American Politics and Character Issues

It is legitimate to worry about the personal traits of a political candidate. Will John McCain be too old to lead the nation? Is he getting senile? Is Hillary Clinton trustworthy? Does Barack Obama lack an understanding of average Americans? Will his race prevent him from being elected? These are all reasonable questions for voters to ask, and the public news media are right to address them. But sometimes it seems that those are the only issues that matter to American voters. Personality disputes don't require a lot of investigative reporting, and people seem to prefer not to think about the serious problems that the nation faces.

Our elections have come to be treated by our news media as little more than sporting events. News shows spend almost all of their time reporting on who is up or down in the polls and every primary contest becomes a "make or break" situation for the candidates. Meanwhile, food riots go on in the background, the rising cost of oil is driving prices of everything through the roof, water supplies are dwindling, sea levels are rising, and the weather is playing havoc with our lives. Surely, there are more important things to focus on than the opinions of Obama's former pastor and whether or not he can "weather" them in a contest that few doubt he has already won.

Neither party is proposing radical changes in our future, but radical changes are on the way. No political candidate is going to campaign on the prospect of meeting the challenge of impending catastrophes, but that is just what the future president faces. We will need a leader with extraordinary abilities, but our style of campaigning seems only able to focus on the failures and weaknesses of proposed new leaders. The news media can be blamed to some extent for failing to address issues that voters care about, but is it really all their fault? In the end, they are driven by ratings, and Americans don't want to hear that serious changes are on the way. They want a president who will reassure them that their lives will remain largely unchanged from the past. So the public dialog comes down to who has the least worst personality, not what the candidates intend to do about the real world.