Who is More Realistic?

While surfing the internet today, I found an interesting article on the Washington Post’s website. It is a little outdated, but nonetheless interesting. The title caught my eye immediately; Who’s More Realistic: McCain or Obama? The article combines ideas of last unit’s topic of perilous times and our new unit of dreams and realities. As I began reading the article, I expected the author’s thesis right away. He had an interesting style where he discussed both candidates views on domestic policy, then finally said who he thought was more realistic. His answer was Obama, who he thought was correct when he stated that we lived in peaceful times, contradicting McCain’s views of the direct opposite. I thought this was surprising after reading both candidates thoughts on domestic policy. McCain, who thinks that we live in a dangerous world, and we have to aggressively use our power in this type of environment. Obama, who contradicted McCain with his view that the world is less dangerous than it was during the Cold War. Personally, from the invasion of Georgia over the summer to nuclear missiles, I believe the world is very dangerous. Therefore, I think McCain is more realistic on terms of foreign policy. One thing Obama said, though, I thought was very interesting; that the United States needs to stay calm. He believes that when fear spreads (connects to perilous times), we have a tendency to overreact, and cause new problems. Obama uses Iraq as a specific example of the U.S. overreacting to a situation, causing a costly and unnecessary invasion. The author of the article later gives more examples of this, while backing Obama’s claim. One of the examples, which I thought was comical and interesting, was how “the paranoia of communism helped fuel McCarthyism” because without the fear of the people, McCarthy never would have been trusted on all his accusations of communisms in the U.S. Overall, I thought this article had a nice link between last units topic and our new topic, and connected them very well.