What got me thinking about this was the recent presidential candidates’ “forum” hosted by Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Pastor Warren interviewed each candidate separately, promising beforehand to avoid asking any “gotcha” questions. Still, it was the kind of event that any serious candidate would avoid, if he possibly could talk his opponent to agree to skip it. The questions weren’t piercing, or even designed to entertain anyone other than the faithful. Rather, they were the kind we used to go at in college bull sessions – which our philosophy professor averred were perfectly named. It was painful to listen to, like a high school kid interviewing Bertrand Russell. But once the questions were asked, it was, of course, impossible to dodge them. The most cited – and most simplistic – example:

“Does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it.?”

“Now, that,” as Maine humorist Tim Sample likes to say, “– that is an intelligent question. Not many people smart enough to ask a question like that.” He might add that there aren’t many candidates smooth enough, either, to avoid answering it in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Pastor Warren had not kept his word; it was a gotcha.

Senator Obama answered, in part: “We are not going to, as individuals, erase evil from the world. That’s God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.” He suggested in addition that evil wasn’t the sole property of our country’s enemies, a statement that, quite predictably, fanned the right-wing blogosphere into a white heat.

Senator McCain, when it came his turn an hour later (It’s suspected that, despite the rules of the game, he listened in and found out what was coming.), claimed that “radical Islamic extremism” was evil. “Defeat it!” he proclaimed, which again fired up the blogs, but this time gleefully. “If I’m President of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of Hell, I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice!”

Both answers were pure blarney, one cannily evasive and inaccurate – it’s not God’s job – and the other simply red meat flung to the militant guardians of righteousness. Evil, which very few of us can define to the satisfaction of others without personifying it, has been with us from the beginning of human consciousness (see Genesis 3) and shows very few signs of recession. Invoking its presence has nothing to do with politics; we have laws for that. The notion that the next president, or any president, can defeat it in four years is fantasy. But fantasy seems to be doing well these days, too. The image of John McCain shouting threats at the gates of Hell is chimerical. First, because Hell doesn’t have gates; that would imply that not everybody is welcome. Second, because the president himself won’t be going; it’ll be a brigade or two of young men and women from our home towns.

Which brings me finally back to the carpenter, the nail, and the hammer. Senator McCain is a third-generation Annapolis graduate, a professional warrior. During the Vietnam War, he fumed at civilian control of policy and later wrote, “In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war.” It didn’t seem to enter his head that the war wasn’t winnable; or that the North Vietnamese, once they had gotten rid of our occupation, could govern themselves and the feared dominoes might not fall.

Thirty-five years after his release from the Hanoi Hilton, Senator McCain still thinks in terms of winning wars that are similarly unwinnable. While the Commander-in-Chief seeks, like a tent revival preacher, to spread the word of Democracy by force through the world – rather like the Viking kings who gave their subjects the choice of baptism or beheading – his would-be successor seems to believe that if we kill enough of the evil guys, the rest will cry, “Uncle!” beat their AK-47s into plowshares, and go back happily to farming the Fertile Crescent.

That’s never happened, and it never will happen. You can’t kill ‘em all, and the ones you miss, as well as the children, will hate you for generations. The stunning irony of Condoleezza Rice wagging her finger ineffectually at Russia for invading sovereign Georgian territory should make it plain that not only have we lost the moral initiative in international diplomacy, but that we’re about to confront some problems during the coming so-called Asian Century that are going to make Iraq seem like children squabbling in a sandbox.

I don’t believe the notion that McCain has the experience to keep us safe in these perilous times. It’s that experience, and the shriveling of imagination that invariably results from carrying weapons to disagreements, that most endanger us. Diplomacy is not a nail.