On the defensive over the extent of multiple McCain homes, the GOP candidate strikes back. But his TV spot gives an oversimplified and misleading account of how Obama bought his own $1.6 million house in Chicago.

• The ad says Chicago power broker Tony Rezko got “political favors” including “$14 million from taxpayers.” But there’s no evidence of any connection to the Obama home purchase. The $14 million was to build apartments for low-income seniors.
• Obama wrote a letter supporting the “worthy” project, but both men say Rezko didn’t ask for the letter. It says Rezko “purchased part of the property [Obama] couldn’t afford.” Rezko’s wife did buy an adjoining tract but later sold the land at a profit. Obama paid market price for his home.

McCain launched the attack after Obama ran one capitalizing on McCain’s inability to recall for an interviewer how many homes the McCains own. Obama’s ad says it’s seven. The best tally we’ve seen puts the figure at eight, counting all the apartments and homes owned by McCain’s wife, Cindy, and various family trusts, for themselves and their children.

Note: This is a summary only. The full article with analysis, images and citations may be viewed on the FactCheck.org Website.

While it was in exceedingly bad taste and showed a lack of judgment on the part of Charlie Black, I suspect Mr. Black was dead on target when he said another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be provide “big advantage to him” (him being Candidate McCain).

Polling data and the narrative coming out of the main stream media throughout the this election has left everyone, myself included, with the feeling that the Republican candidate would be a shoe in this fall if voters focused on nothing but national security and terrorism. It’s been hammered into the American consciousness to the point where we don’t even think about it anymore.

We know that Bush’s top approval ratings came immediately after the September 11th attacks in Washington and New York and part of that approval rating stemmed from his hard line stance on Islamic extremism and his promises to bring the perpetrators to justice.

It’s going on seven years now and Osama Bin Laden is still at large and even Bush and House and Senate Republicans accept that Iraq has become a magnet and prime recruiting ground for al-Qaeda and similar idealogical militant groups.

This all brings me back to the idea behind Charlie Black’s quote:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an “unfortunate event,” says Black. “But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us.” As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Certainly it would be a big advantage to him,” says Black. (From the current

From The evolution of John McCain in Fortune Magazine

President Bush and members of his party controlled virtually the entire Federal government for the five years following the attacks of 9/11. Ordinary citizens accepted changes to their personal liberty in the passage of the Patriot Act and many people accepted the Bush administrations contention that deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq was an integral part of making Americans safe in their homes.

So my question is, WHY would another attack be good for McCain’s candidacy?  A Republican president with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress could not bring the leader of the terrorist group that killed Americans to justice in the five years they were in charge.  Why do we accept the idea that  a new Republican president with a Democratic house and senate would make us safer?

FactCheck.org

I wonder if that inclusion has anything to do with the fact that Gamesa Corp. is creating jobs and tax revenue here in Pennsylvania.  This Spanish wind energy company is investing $84 million to locate its U.S. headquarters and four manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania.

These facilities are going to make Pennsylvania the top wind power generation region in the United States.

Contradictions and misstatements short-circuit McCain’s energy policy pronouncements.

Summary

McCain has spent the week focusing on energy policy, making some surprising, and inaccurate, statements.

Among them:

• He said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling “would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis.” But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn’t have much of an impact on supply or prices until 2030.
• McCain tried to paint Obama as an opponent of nuclear power, yet Obama has said he is open to nuclear energy being part of the solution and has supported bills that contained nuclear subsidies.
• He has soft-pedaled the “cap” portion of his cap-and-trade proposal for greenhouse gases, even denying that it would be a mandate. The cap is a mandatory limit, however, and McCain even says so on his Web site.
• McCain’s new ad, running this week, rightly says that he bucked his party in supporting action on climate change years ago. But its images of windmills and solar panels are misleading in that he supports subsidies for nuclear power, which isn’t pictured, and opposes them for wind and solar energy.
• McCain continues to say that a suspension of the federal gas tax will lower prices for consumers, though hundreds of economists say he is wrong.

To read the full analysis visit the FactCheck.org report.

Tom Shales, in the Washington Post, gives a thorough and fair critique of what ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos did wrong. Ignoring the aspects that were outside the moderator’s control such as timing and number of commercial breaks, there was still a lot to complain about.

