So a bowling score is a better way of picking the right person for health care and the economy than the issues? It's not a point I'm ready to concede even though it misses the point. The point is that a healthy functioning Democracy is always able to punish politicians and ideological policies that resolutely fail. To, "throw out the bums". There is no need for each voter to know what's best for the economy or the health care system down to policy minutia- although trusted commentators in our press and communities can facilitate that comparison for voters- simply the need to hold politicians accountable. These personality politics have disabled our ability as a nation to do that. The last election showed that beyond a reasonable doubt. George Bush's first term was an unmitigated disaster by any reasonable standard, but he got reelected to a second nearly as disasterous term. Why? Because Kerry is 'an effete elitist' blah blah baloney. And I think Kerry would not have made the best President, (albeit far better than the diabolically bad dubya), but again, that's how this process is meant to work.

Our politics is broken and people like David Brooks are symptomatic of that. One only need diagnose what has and is going on in this country to see the consequences of that.

It's not that these things don't end up motivating votes, it's a chicken and egg question. The media's belief that these are important issues is a self-fufilling prophecy- it makes them important, or at the very least, highly viable distractions to serious voter judgments (not to be confused with 'serious' judgments) over who to vote for and why. And the point I made before is that the epidemic of this silliness in the name of not being elitist or other such garbage has totally taken the wheels off this democracy. George Bush should not have won in 2004- simply should not have. On every conceivable metric, most notably by making the worst and least necessary foreign policy gaffe of United States history, (this is a big thing, fyi), voters should have rejected him in a landslide. They did not and that's a real problem. It means these asinine Republican favoring judgments are becoming paramount in our decision making. And I shouldn't have to say this, but any country that is unable or unwilling to hold its politicians to account is in for diabolical comeuppance.

The press censorship bit is a roaring non sequitur fyi, but I'd rather pick up on your second half. Do you claim that anything that has been brought up credibly identifies Obama as a 'black liberationist' or whatever it was you wrote there? Wright was his pastor, Ayers an acquaintance whose importance to Obama rested in his political activeness in Obama's district and he made a point of not wearing flag pins when the peacock class was all over them. What sincere judgments- as opposed to convenient cynically motivated ones- can you draw from that. The answer may not be zero, but it certainly doesn't include the wholesale porting of those people's world view's onto Obama.

As regards, "what Clinton taught us", again, there's plenty left out in that statement. Because the lesson I draw when comparing the Clinton and Bush administrations is that whatever it was that lead us to pick Bush was cataclysmic, while whatever we overlooked to get Clinton was the right call. If you disagree, I'd like one- not many- one metric by which the Bush administration can be favorably compared to the Clinton administration. When you aren't able to find any, you should consider revising your bankrupt world view, and introspection over the character flaws and swallowed misinformation that facilitated its development.

I can't help but get the sense you are sympathetic to this view that a bowling score is meaningful (he didn't bowl a 37 by the way, it was 40 something over 7 or so frames- can't help but note that a dash of truth is nice even on the irrelevancies). Please don't hide behind the, 'some people think' business, and tell us why this is meaningful. Why you feel it's less likely that someone whose background differs from your own enough that he didn't grow up bowling regularly would make a good President of the United States. And while you're at it, you may consider some or any of my two other posts to you. They are not substance free.