As I see it, the Democratic presidential race began sliding downhill right after Super Tuesday, and last week’s Pennsylvania debate offered mind-numbing proof that the slide has yet to hit bottom. Coming off Super Tuesday with the winner still undecided – the deeper issues surrounding gender and race deemed too complex to profitably pursue, the press settled in for a protracted battle by fixing their cross-hairs on the soft target of personality, thereby stepping into what has come to be called “gotcha” politics. In this form of bear-baiting, every word and action is scrutinized not for its intended meaning, but for its possible innuendo.
Who you are and what you say or do is not nearly as incendiary as who you once knew and what they once said or did. On this score, any and all candidates will be equally vulnerable. Hillary’s associations with lobbyists and deals struck with the super-wealthy are just as ready to picked apart as Obama’s youthful associations with more radical elements of the left and black communities. It’s just a matter of the press deciding which fish in the barrel get shot.
And, what do these associations prove? In most cases not much. Yes, they deserve mention, but not fixation – not unless there is provable guilt beyond association. And certainly when compared to what does matter; namely what deals have been or are being struck by the candidates right now? Who is beholding to whom right now? Positions on education, environment, healthcare and the economy? Let’s let the candidates’ voting records speak for themselves. Who voted for what and when? Who benefited from those various votes? When in doubt, follow the money; it rarely lies. Tossing around puffy cupcakes like “elitism” and “bitter” at us, without attaching specific definitions to them, is just a waste of time.
This type of exhausting and torturous media recycling requires our so-called “journalist” class to make evermore fantastical attempts to connect all the disconnected dots of a story. Do they connect? To most of them and to most of us, it doesn’t really matter. As Fox News has proven over and over again, the insinuation that they connect is enough to justify their constant repetition and the attendant flood of sponsorship dollars. And so it was, the battle charge was sounded, and the media, hot in pursuit of those nice fat ratings followed the wounded monster Hillary down the low-road – and from then till now, it’s been a steady diet of mudfights and bullshit.
Welcome to the world we deserve, my fellow Americans. And once a story takes off like the “bitter” one did, then it becomes source material for more of the same – a mad and recursive hyperbolic rush to see just how much of this recycled nonsense the public will swallow in any given 24 hour news cycle. And of course, enough of the public – at least that large segment whose intelligence has never exceeded anyone’s estimation, does in fact jump at the chance to toss their prospective leaders into the celebrity mudpit with Britney and Paris and good ol’ Bill Clinton. Feeding on such crap is the ultimate waste of time. Catering to that urge, and serving it up in ever more scandalous packaging, under the guise of “news” is the ultimate cynicism.
Our only hope in the face of such cynicism is that one by one, enough of us will say no more, and show our disdain for the status quo and for this sort of feeding frenzy reporting by calling out corruption for what it is and signaling our desire to put an end to its reign by electing to the toughest job in the world, someone who while not without faults, seems after months of intense scrutiny to be a pretty decent fella; one who is clearly far less corrupt than most politicians and far more intelligent than most people you or I know. That would be a remarkable and positive step and would indicate the rise of a citizenry finally ready to do something to change the way our country has been run for far too long. Let us see what we can make come to pass.
There was a fine article today in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Obama’s Touch of Class,” written by Thomas Frank – he of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fame -
His last paragraph reads as follows..
“If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself.”
