I’m sure you all have seen Clinton’s latest ad, the one where she talks about answering the phone in the White House at 3 A.M. to keep your kids safe. I doubt it’s really working, for two reasons:

First of all, Democrats, as opposed to Republicans and Independents, just aren’t that interested in national security. 9/11 is a distant memory to almost all of them, and a significant chunk of them believe that Bush rigged the attacks anyway. They live in a dream world where terror attacks can be prevented only by the most basic of measures, one of which is ignoring the terrorists committing them.

Second of all, Hillary Clinton doesn’t have all that much experience in foreign policy and managing crises. Seriously, she was in the White House for 8 years, doing what? Let’s count her and Bill Clinton as one person, for the heck of it. So they negotiated a failed Middle Eastern peace agreement, had a disastrous venture to end the Somali genocide in 1993, had a moderately successful campaign to end genocide in the Balkans, and handed over nuclear fuel rods to North Korea. That’s a pretty lackluster list of accomplishments.

What’s pretty bad as well is Obama’s response to Clinton’s ads: saying they just play on people’s fears. I have news for Senator Obama: fear is neither entirely evil nor good. Fear has motivated many of the greatest actions in the world, and it has motivated many of the worst. We think of it as bad because it is unpleasant, and most of fear is unnecessary and bad. But Al Qaeda has killed 6,000 Americans. Is it fear-mongering to point that out, and to point out that they’re going to kill as many more as they possibly can? Is it fear-mongering to point out that George Bush got the same call the next president may take when he was at that Florida elementary school? What is Obama going to say to his National Security Advisor when the terrorists attack this country again if he’s president? “Oh, you’re just fear-mongering. We need to communicate to Al Qaeda these politics of hope that so helped America, and they’ll understand.”

Obama, in fact, has a campaign that plays on a combination of people’s fears and dreams: the fear that they’re racist drives many to vote for him, the fear that if Washington continues as it does the country will be ruined, the fear that America truly is a bad nation in need of redemption (both spiritual and political), the dream of a non-fully-white president, the dream that America can become “great again”.

This does not condemn Obama at all: all politicking is somewhat based in fear and dream mongering. McCain, too, runs on dreams and fears: the fear that an uncontrolled border will irreparably damage this country, the fear of the next 9/11, the fear of defeat and humiliation in Iraq, the dream of a true hero in the White House, the dream of a smaller and more responsible government, and a perpetuation of the American Dream itself.

The difference is that Obama openly condemns any who run on fears. Indeed, his change itself is supposedly based on hope, but is truly just a fear of the status quo (Americans have a general fear of the status quo, which is part of what has made us great and also may be our eventual downfall). Yet he condemns Clinton when she brings the truths of the world into the campaign.

So how can McCain run against this? I’ve been thinking, and this is my idea: McCain must make himself into the Candidate of Truth, against Obama’s Candidate of Hope. He’s already done it, to some degree, with his reputation of straight talk. But I’d recommend hammering truth everywhere he goes: the truth that the American economy is doing pretty well but some things should change, the truth that the Surge is working, the truth that Al Qaeda is still out there, the truth that the border must be secured. If the opposite of hope is despair, the opposite of truth is lies. People don’t like people who despair, but they hate liars and deceivers. (Obama does little lying though bits and pieces of deceiving, and McCain does no despairing, I’m simply saying that at the negative extremes, I believe truth still beats hope.)

If anyone has a better idea to stop this rock star, I’d love to hear it.