An Obama-Cheney Thought Experiment

David Ignatius
WashPost

Here’s a thought experiment: When you watch excerpts of the Obama-Cheney great debate over national security, try to imagine how these issues would play if America should be hit by another 9/11-level terrorist attack.

You hope the country would unite behind President Obama in crisis, the way it did behind President Bush. But watching the poison darts fly Thursday, I’m not so sure. I worry that this time the country could split down the middle like an empty gourd, with the right blaming the left, and the left blaming the right.

That’s what scared me about Dick Cheney’s sneering, sarcastic attack on the new administration’s national-security policies: He is turning up the heat of partisanship, and thereby weakening the glue that would hold the country together in crisis. He is playing the vindication game, like his pal Rush Limbaugh, pushing for the sharpest, meanest lines to justify himself -- claiming that Obama’s opposition to harsh interrogation was “contrived indignation and phony moralizing” and “recklessness cloaked in righteousness.” Those are bitter words, fighting words. When you accuse a political rival of weakening the nation against its adversaries, you cross a line.

That’s why I liked Obama’s attempt to claim the middle ground in this debate. Cheney may have had the whip hand rhetorically, but Obama’s cool, calm presentation gives him a better chance of uniting the country, if disaster should strike. Or so I would like to think.

(More here.)