Nixon in 1968 unlike Obama 2008 was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet in 1972 he won what in some measures was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.
War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.