. It’s what got George W. Bush elected. Twice. Democrats have learned that lesson. And we thought 2008 might make a difference.

I think his point, that we cannot speak openly about something as important as US foreign policy, is spot on. It also echoes my comments above on how the candidates, the political parties, and the press, have framed issues to make their position appear strong and their opponent's position weak. This corrupts the process (governance) so that it becomes counter productive to what is the 'best interest' of the country. Because we do not have an open and honest debate, but are hemmed in by frames, exploring 'a better way' is considered a sign of weakness.