WASHINGTON -- The hotel commercials show Average Joe about to perform a job requiring training and skill when Joe confesses that he's not really qualified, "but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."
Translation: He may not know much, but he's that smart.
Sen. Barack Obama must have been taking notes. He may not have much foreign policy experience per se, but hey, he's traveled to visit his grandmother who lives in a tiny hut in Africa.
So Americans are thinking: Yes, this makes perfect sense - especially if you squint your eyes really, really hard.
The hut came up as Mr. Obama was addressing the "experience" question that has dogged his presidential campaign, contrasting his get-down bona fides with those of a certain former first lady whose claim to experience in foreign matters also corresponds primarily to travel.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton may have met dignitaries in her ceremonial role as first lady, Mr. Obama implies, but does she have a handle on real people? "It's that experience, that understanding, not just of what world leaders I went and talked to in the ambassador's house I had tea with, but understanding the lives of the people like my grandmother who lives in a tiny hut in Africa," said Mr. Obama.
Poor grandma. Here she gave Mr. Obama good enough genes to get him through Harvard and a seat in the U.S. Senate, and still she's grilling wildebeest over a dung fire in the proverbial tiny hut?
Later, when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, Obama adviser David Axelrod suggested that Mrs. Clinton's vote on the Iraq war was connected to Ms. Bhutto's murder. Translation: Experience isn't all it's cracked up to be. Mr. Axelrod's explanation was that if not for the war (which Mrs. Clinton supported, in case you missed that), the U.S. would have been more focused on Afghanistan and al-Qaida and, therefore, lalalalalalalala.
On Meet the Press, Mr. Obama said he was not trying to draw a causal relationship between any single vote and Ms. Bhutto, but added: "If we are going to take seriously the problem of Islamic terrorism, and the stability of Pakistan, then we have to look at it in a wider context. What we do in Iraq matters."
Terrible as it was, the timing of Ms. Bhutto's death just a few days before today's Iowa caucuses reminded campaign-jaded Americans that this presidential election isn't about hair-poofing, cross-dressing or floating crosses, entertaining as those digressions have been. Until further notice, it's primarily about terror - and what happens "over there" imposes harsh realities over here.
