A Friday night ritual where I live is to catch Mark Shields and David Brooks on the Lehrer "News Hour." The segment is always entertaining, sometimes enlightening, and, on occasion, David even manages to get a word or two in. In recompense, David writes a column for the New York Times.Today he compares the styles of Hillary and Barack as, respectively, "Combat and Composure." Here's his summing up:

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against Wall Street money-grubbers, but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.Still, amid the storms of the presidency, their basic worldviews would shape their presidencies. Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight. If elected, shell have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.

Grant, do you take that as an endorsement?

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

Also by this author
© 2024 Commonweal Magazine. All rights reserved. Design by Point Five. Site by Deck Fifty.