Duel in the sun?

Time's Michael Scherer is making sense.

If Ali had the Nation of Islam to back him up, Cheney has the Nation Of Rebublicans, such as it remains--a cavalcade of aspiring tough guys, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, the talk radio gabbers. In recent weeks, following Cheney's lead, they have settled on national security as their best card left to play against Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the bunch. (This, in itself, is an amazing admission, given Obama's dramatic expansion of domestic government.) And so they are hammering hard, trying to disrupt the cool of mister cool, President O, who I can now posit as Frazier, the workhorse, his head down, focused on the fight.

Such is the set up that is expected of me, a Washington correspondent, at a moment like this. For there is a showdown scheduled tomorrow--Obama and Cheney both giving separate speeches on national security. All the narrative elements are there to get America to pay attention, a top-billed clash, a battle, a contest of generations, of ideologies, of facts. This is the story line you will likely hear for the next 36 hours on cable and on the web, minus, of course, my strained boxing metaphor, which is imperfect, in part, because history has left far more Ali defenders than Cheney is likely to enjoy.

But instead, I pause. What is this all about anyway? How to distinguish the hype from what is happening? What battle is really being fought?

Exactly. Cautioiusly, pragmatically, Obama has shown little inclination to vastly change the policies of his predecessor when it comes to battling terrorism. And why should he, with members of his own part talking like blithering idiots.

Meanwhile, MoDo, characteristically, chose today to "move past" her little plagiarism episode from Sunday's column, and instead chose to write an old staple: Obama is a doe-eyed fawn intimidated by big ol' Cheney and Rumsfeld [no link, take my word for it, or find her yerself].