One of Shale’s primary complaints – one in which I am whole hearted agreement – was the waste of almost an hour of the two hour debate rehashing the “controversies” that have already been beaten to death in the news media. Asking Senator Obama to once again address the “bitter” comment and his former pastor’s statements from the pulpit was a complete waste of the candidates time as well as the time devoted to the debate on the part of watchers who really want to hear from the candidates.

That hour was well summed up by Shale:

“It’s not the first time I made a misstatement that was mangled up, and it won’t be the last,” said Obama, with refreshing candor. But candor is dangerous in a national campaign, what with network newsniks waiting for mistakes or foul-ups like dogs panting for treats after performing a trick. The networks’ trick is covering an election with as little emphasis on issues as possible, then blaming everyone else for failing to focus on “the issues.”

Over at Gather.com, Samuel Gerace Sr. had more to say about the media after the debate than about the candidates.

The “debate” last night was very revealing, no not about the position of the candidates on the real issues which challenge the country today after the disastrous but the trustworthiness of the media’s objectives in the moderating the questions put to the candidates. Charlie and George were a veritable disgrace to the intelligence of any person wishing to see the candidate’s positions on a number of subjects which are hobbling our democracy. (emphasis added) For example a few of those fundamental issues are: ethics in the executive and legislative branches of government, a detailed plan to yes, regulate Wall Street’s insatiable hunger for greed and profit, changing the budgetary allocations so that education, health and economic needs are properly addressed, and finally a balanced budget amendment to collar deficit spending and mortgaging the future of the country to China, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

I know the debates are not drawing American Idol size viewing audiences, but to me that seems to indicate tha tthe networks handling the debates should focus more on the issues and less on the normal media circus surrounding the campaigns. We can get that everyday.

At least John McCain is burying his own campaign in appalling statements like the one he made recently when he essentially stated that he would, as president, hand over his Commander In Chief powers to Gen. Petraeus.

When asked whether he would divert U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to quash the resurgent Taliban and capture Osama Bin Laden he responded with “I would not do that unless Gen. Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.”

There are several things both wrong and a bit insane about that answer, not the least of which is that Gen. Petraeus himself has begged off making that kind of call in Senate hearings that McCain himself attended earlier this month recognizing that such decisions MUST come from higher up the chain of command.

Slate.com’s Fred Kaplan has a nice analysis of this foreign policy preview from Senator McCain in an article titled I Don’t Know. Go Ask Petraeus. McCain’s appalling answer to a question about national-security policy.

In recent months, a lot of people have been handed financial get-out-of-jail-free cards. C.E.O.s who presided over billions in losses have walked away with tens of millions in compensation. The Federal Reserve has showered cheap money on banks and brokerages. Even Bear Stearns caught a break when, last week, J. P. Morgan agreed to quintuple the price it will pay to take over the firm. But there’s one group for whom forgiveness has not been forthcoming: ordinary consumers struggling with piles of credit-card debt. For them, escaping the burden of their bad decisions and their bad luck has become much harder.

That’s because of a law that Congress passed in 2005 which has made it more difficult for people to write off their debts. Filing for bankruptcy has become much more expensive. More important, while lower-income people can still declare Chapter 7, which takes away your assets but then discharges your debts, most middle- and higher-income people now have to declare Chapter 13. That means they have to pay their creditors monthly for five years before they’re free.

The bankruptcy law he is referring to was the 109th Congress’s S. 256 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. It was one of the most partisan bills to make it into law under the Republican majority before the Democratic party won back a majority in 2006. This bill was the result of much lobbying by the banking and credit industries.

The 2005 bankruptcy bill was opposed by a wide variety of groups, including consumer advocates, legal scholars, retired bankruptcy judges, and the editorial pages of many national and regional newspapers. While criticisms of the bill were wide ranging, the central objections of its opponents focused on the bill’s sponsors’ contention that bankruptcy fraud was widespread, the strict means test that would force more debtors to file under Chapter 13 (under which a percentage of debts must be paid over a period of 3-5 years) as opposed to Chapter 7 (under which debts are paid only out of existing assets), the additional penalties and responsibilities the bill placed on debtors, and the bill’s many provisions favorable to credit card companies. Opponents of the bill regularly pointed out that the credit card industry spent more than $100 million lobbying for the bill over the course of eight years.

