Rorschach

Kevin Drum yesterday noted that "The Democratic primary has become more a Rorschach test than an actual contest." He's right. Great example. Yesterday, someone supporting a different campaign was trying to interest me in some story about how Barack Obama had sold out to insurance companies in the Illinois State Legislature. I didn't look into it, but Paul Krugman found something similar. Now I was reading the excerpt, and I had a reply to the implicit critique Krugman was making. And then I read this from Krugman: "being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator."

Exactly, I thought. Krugman has found an example of Obama doing his job as a state senator well, and decided to simply assume that he doesn't understand that being president is different from being a state senator. I see the reverse -- I see a guy who was an effective state senator, which I see as evidence that he'd be effective in other roles as well.

It's a pure rorschach issue, though. So in the interests of my sanity, I'm going to write the following sentence and then endeavor to drastically curtail my involvement in blogospheric debates about the Democratic primary: I believe that Hillary Clinton is likely to pursue a worse foreign policy than would Barack Obama or John Edwards and I don't see any clear and convincing reason to favor her on other grounds; that said, there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the decision -- any of these three could be an excellent president and any of them could screw-up.