The Choice Before Us

It's one of the choices that help define us in a media obsessed culture:
Beatles or Stones?
Coffee or tea?
Boxers or briefs?
Coke or Pepsi?

But this one perhaps will tell more about your personality than some of the other dichotomous preferences. And this one definitely has bearing on how you might vote in any given election.  In fact, I'm surprised that pollsters haven't taken to asking this simple question when they call you up at dinner time to bug you.
The question is:

Kirk or Picard?

If you don't know what I'm talking about then one of two things is probably true about you:
1. you've been in cryogenic suspension since about 1960, in which case welcome back to the world, I'm afraid things are worse than you thought they would be, but hey congratulations on the whole thawing out thing.
Or
2. You just don't watch too much TV, in which case congratulations, you're probably smarter than I am and you don't need to keep reading.

Still reading anyway?

Okay, James Tiberius Kirk was the Captain of the Starship Enterprise in the campy but brilliant television show Star Trek.  The original show was a little ahead of its time and was cancelled after a fairly brief run.  However, over the decades the show just wouldn't go away.  Despite being cancelled Star Trek got more and more popular, spawning several movies, large amounts of merchandising and fanatical conventions of fans who dress up like Klingons and Vulcans and generally revel in their collective Geekhood.
Kirk was a space cowboy, played with incomparable bravado by William Shatner.  Kirk was the guy you wanted if you had to fight a giant lizard in some sort of gladiatorial bloodsport.  Kirk was always up to making romance with sultry alien females who find stocky Kirk Douglas types irresistible.  Kirk blasted his way through the galaxy on a mission that vaguely qualified as scientific exploration, but was mostly just a series of predicaments that had to be conquered by sheer gall and intuition, rather than by the cold logic of science (represented famously by Leonard Nimoy's character: Mr. Spock).
But the real genius of Star Trek were those moments where the questions of human nature and our relative place in the universe came into focus, where the blessings and curses of technology were examined.  They were rare, but they were there.
Fast forward 25 years to the late 1980s, Star Trek is reborn as a television series, but this time the feel is a little different: Star Trek, The Next Generation is embodied by a different sort of Captain: Jean Luc Picard, played by a classically trained, dignified and very bald, Patrick Stewart.  Picard lacked Kirk's swashbuckling presence as well as his unruly pompadour.  Picard very rarely had a love interest and never got in a fist fight with a giant lizard.  Picard was a diplomat, a lover of music and art, a cultured intellectual, in short, the polar opposite of James T. Kirk.
The creators of Next Generation knew that certain parts of the Star Trek formula were worth keeping, but Kirk got a demotion to first officer in the character or William Riker, Spock became the Android Mr. Data and Mr. Scott the bombastic engineer became the well mannered (and blind) LaForge.  They gave us a Klingon serving in Starfleet, the long-time enemy of the Federation, now at peace.  We got better special effects and better thought out plots, but the biggest difference was in the Captain himself.  Picard faced a challenge that could not be overcome by might or phasers in the very first episode.  He was hijacked by a near omnipotent being known as Q, who would become Picard's nemesis and grudging admirer
Q's indictment of humanity couldn't have illustrated the difference between Picard and Kirk more clearly.  Q expected humans to go in with guns blazing and never see the predicament that was staring them in the face.  Kirk would have certainly failed the test, but Picard, with observation, diplomacy and an open mind was able to solve the riddle of Farpoint station and save the day, and all humanity from Q's judgment.
So what does all of this have to do with say, foreign policy, the subject of last evening's debate between Obama and Romney?
A whole awful lot actually.  See, up until now there has been a lot of harping on the Economy, but the funny thing is that the President, as head of the Executive branch of government, has fairly minor ability to shape our economic policy.  Unless someone is going to go full on FDR and haul out a new New Deal, the President can, at most, massage the legislature into trying to go along with his vision and plans.  He's not powerless to influence the economy, but he's not really in charge.
What he is in charge of though, is the State Department and the Military.  He can basically start a war (although he can't call it that without an act of Congress).  What the President is the face of our nation when it comes to foreign policy.  That's why last night's debate, which focused on foreign policy, was so eminently important.  This is actually the area where the President is going to have some real clout!
Which is why it was disturbing to hear both candidates do their best James T. Kirk impersonations and keep Picard locked in the closet.  Neither Romney or Obama is ever going to be able to out-Kirk George W. Bush, but what I really want to see from the leader of my country is a little more Jean Luc Picard.
This is where I may give away a bit of Obama bias, because I think he has leaned that way.  He has not led us into any new intractable conflicts in the Middle East, and he has actually extricated us from one of them.  He has refused rash and categorical action in Libya and Syria, and he actually had the restraint to watch and learn as the Arab Spring unfolded.
The Kirks of the world are chomping at the bit for some giant lizard fighting, saying that O is exuding weakness and we need to crack down, but actually I tend to believe that the world respects us a lot more now than they did four years ago.  Maybe they don't fear us as much as when Bush and Cheney were doing their Vader-Tarkin act (sorry I had to give Star Wars a shout out), but there is evidence that the people in the streets of Egypt, Libya and even Iran are not buying the portrayal of the West as the Great Satan, quite as fully as they used to.
Picard often proved that restraint in the use of force was of greater value than raw power.  I would hope that our next president, whether it is Obama or Romney, will follow the path of the diplomat rather than the way of the fist.