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Enough Already With the Fake Debates

LOS ANGELES -- This campaign is SO over. It is hard to imagine a debate worse than the Clinton-Obama stand-up on Wednesday night in Philadelphia. In case you missed them between what seemed like a hundred commercials, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the shorter white one, and Sen. Barack Obama, the taller black one, answered (or endured) a road-show production of "Dumb and Dumber," starring Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.

Gibson was the taller of those two, the one with the glasses. In fact, it was a long time before viewers even saw Stephanopoulos. After what seemed like an hour of scab-picking by Gibson, mostly about Obama's exploitable words about bitterness in small-town America, George came up with his biggie, asking Obama about whether he knew a 1960s radical named Bill Ayers, who was a member of the old Weather Underground.

Obama said yes, but added that he was 8 years old when Ayers, now a college professor, was doing his things with curses and bombs. I think that was when Gibson asked Obama why he was not wearing an American flag pin, forcing me to focus for a few seconds to see if anyone else up there on stage was pinned. They weren't.

The candidates were less than great; they seem tired and testy. But they were Lincoln and Jefferson compared with their interrogators. I am no TV critic, but I did agree with one, Tom Shales of The Washington Post, who wrote under the headline: "In Pennsylvania Debate, The Clear Loser is ABC."

Noting that Gibson and Stephanopoulos were "usually dependable" -- they're both pretty smart guys -- Shales wrote:

"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."

The umbrella over the event was not the security umbrella Clinton suddenly pledged to place over most of the Mideast -- no wonder she voted for the Iraq war. The conversation was shaded by Obama's recent analysis of the forces isolating much of small-town America and saying the people caught in those towns were bitter about being ignored by political leaders as their jobs are moved away and their values degraded by elitists -- like Obama. The Illinois senator may be too smart or thoughtful to be in politics. Is he John Kennedy or Adlai Stevenson?

I am not a small-town guy -- though I worked in one years ago -- so I did a survey of students (at the University of Southern California) and friends who are from such places. Unanimously they thought Obama put his foot in it and his finger on it. All of the students said they would never go back to their hometowns. One reply from a friend well past her student years:

"Yes, we small town people can be bitter. ... I think of how our government has given us lousy health care, job loss, a low minimum wage, few social services, high-priced fuel, business shutdowns/moves, and then still think they deserve taxes? But I don't think he should have focused it on only 'small town people,' and perhaps he could have worded it better. Job loss is a general nationwide problem, one that was created by our government, big business with moves overseas and ourselves. ... The government has their hand out, but seem unable to solve real problems on our own soil."

Actually a boy from a small town, Bill Clinton, said most of these things when he was running for president at the beginning of the 1990s, giving his view of why Republicans generally do so well among small-town people:

"You have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death. ... It's the same old scam they've been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country's coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them."

So it goes. It goes on and on, just like this Democratic campaign. Enough already. The sooner we count votes, the better.

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Related Topics: clinton | election 2008 | media | obama |

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