Campaigns should be about real issues

In a political environment where complexities are whittled down to sound-byte size, elections sometimes turn on currying favor with a media more intrigued by conflict than the motivating force behind it - - where fluff trumps substance and attacks on a spouse sometimes assume greater importance than the workings of government.

It is said Republicans will make an issue of Michelle Obama's comment that ‘for the first time in her adult life she was proud of her country', although as she later explained her special sense of pride was due to the fact that her husband was able to run for president in what had long been a politically closed process for people of color. Whatever one's take on her comment, the Reverend Wright rants, or others who have slipped in and out of Barack Obama's life over time, efforts to make them the focus only serve to avoid addressing matters of far greater import.

Unless a potential first lady is running an escort service, poisoning neighborhood dogs or setting forest fires, her doings are for the most part beside the point. Cindy's jet may transport her husband in greater comfort and at more reasonable expense than other forms of transportation, but it is what it is, she's a millionaire, get over it. Speeches either lady makes are newsworthy of course; more important is what Senators McCain and Obama are saying on the stump and in interviews.

Meanwhile, Congress isn't accomplishing much, fearing their actions could reverberate in November. Instead it is mired in partisan wrangles and tactical maneuvers. Senator McConnell, for example, forced the clerk to read a 500-page global-warming bill aloud, using a parliamentary device to protest stalled Bush judicial appointees - - effectively shutting down the Senate for an entire day. This was different only in degree from his announcement, when Democrats took control of the Senate, that Republicans should do everything they could to block legislation initiated by the other party even if they thought it was worthy of passage.

If government is broken, as some say, the McConnell approach has helped shatter it. Shouting "socialism", for example, whenever national health issues are raised is a scare tactic that does nothing to advance the debate. When Senator McCain says our health care is the best in the world that may be true in a general sense, but his notion that competition and tax rebates could serve to guarantee coverage for all citizens offers false alternatives. Tax rebates probably wouldn't mean much to people with low incomes, and medical-savings-accounts would be unlikely to provide adequate insurance for families should major health crises arise.

Those who could avail themselves of such options are the very people already able to afford expensive medical plans. For them, tax rebates and deductible medical savings accounts would simply mean more disposable, tax-free income. Though McCain says that anyone who wishes to do so could keep their employer-provided health benefit, how many employers would continue to offer such coverage if other plans were in effect?

At a major New York City hospital one floor offers every imaginable service and amenity to wealthy patients. It is very expensive, and while one may deplore a system where only the very rich can enjoy such comforts, as a nurse explained it to me, charges for the special accommodations enable the institution to provide care for the poor and indigent, a microcosmic arrangement rarely duplicated in the larger society where employees lose their jobs, health care and pensions by the thousands while employers haul in huge salaries and, if forced to move on, are suspended painlessly from golden parachutes.

Hope for a brighter future has energized an electorate that has come to understand that when you find yourself in a hole you should stop digging which means among other things not accepting more-of-the-same policies dressed up as change. Washington and the way it works will not magically re-invent itself without a new and progressive leadership team in charge.