Obama is either inexperienced, not ready to be C-I-C, yet for an inexperienced guy he sure shows good judgment - twice on Iraq and now with his VP pick.

Andrew Sullivan, at his blog and in The Times, UK:
has a very interesting essay, High noon in duel for White House written for the Brits. I think you'll all either enjoy or you'll need a Maalox and baking soda -

The Phoney War Is Over

OR

High noon in duel for White House

"Two men now offer themselves to America, as the race starts over. My take on two very American Americans in the Sunday Times:"

WHEN you take a good, long, as-fresh-as-you-can look at the two men on stage, it is not that huge a mystery why the race has been within a few percentage points since Obama finally wrested the nomination from the Clinton dynasty. McCain and Obama are two evenly matched, larger-than-life figures with riveting biographies, charisma and a capacity to appeal beyond the members of their own parties. Of course the public is evenly divided about them.

In this face-off - between perhaps the most talented duo to joust for the title since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 - America sees parts of itself, past and future, and finds it understandably difficult to make a choice just yet.

[.]

    Obama's Americanness, however, is deep, for all the aspersions of otherness thrown at him. His DNA combines two of the more indelible American identities: heartland grit and immigrant dreams. Half his family has roots in Kansas, the heart of the heartland. His largely absent father came from a distant place, Kenya, and Obama grew up in, among other places, Indonesia. These two identities place him at the centre of a churning, yet traditionally immigrant country.

    His eclectic Americanness reveals itself elsewhere as well.

    He is at home in the rabble-rousing church of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and yet he is also in his element at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He plays basketball and can write like a professional novelist. He is a product of modern Chicago and premodern Indonesia - and able to note similarities in each.

[.]

The raw appeal of McCain as a candidate, on the other hand, is rooted in another form of Americanness.

[.]

McCain is a far more mercurial, emotional and volatile character than Obama. Despite being a generation older - he will be 72 on Friday - he is temperamentally much younger than his rival. There is a lot of Churchill in McCain: the melodrama and the sanctimony, the mawkishness and the sincerity, the big heart and sometimes faulty judgment.

[.]

OMG. Andrew elevates McCain to Churchill!?! Which of the McCains?

 I guess Andrew missed the several - not too flattering McCain profiles - his POW and post POW years  by the Cockburns and others in Counterpunch.

To pinch a Biden..this McCain campaign rests on a noun, a verb and the acronym POW.

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"