Tight races lead candidates to take desperate measures.  So, fasten your seat belts, and prepare for some sharp turns from logic.  We have a tight race now and only 54 days left.  Any statement that can be attacked , fairly or not , will be.  Any miscue will be magnified and ridiculed.  "Surrogates" will be given a free rein to say or do anything that can damage the opposing camp, so long as the surrogates do not harm their own candidate.

You might call this "the fierce urgency of now."  Or the politics of "personal destruction."  That would be wrong.  It's more like taking a mud bath in a hurricane. Before we jump , or are blown , into this mess, it may be at least somewhat reassuring to recall that the campaigns in both parties have been relatively clean and democratic so far.  Despite occasional lapses, the two major candidates have spoken fairly clearly about what their own views and priorities are.  So if you pay attention to their own policy statements and actions and ignore what they say about each other, you may come away with a fairly good idea about what McCain and Obama would try to do as President.

In foreign policy, these views and statements have been encapsulated at FPA's new election ballot site.  A similar effort was undertaken by the German Marshall Fund.  You can see how McCain envisions a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq as a security requirement, and how Obama sees calibrated troop reductions as a way to exert pressure on Iraq's fractured political leadership to reach political settlements.  You can also see how Obama would explore cautiously certain direct negotiations with Iran, and how McCain would exclude such talks without preconditions.  Both favor sending more troops to Afghanistan, but Obama blames the U.S.' failure to do this earlier on an "unnecessary" war in
Iraq.  

McCain promises a public demotion of Russia's international status by removing it from the G-8 group of industrialized democracies.  Obama would try to discourage unwelcome Russian behavior in other ways.The list goes on, but what is striking about it is how much these views echo standard Republican and Democratic viewpoints on America's role in the world.  For all the rhetoric about McCain being a "maverick" Republican or Obama being a "left" Democrat, their foreign policy views are fairly typical of their respective Parties.  McCain's views, after all, don't vary that much from George W. Bush's, he simply feels that the current President and Harvard MBA "mismanaged" the Iraq War.  Obama's views on topics such as peacekeeping and the United Nations are not that different from Bill Clinton's.This is not to say that these "typical" views on foreign policy will determine which candidate Americans will favor with an Electoral College majority.  Many other factors , the economy, most importantly , will be taken into consideration.  And some of these factors, it seems clear, will be more about identity than policy.  Such factors appear to be behind the Palin "bump" registered in the polls.  After the mud-slinging is over, religion, abortion, gun control and other "values" issues may trump actual policy debates, such as the economy and health care.  And it is because the values issues yield satisfyingly clear conclusions to so many voters that the voters , pardon the word , "cling" to them.