By Staff
Despite the gravity of America's festering unaddressed issues, we're not getting the election we need, though since we're tolerating it, maybe we're getting the campaign we deserve.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama wanted to have a high-minded discussion, but as the punishing Pennsylvania proved to his detriment, that's not how American sideshow politics work.
Are the candidates arguing about climate change, food and gas prices (and a much-needed energy policy to replace our addiction to fossil fuels in the name of national security), the war in Iraq, mortgage markets, health insurance or our crumbling infrastructure and median family incomes that are lower than the start of the economic expansion preceding the recession President Bush calls a "slowdown"?
Policy didn't matter much in ABC News' debate in Philadelphia, which dwelled for 40 minutes on phony character issues.
Obama must have thought it was the Sixties again with all the attention paid to the angry, anti-American sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with a building-bombing Vietnam-era radical.
Did you know Wright and Vice President Dick Cheney, who received five Vietnam deferments, were born in the same year?
While Cheney and Bill Clinton did not serve, and George W. Bush spent two years on active duty in the National Guard, Wright surrendered his student deferment in 1961, spent two years in the Marines, volunteered to become a Navy corpsman and eventually joined President Lyndon B. Johnson's medical team, earning three White House letters of commendation.
Wright's critics confuse patriotism with uncritical nationalism.
It would seem his war service earned him the right to speak his mind.
Hillary Clinton prevailed handily in Pennsylvania because she doesn't shrink from hardball politics. She famously threw the "kitchen sink" at Obama and diminished herself in the process even while winning. In one poll, 60 percent of the American people regard her as "untrustworthy."
At what cost have we spent so much time learning that Obama isn't a very good bowler, doesn't wear a flag lapel pin (neither does Hillary) and has an Islamic-sounding name or, for that matter, that Clinton the tireless populist champion is the granddaughter of a Pennsylvania factory worker who can knock back a shot of Crown Royal sipping whiskey?
Obama himself said, "After 14 long months it's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are immune to, and it trivializes the profound issues."
His civility is admirable, but it risks being mistaken for weakness if his feistiness is no match for hers and he is successfully caricatured as some sort of elitist cross between Michael Dukakis in a tank helmet, wind-surfing John Kerry and Adlai Stevenson in his well-worn shoes.
Earlier, Clinton, for whom Indiana is crucial May 6, argued that she is the most qualified candidate to be president, so she could engage him on substantive issues and not resort to attacks if she wanted.
But right now she realizes better than he does that the only way to reach the high ground is to travel a lower road than he is so far willing.