Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1960...

As I listened to McCain and Obama duke it out last night over what to do about Georgia, I had a queasy sense of déja vu. Is it already 48 years ago that one of the rallying cries in the second debate between Nixon and Kennedy was "Quemoy and Matsu"? I was still a kid at the time, but somehow I remember thinking that Quemoy and Matsu must have been terribly important if the Vice President and this new guy got so excited over it.

The issue of the PRC's perennial mischief in the Strait of Taiwan, where the ROC-claimed islands of Matsu and the Quemoy group are located, lives on today but is hardly the Rubicon of Asia-Pacific geopolitics. In the 1960 presidential debate, Nixon pressed Kennedy to commit to using nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu against the PRC. Get that? Nuclear war over a couple of islands that most Americans probably couldn't locate on a map.

Russell Baker, the incomparable Times columnist, recalled the demagoguery over Quemoy and Matsu in discussing its similarities to the issue of Nicaragua in 1985:

There hasn't been so much posturing and braying about so little since 1960. That was the year John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon managed to spend a big part of an entire Presidential campaign flailing at each other about Quemoy and Matsu.

Everybody remembers Quemoy and Matsu, I hope, because there isn't enough space in this column - or in this entire newspaper, for that matter - to explain why the future of humanity hung on the outcome of the Quemoy-and-Matsu situation. You had to be there.

And if you were there, of course, you probably can't believe - now that you think about it - that grown Presidential candidates really thought Quemoy and Matsu were important.

Baker could have written that this morning. He knew the same minefield was laid around both Quemoy/Matsu and Nicaragua: No one wanted to be accused of being "soft on communism."

Flash forward to 2008. Now no presidential candidate dare be accused of being "soft on Putin." Same thing.

Obama's response last night to McCain's goading over Georgia was much like Kennedy's over Quemoy and Matsu: measured and realistic. McCain was channeling Nixon. Nixon had accused Kennedy of "wooly thinking" of the kind that led to the Korean War and predicted that any flexibility on our part would open the door to the invasion of the ROC.

We know what happened. Kennedy won the election and the issue of Quemoy and Matsu died down outside the glare of presidential election politics.

Does anyone believe that 48 years from today our grandchildren will remember Russia's smackdown of Georgia? Is brinksmanship with Putin -- as opposed to hard but realistic bargaining -- the better course? Do we still believe in the domino theory?

Hey, anybody remember the Missile Gap? Not one of JFK's better moments in the '60 campaign. Demagoguery can be a two-way street.

[Photo: Al Rodgers, DKos]