The Search for Competence

George Will talks about America's search for competence in the next President.

Hillary Clinton is hardly a fresh face. She has been in the nation's face since the I'm-not-Tammy-Wynette expostulation of 1992. She is not even the most interesting novelty. Barack Obama is, and he is more charming. She is, however, seasoned. Americans hungry for competence seem, so far, to be resisting Obama's request that, for his benefit, they should treat the presidency as a nearly entry-level political office.

One or two persons were going to emerge as Clinton's principal rivals and perhaps she is fortunate that they turned out to be Obama and the almost-as-inexperienced John Edwards, not, say, five-term Sen. Chris Dodd, six-term Sen. Joe Biden or governor and former diplomat Bill Richardson. Clinton's persona as the high school class grind may be this year's charisma.

I am not sure this makes Clinton competent when the comparison is relative to two definitively inexperienced political leaders.

But then Will digresses into an exposition on the Republican stance on abortion,

The party asserts that one of America's most common surgical procedures is murder. So, last year, perhaps a million women and their doctors committed murder. However much a person deplores abortion and embraces that legal logic, nobody believes that either the legislation or the constitutional amendment that Republican platforms have praised will be passed. Hence the sterility of today's abortion debate. And hence the inclination of some social conservatives to focus on limiting abortion by changing the culture, and their willingness to evaluate candidates by criteria unrelated to abortion.

Will arrives at Giuliani, who seems to be gaining some acceptance among Christian conservatives.

I have always thought Giuliani's stance on teh issue to be a pragmatically conservative one. In 30 years, the law regarding abortion has remained largely unchanged despite all the sturm and drang expended on teh subject. The reasonable person, in Giuliani's and my, view accepts that we as a nation are going to be of divided opinion the matter and look to a principaled position. Giuliani doesn't like abortion, but doesn't like to impose his view of the matter on someone else, particuarly a woman in a difficult position. Far better is it to try and change one person's mind on teh subject than an entire nation.

It is this issue that Will finds some competence in Giulani, or at least he can see why some people are finding competence:

Giuliani, who is appealing to "the Republican longing for managerial competence" with his "idiosyncratic brand of conservatism," might be a transformational Republican figure. But perhaps his conservatism is not idiosyncratic. Perhaps it is, in a way, traditional.

I think it is a model of traditional conservatism, but then I am sure I don't speak for Christian conservatives and perhaps not enough Republicans.