Opponents of the bill argued that claims of bankruptcy abuse and fraud were wildly overblown, and that the vast majority of bankruptcies were related to medical expenses and job losses. Their arguments were supported by an in-depth study by Harvard University medical and legal scholars, which found that more than half of bankruptcies were attributable to unpaid medical bills.

This bankruptcy bill was actually first drafted in 1997 and introduced in 1998. The House of Representatives approved a version titled the “Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1999″ and the Senate approved a slightly different version in 2000. After the differences in the bills were reconciled, Congress passed the “Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2000″. President Clinton, however, employed what is known as a “pocket veto” by waiting for the congressional session to adjourn without signing the bill, a legislative maneuver tantamount to a veto.

In the years since 2000, the bill was introduced in each Congress, but was repeatedly shelved due to threats of a filibuster from its opponents and because of disagreements over various amendments.

The increase in Republican majorities in both the Senate and House after the 2004 Federal elections breathed new life into the bill, which was introduced in its current form by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The bill was supported by President George W. Bush. Tom DeLay also championed the controversial legislation in the House.

“I’ve never seen a bill that was so one-sided,” said Consumer Federation of America chair (and former Ohio senator) Howard Metzenbaum, at the time. “The cries, claims and concerns of vulnerable Americans who have suffered a financial emergency have been drowned out by the political might of the credit card industry.”

The new law adds a number of new requirements for bankruptcy filers that attempt to make the filing process more difficult and costly. These additional requirements include:

• Mandatory credit counseling and debtor education. All potential bankruptcy filers must now undergo credit counseling via an “approved nonprofit budget and credit counseling agency” prior to filing for bankruptcy. Chapter 13, Chapter 7, and Chapter 11 filers must also complete a course in “personal financial management” after filing the bankruptcy.
• Additional filing requirements and fees. The new law increases the amount of paperwork involved in filing and raises the filing fees for debtors earning over 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
• Increased attorney liability and costs. Attorneys representing bankruptcy filers are now required to conduct an investigation of their clients’ filings and can be held personally liable for inaccuracies. Most bankruptcy attorneys predicted that this will result in increased attorneys fees and will make attorneys less likely to take on some cases. In addition, bankruptcy filings are now subject to audit in a manner similar to tax returns.
• Fewer automatic protections for filers. The new law eliminates some of the protections bankruptcy filers previously had, such as stopping or delaying evictions, avoiding driver’s license suspensions, and delaying child support proceedings.
• Increased compliance requirements for small businesses. The new law increases the bureaucratic compliance obligations and shortens the deadline for Chapter 11 reorganizations involving small businesses, a series of new requirements not applicable to larger businesses.
• Increased amount of debt repayment under Chapter 13. The new law made several changes that effectively increased the amount of debt that Chapter 13 filers will have to repay. In addition, the “super discharge” provision, which allows filers to discharge many of their debts under Chapter 13 in return for agreeing to a payment plan, is significantly curtailed under the new law.
• Increased length of time between discharges. The new law increases the length of time from six to eight years between which a filer can receive a Chapter 7 discharge after a prior Chapter 7 case.

You may be wondering what this all has to do with the current election campaign. With three candidates left in the news – the presumptive nominee for the Republicans, Senator John McCain, and the two remaining Democratic party candidates, Senators Clinton and Obama – its a pleasure to get a glimpse of their behavior in the Senate on bills that came up while all three were holding their Senate seats.

The voting on this bill is one such glimpse. As more and more voters report that finances and the economy are gaining in importance in terms of their selection criteria for our next president, I think its worth taking a look at how the candidates handled this bill that, by all metrics, made it more difficult for consumers to get out from under debt and get their lives back on track while nailing down protections that the credit card companies have wanted for years.

Over all, 74 Senators voted in favor of the bill’s passage while 25 Senators voted against it. Those 74 Senators who voted for passage included every single Republican Senator. Every one of the 25 Senators who voted against the bill were Democrats. As any American school child knows, 74 + 25 = 99 while there are supposed to be 100 Senators voting.

Senator McCain was one of those Republicans voting in lock step to pass this bill. Senator Obama was one of that 25% of the Senate that voted against the bill. And that missing vote? That was Senator Clinton not voting. This bill affects Americans from the boardroom to the poor house yet Senator Clinton skipped the vote entirely.

In this case, sitting out the vote paid off – literally.

