One striking difference

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Party of Anecdote

Victor Davis Hanson

One striking difference between McCain's speeches and those both of Obama and Clinton is the former's absence of personal misery stories. At least McCain is clear on two vital issues of our time: ensuring that U.S. forces once committed to war defeat the enemy rather than withdraw in defeat, and ensuring that we cease borrowing money to spend what we don't have or are not earning.

94% of mortgages may be paid each month, but we hear constantly from Obama of foreclosure signs and the evicted. Unemployment may still be at historic lows (cf. the frequent -6-7% of the last three decades), but in Hillary's world Jane Doe and Joe Sixpack are out of work and starving. The point is not that these are not real stories, but that these human agonies are not put into any broad perspective to ascertain to what degree things in general are far worse than before.

A poignant anecdote is instead intended to move, sadden, and finally anger us—to the point of begging a Hillary or Barack to intervene to stop the unceasing misery of innocent others. The net result is one of profound depression that America is such an awful, failed country — and I'm not sure if that innacurate storyline is one they really want to pound home to the voters for the next nine months. It all sounds right out an Athenian court case where the victim brings in starving children in rags to sway the popular jury.

If one were going to make the case for agony and hardship, the Democratic candidates should at least make it rational and collective: e.g., gas is over $3.50 a gallon, this means X billion out of U.S .pockets, and Y dollars more lost from your personal budget for the year — AND this is due to A, B. and C that we had some control over. It gets worse when we get to education, where the culprit is always the absence of money, never the lack of standards, the absence of accountability, the politicization of the curriculum, the infusion of therapy into the classroom, the popular emphasis on sports or leisure rather than on knowledge, or the role of unions in stifling indvidual initiative and excellence.

I don't think I have witnessed any campaign in recent memory so full of platitudes and mush — and thousands of personal voice tales of catastrophe right out of Dickens.

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