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Friday, September 26, 2008

Silly Season on Steroids

Quite apart from McCain's terrible Bush-sequel policy positions for the country, there is a whole new layer of catastrophic impropriety in play here at this point. Were McCain to win the White House after pulling all of these ridiculous stunts -- most of which should have been frankly game-ending in any sane polity -- it pretty much ensures that Presidential campaigning from here on out would irresistibly be drawn to these now "proven" gimmicks, reducing the process to an ever more surreal circus out of which candidates with properly Presidential talents and temperaments could only occasionally and accidentally prevail, followed no doubt by next-day Buyer's Remorse and equally surreal Impeachment circuses.

It seems to me that under such conditions the Nixonian/Bushian Imperial Presidency, far from withering, would likely expand beyond our reckoning, going into mass-mediated Celebrity Culture variations on Rome's Bad Emperors. In light of this, Obama's steady messaging and cool, sane temperament on the stump, and even his conspicuous tendency toward inclusive pragmatism (which often worries and maddens me from a policy perspective, as a person whose politics are far to left of Obama as far as I can tell) all seem to answer the needs of this historical moment in America at a whole different level than the one addressed by the obvious superiority -- whatever their imperfections -- of his policy positions over McCain's on so many concrete issues. If Obama doesn't win the White House, I am seriously unsure whether the US will be a safe place for sane people to live in.

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