A good test of Presidential candidates is to ask how they would have acted as captain of the sinking Titanic.

McCain: Friends, we cannot cut and run in this war on terror in the vital North Atlantic shipping lanes. I have ordered the vessel to turn around and ram the iceberg again. We will hit it a hundred times, no a thousand times, till our enemy melts away. God bless the United Shipping Lines.

Hillary: There is a vast white conspiracy on starboard. There is a vast black (wink!) conspiracy on port. Why is everyone asking me all the questions? I said I am tested and ready for day 1, not day 4! No, corporate HQ didn’t pass my lifeboat mandate. Only sisters and toddlers please.

Obama: I do not agree with the chef’s lunch menu from yesterday. A 2004 Cabernet Blanc with steamed mussels is not how I would have done things, but Alessandro is a good man, been with us for over twenty years. No, I didn’t pick the drapes for the banquet hall either. I reject and denounce them thoroughly. And now, ladies and gentlemen, as we wait for change, for a new dawn aboard the Carpathia, here’s the first movement from Beethoven’s 9th to keep us buoyant.

Nader: Ha, ha, ha, I told ya! Now I’ll be captain for life.

Not convinced this is a sound way of conducting political analysis? Just check how some past presidents would have handled the situation and tell me I’m wrong.

Bill Clinton: Ayyh did not have a collision with that iceberg, Miss Leakinsky. What? That depends, sir, on the meaning of ‘sink’.

Nixon: I firmly deny any knowledge of the eighteen missing lifeboats. Very soon, you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more, you rotten third class commies.

George H. W. Bush: What is a lifeboat, dear?

LBJ: We weren’t struck by ice. Our intelligence has confirmed that we were attacked by a great, white whale. All hands to deck, ahoy, ready the harpoons, full steam ahead.

JFK: Aaask not what the Titanic can do for youuu, aaask what you can do for the Titanic.

But the gold standard of conduct for a sinking ship’s head honcho must surely be that of Edward Smith who, with undiminished humor and infinite grace, asked the band to play on till the very end.

There is only one fella who can live up to that standard. I’m gonna miss ya, George Dubya!

would have rammed the iceberg on purpose - ostensibly because it was allied with Cunard.

Lincoln - could not have tolerated the bow's attempt to secede from the stern.

Jackson - would have personally shot the bank.

And, of course, the eternal question - WWPD? (what would Polk do?)

Jackson might well have shot the bank. Damned Jews.

Dubya's his own band. The man is positively giddy, ready to have his burden lifted.

Dammit, we were waiting for you to crow over Eliot Spitzer. I heard the word "schadenfreude" on the cable echo chamber last week more often than I heard "gravitas" during the 2000 election.

Sadly, the window is swift closing for Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Barring a dramatic trial. Strike while the iron is hot, girl.

We think of statesmanship in Titanic terms: could this candidate rescue our bacon in an extreme crisis? But extreme crises are no more than one percent of governing. Maybe not even that; options are usually so limited in an extreme crisis that luck decides more than choice. There was nothing anybody could do once the Titanic struck. Its sinking was inevitable and there was no way to get more lifeboats. (You can't fool me--I've seen the movie.) What the captain did after the strike was irrelevant. The whole art was in not hitting the iceberg in the first place.

Query: has the nuclear "button" fundamentally altered our conception of leadership? Do we evaluate potential leaders with respect to a standard that may be more mythical than real?

The President is actually a TV show. If you've watched BBC's Yes Prime Minister, you'd know that all that tax and spending stuff is run by career bureaucrats in undisclosed locations. The minister's job is to make speeches, inaugarate events and stay away from scandals.

Before boasting loudly of your Titanic scholarship, I suggest you rent a few educational programs like Independence Day or MIB. When the aliens are setting fire to your garage or there's an ocean liner floating down 42nd Street, would you rather watch Sex and the City reruns, or hear Morgan Freeman's baritone reverberating around the oak panelled set? (bonus tidbit: network telecast will not go down even after a hundred feet tidal wave hits the east coast, so don't think you can take the easy way out).

Always beware of a man who moves to enter novels or movies into evidence.

You might take a step back to Yes, Minister, when the Rt Hon James Hacker was Minister for Administrative Affairs. The episode titled "The Moral Dimension" was especially fine.

Hacker: Let me know if there are any new developments regarding the coup in Burundi.

Foreign Minister: No, you let me know. You're the one with the working tele.

Sir Humphrey: You don't get gratitude afterward. Gratitude is merely a lively expectation of favours to come.

Words to live by.

instead of asking what your captain (president?) would do AFTER he hit the iceberg (there's really nothing to be done, i'm afraid), why not ask which candidate has methodology which would have best prevented the collision?

mccain - "there are icebergs everywhere, and we have to stand up to them. you can't stay in port all year because of the weather, you know"

obama - "i am dead set against ever travelling in the north atlantic, between britain and the US. i propose passage around cape horn, and to circumnavigate the globe, in order to avoid all risk of icebergs"

hillary - "i was sleeping with the captain on a ship which hit an iceberg a few years ago, and let me tell you it wasn't pretty. my policy is, that when you hit an iceberg at 3am, you want a captain who's been there before"

For over a century, icebergs have been sneaking out into the oceans and melting - destroying our coastlines and wreaking havoc on shipping, a vital part of free trade between freedom loving nations.

Most of the threat from fanatical icebergs remains below the surface and so to combat them, we should not only intecept overseas communication, but underseas communication as well, which is why Congress should act now and pass legislation renaming iceberg lettuce to Freedom Lettuce.

We know that icebergs hate our freedom and use their polarizing influence on young democracies emerging from the cold war as part of their global war on terra and so as we hunt them down, we will detain all suspected icebergs at Gitmo where they can chill until we can bring them to just-ice.