Now that Senator Clinton has put out yet another tiresome "it's 3:00 am, who do you want answering the phone?" ad and made me think about it some more, I see another really serious problem with these ads. See, I'm trying to think of how many times in the entire history of the republic that the President has had to make a decisionOh, sure, during the Cold War it was theoretically possible -- not that this stopped Nixon from going to bed dead drunk most nights, not that this scared Reagan's staff into admitting that the old man was irretrievably senile for most of his second term. But no, really, when the phone has rung at 3:00 am in the White House, or for that matter when the telegram has been delivered at 3:00 am or some ambassador shows up with an urgent communique at 3:00 am, how often has it ever mattered if the President responded by giving orders right then and there? Ever?9/11 itself is illustrative. Because the Secret Service was being protective (over-protective? that's a judgment call) the President spent almost all of 9/11 being shuttled around the US on Air Force One, while the military and the Treasury Department scrambled to find somewhere for him to land that they were 100% certain was safe from terrorist attack. We know from the timelines that have been reconstructed that over the course of the firstafter the attack on the US began, the President gave no actual operational orders other than, "keep doing what you're already doing." Even the most incompetent administration in history had enough contingency plans in place, and a decentralized enough chain of command, that until some actualdecision had to be made, not a decision about what to do during the emergency but what to do after and in response to the emergency, did the President have to make a decision. He didn't have to jump right up from readingto bark out the emergency orders for everybody to know what to do. People just went ahead and did their jobs. That's what we pay them for.And, of course, we know that once he did have time to think it over, he screwed it up. And that's the problem with these ads, isn't it? Not only can Hillary Clinton not cite one time that she's been called upon at 3:00 am to make some snap decision when the national security was on the line -- by definition she hasn't, she didn't have the necessary security clearances to even know about 3:00 am emergencies, and there weren't that many (if any) of them during her husband's administration, and I've just demonstrated that it doesn't matter that she hasn't because the 3:00 am response is almost always going to be "keep doing what you're doing, we'll discuss plans in the morning" -- but the one time she did have to make a decision, not in the first hour after 9/11 but after days and weeks to think about it, she screwed it up the same way that George Bush did, voting for George Bush's proposal to let al Qaeda and the Taliban escape Afghanistan so that the President could have his personal little war against Saddam Hussein.I understand that the average voter has a skew idea of what the Presidency is actually like, might think that a lot more of the decisions in government are going all the way to the top than actually are, might think that an awful lot of people in the government and the military would wait for an explicit "go" order from the President before doing their jobs, and that's why these ads might impress them. But it seems to me that the more she keeps running these ads, the more time she's giving the public to think about them, to think about what they mean. And if they do, it seems to me that these ads will come around and bite her somewhere uncomfortable, that they'll turn out to be counter-productive.