Op-Ed Columns

As the Democrats' infantile nomination process points ever more surely to a victory for Barack Obama, I feel more comfortable than ever with Hillary Clinton commanding our foreign and national security policies.

First point, not in order of importance: The Democratic primary is organized on the principle of children's T-ball; everybody gets a prize: most times at bat, best team spirit, best spitter.

Because it is proportional, not winner take all as in the GOP primary, two strong candidates such as Obama and Clinton stretch out the process, producing bizarre results. Hillary won Texas but Obama got most of the delegates.

If the cleaner winner-take-all rule applied, Democratic leaders would be demanding that Obama quit the race and concede, even before a single vote had been cast in Indiana or North Carolina.

Before Tuesday's vote, counting Florida and Michigan and using take-all rules, Hillary would have been ahead by 164,692 votes and 472 delegates. Adding undeclared superdelegates, she would be the certain winner.

She could still win the most delegates if the undeclared party leaders used their independent judgment, as they were selected to do, and declared Hillary the better candidate to defeat John McClain and protect America.

They will not do that. Even if they felt more secure with Hillary making national security decisions as I do, they will crown Obama because party and media have created an overwhelming expectation that under current rules the person with a majority of delegates is the winner.

Obama is the winner, and sooner or later Hillary will gracefully bow out, pledging to lend her indefatigable energy to his campaign. To do otherwise would create a schism within the party that neither she nor Bill wants as a heritage.

So, despite the inconclusive result of Tuesday's voting, it seems the Democratic candidate for president will be an extremely bright, eloquent man who has a calm temperament, good looks and skin the color of cured tobacco.

It is very likely that Barack Obama, made from roots in Kenya and Kansas, will be the next president. Among the numbers supporting that conclusion is: 11 million more Democrats than Republicans voted in the primaries.

More important than numbers is the inarticulate national craving for some kind of change, a hunger for something that Obama sensed better than Hillary.

How did this national emptiness come about, and what will it take to fill it?

From FDR right through Nixon, there was a belief that government had a large role to play in a partnership that met our needs. When Reagan made government the enemy, the consensus collapsed.

Republicans tried to fill the consequent void with moral and religious imperatives, keeping abortionists out of their clinics and homosexuals in their closets. If government were to play favorites, it would be for winners — the rich.

In foreign and security policy, the consensus on gathering friends, talking to enemies even while applying steady pressure over time — the Marshall Plan, NATO and containment that won the Cold War — was discarded as well.

That void was filled with a more aggressive formulation of Wilson's vision of making the world safe for democracy. The neoconservatives that dominated the Bush administration said to Iraq, in effect, we're going to make you democrats if we have to tear up your country and kill you to do it.

The consequence of trying to govern from a collection of narrowly defined moral and religious beliefs is that it triggered a cultural war that nobody could win. On matters of faith there is no compromise, only perpetual war — a hardening of the nation's partisan arteries that produce paralysis and, in time, death.

As national elections neared, voters increasingly felt something big was missing, something more than gas prices. This sense of going on the wrong path was as if we asked ourselves, what does it mean to be an American today?

Does it mean being mean to gays, condemning women who believe their bodies do not belong to government, and guaranteeing business executives tax breaks with their multimillion dollar bonuses from failing companies? Does it mean invading every nation whose government we don't like?

Even if most voters don't parse their feelings the way I have, there is a strong feeling that being an American means something bigger and better than what we've got. We all want change, and yet we're a little scared.

The president's political adviser, Karl Rove, is a world-class propagandist. He has sold the media and the people on the false premise that the war in Iraq is the war on terror.

It is not. The war in Iraq was a war against a man, Saddam Hussein, but which has become an enormously deadly and expensive mediation of internal divisions within Iraqi society. The war on terror is worldwide and unending.

There is a sense among the population that we need to get out of the Iraqi civil war so we can better fight al-Qaida in Afghanistan and, together with our allies, pursue terrorism to the end of time.

Fingertip understanding of the shifting contours of forces threatening us, where and how to deploy force or diplomacy, is on parade every time Hillary Clinton discusses complicated regions like the Middle East.

Obama will rightly be challenged on his preparation for that role, as he will on simple patriotism — a detestable instinct for elements of the GOP — but this country is at core so strong, supple, value-driven, all that is needed is a change of priorities.

If Obama shows he has the words and the will to concentrate America's strengths — nerve, bone and muscle — to reorder domestic priorities and recalibrate national security policies, he could be a very good president.