He put the whole process in realistic perspective with his quote in Bob Herbert's column in todays edition of the NYT...
“What politics has become,” he said, with a laugh and a tinge of regret, “requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply.”
Perhaps the candidate with the best resume to run the country who has run for the office in the past 50 years...
And yet we remember all the crap the news media shoveled on him...
And not just the right wing crazies...
I just can't believe that Chris Matthews may have shifted the debate to Bush when he claimed that people would rather have a beer with Bush than with Gore...
It's crazy...
Absolutely bat shit crazy...
And all of the pundits that picked and gnawed at Al Gore almost as if he was the American Prometheus are still out there waiting to dumb down the process again...
There was an OpEd today in the Cleveland Plain Dealer via the Washington Post by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British author, titled Why are Americans voting for dynasties. Wheatcrift wonders how Hillary Clinton had become the presumptive nominee since she was elected first elected to the Senate in 2000...
Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there's nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?
She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can't win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?
And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton's resume even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It's true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fernendez de Kirchner may succeed President Nestor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines -- and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. Such things also happened (apart from the assassination) in the early days of women's entry into British politics. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Lady Astor, by birth Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Va., who inherited her husband's seat in 1919 when he inherited his peerage, but we haven't seen a case like that for many years.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501680.html?sub=ARIt boggles the mind, it really does, when people are asked to basically have a "gut reaction" to a candidate, want to have a beer or sit down with the cool kids instead of the Honor Society kids...
I don't get it...
I heard yesterday that over $3 billion was going to be spent when the cost of media and message is all totaled at the end of this monotonous grind to the White House is finally over in November 2008...
Perhaps the media moguls are extending the campaign season for so long in order to get at that billion dollar pay off...
But what does that say about our democracy...
Do we really think anything good can come from a perpetual campaign where absolutely everything is parsed by image consultants to see how things play instead of going for the best solution...
Are we really doomed to have a government that suffers the minutia in lieu of tackling the larger more pressing issues...
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