The back and forth about Kissinger last night - about whether or not Kissinger agrees with McCain or Obama regarding meeting with Iran - is completely irrelevant. Not because Iran is irrelevant, but because Kissinger is.
This is an 85 year old man, Secretary of State to the most disgraced president in the nation's history. He is a relic of the Cold War and we have no evidence that he has anything of value to add to today's foreign policy debates. I thought it laughable when Sarah Dolittle met with him last week, and I thought it ridiculous that his name came up last night.
Who the hell cares what this old man thinks. Seventy percent of the electorate is too young to even know who he is.
But McCain's dependence on Kissinger as an advisor is emblematic of what is unacceptable about McCain as a presidential candidate. He is a product of the Cold War and Vietnam. He is too old, his ideas no longer applicable to the rapidly changing and interconnected world.
Obama and his young supporters (including this 61 year old grandmother) know we can no longer live in a world of black and white, friend and foe, good and evil, victory and defeat. This world is so small now, with travel between countries so rapid, that we must find new ways to relate to each other.
This week we learned that McCain cannot communicate with his fellow Republicans by telephone or computer. He must travel by plane to meet personally with them to convince them to support some yet unknown position he has on the bailout plan. This alone makes him unqualified to lead in the modern world. And we learned last night that he is still caught up in Reagan's failure in Lebanon, the Cold War with the USSR ("I looked into Putin's eyes and I saw three letters: K.G.B."), his time as a POW during the Vietnam War, and some antiquated notion of victory and defeat.
Obama, on the other hand, understands the world we live in and knows how differently we must approach it.
Kissinger is irrelevant, and McCain's reliance on Kissinger makes him irrelevant as well.
