LOS ANGELES — One of my all-time favorite Chinese proverbs goes like this: "To listen well is as powerful a means to influence as to talk well, and it is essential to all true conversations."
This ancient adage has often popped into my head these past seven years in the bumpy, unhappy presidency of George W. Bush. These have been years of anything but "stop, look and listen." Rather, especially his first four years, they have been more an age of "go forward, blindly, with earplugs firmly in place."
Sen. John McCain now is one of the last two white men standing at the top of the greatly diminished Republican field to succeed Bush in January. The rapid withdrawal of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leaves little more than Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the Arizona senator's way. This should not prove too daunting a hurdle.