This Campaign Season, Funny or Just Sad?

What is to be said about the curious conduct of an election often described as the most important political decision of our time? It gets sillier and sillier in some respects and infuriating in its dependence on attack ads and false premises. How is it, for heaven's sake, that John McCain maintains a sizeable advantage among voters regarding matters of national security and foreign policy? Where's the proof to support such a notion?

And what are we to make of the issues the McCain campaign tries to hammer home? What gives people a sense of comfort about how the country would fare under the leadership of a man who continues to support a war most of the electorate has come to realize was a mistake? There are still those who mouth the platitudes fed to them early on by the Bush administration, e.g. "it's better to fight them over there than over here", but let's face it they've been here, and they didn't need an army to do significant damage.

As for those neo-con advocates, like columnist and Fox News regular, Charles Krauthammer, who support McCain and insist we are winning in Iraq because of "the surge" and our military vision, the public needs better information about the scope of our involvement in the Middle East. Air strikes in Syria and across the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan??? What are we trying to accomplish - - kill a few named terrorist leaders, discourage Al Qaeda, target the Taliban? And while McCain says Iraq is the focus of the war on terror' many experts disagree, and important commanders in the field see Afghanistan as central to addressing the problem of terrorism and not necessarily in terms of military victory.

Perhaps because the American people have short memories and not much of an appetite for fact-checking Joe Biden has been criticized for saying Obama as president would be tested by some international calamity. JFK, critics say, was tested as an inexperienced president by The Soviets trying to deliver nukes to Cuba, but it should be remembered Kennedy won the end game. One has a frightening mental picture of what might have occurred had McCain been in charge at that historic confrontation. In any case, as Biden declared, opponents would find Obama has a "spine of steel".

In fact it seems not all that unusual for some foreign-inspired incident to test the mettle of a new administration. A newly elected Clinton had to deal with the first partial Trade Center bombing and, through both good luck and good police work, the perpetrators were caught, prosecuted and jailed. Eight years later George Bush had been in office less than a year when terrorists totally destroyed the Trade Center. Despite warnings from the Clinton administration and members of his security contingent about the threat from terrorism not much attention was paid to this threat and the rest, as they say, is history. One could say a neophyte president Bush failed that particular test.

But if this election is about anything, it is about judgment most of all. It is hard to accord McCain that most precious personal commodity and to visualize him as either Commander-in-Chief or steward of the economy. The whole "Joe the Plumber" thing is an affront to most Americans. To have plucked this person from anonymity and placed him on a stage with candidate Palin shows a lack of judgment so vast as to beggar the imagination. The man has such right-wing views and is so incredibly ill-informed that using him as a spokesman answering questions on the campaign trail is a sign of moral bankruptcy and political cynicism. The Plumber Guy is working on a deal for a singing contract in the country music field when he's finished doing his McCain gig.

There's a sense of laughter withheld, but it's nervous laughter reminiscent of Robert Redford in the movie "The Candidate" laughing at what the teleprompter is telling him to say in a campaign speech because it seems so silly. And the Peter Sellers role in "Being There" provided another disturbing view of how the crowd gets swept up in the fervor of the moment no matter how improbable the reason, in that case supporting a mentally-challenged Sellers everyone mistakes for a genius.

Whoever would have thought we'd come so close to making a parody of our political process? It seemed we were on the road to better things, and perhaps we still are.