As Mother Jones reported in July of 2007:

All told, in 2006, financial and credit card companies gave $7 million in campaign contributions, and banks $25 million, to candidates of both parties, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Leading the pack, with $378,000, was Hillary Clinton.

It will be very interesting to see if Pennsylvania voters are paying enough attention to see which candidate is really voting in their best interest.

A complete roll call of the final Senate vote for passage of the bill is included below the cut.

Alphabetical by Senator Name

Since then a couple more people have added to the thread so I finally put in my two cents worth. With a few minor edits, this is it:

I’m not sure I even believe in a political center anymore. The US population is basically conservative – in the APOLITICAL sense of the world. Unless something seems severely broken, we generally don’t want to touch it. Thats why Bush’s second term attempt at reforming Social Security went nowhere. Thats also why Clinton’s attempt at healthcare reform went nowhere in the 90′s. Neither situation was bad enough to justify major changes to the system in the minds of the general public. (This was something I hadn’t thought about until I read Paul Krugman’s “Conscience of a Liberal”.)

For most of my adult life politicians – with the help of the 24 hours news media – have dumbed down and severely abbreviated the political news coverage to the point where much of the population sees each party’s platform as this beast of a wall, cobbled together with bricks made up of wedge issues, separating people. If you are pro-choice or in favor of tighter gun control laws, a big part of the Republican party leadership is ready to write you off. If you are in favor of a long term US troop presence in Iraq there are Democrats that will do the same.

However, I DO think that we are reaching a tipping point where people feel that the Federal government as a whole is broken and that makes them ready for major change. People are approaching that tipping point from many different directions. For some it’s all about the politicization of judicial appointments. For others its the war in Iraq’s bad planning. For still others it’s corruption scandals, or too much influence by lobbyists in Congress, or the dawning realization that deregulation and the lack of regulation of commercial banks helped bring about the current economic conditions.

When this many people are ready for change I think we will see real political action on the part of voters this fall. It may be a one time thing and the huge numbers of newly registered voters may fade back into the woodwork after November, but I don’t think we are going to see a close race like we did in 2004.

If there is a center now, its made up of positions on issues that wind their way around the immaterial wedge issues that are NEVER going to be “fixed” by a President. No single President is going to fix the “abortion issue”, or trade policy, or immigration. However, if a candidate of either party can skirt those types of issues and keep people focused on those big tipping point issues, he or she will bring out voters from across the political landscape.

About the Patchwork Nation project

Nearly 305 million people live in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau. Yet in recent elections it’s all been about fitting into two categories: red states that vote Republican and blue states that vote Democratic. But this red/blue breakdown of political opinion doesn’t explain what underpins the voters’ decisions.

That’s what this effort, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, explores in real time during the 2008 presidential campaign.

We’ve identified 11 places across the US that represent distinct types of voter communities. They are Monied ’Burbs, Minority Central, Evangelical Epicenters, Tractor Country, Campus and Careers, Immigration Nation, Industrial Metropolis, Boom Towns, Service Worker Centers, Emptying Nests, and Military Bastions. For example, Sioux Center, Iowa, typifies Tractor Country.

The project is headed by Dante Chinni and James G. Gimpel.   Dante Chinni is based in Washington, D.C. where he has been covering politics and the media for more than 10 years. He has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  James G. Gimpel is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been on the faculty since January 1992. His recent research and teaching interests include American politics, political geography, voting and elections, state politics, US immigration policy, and public opinion.

They have taken the eleven "types" of places in the United States and selected individual towns and cities to act as proxy representatives for those voter communities.  The list below contains the types, the representative location, and a brief summary of each type of community.

• Boom Towns – Eagle, CO - Midsize cities and smaller towns with well-balanced economies of affluence, education, and professional employment; growing ethnic diversity, some retired elderly with high incomes.
• Military Bastions – Hopkinsville, KY - High levels of employment in military or related government employment; often adjacent to major military installations, private military contractors, or have a history of military-dependent economies; middle income, transient, younger populations, with some trade and service workers in the local economy.
• Campus and Careers – Ann Arbor, MI – High percentage of the population between 18-34, few retirees or elderly; includes university/college towns and locations with high employment in education and educational services; high levels of formal education; religious diversity, secularism.
• Minority Central – Baton Rouge, LA – Lower-income counties with large proportions of African-Americans and native Americans on Indian reservations; low population growth or steady population losses, high unemployment and poverty; low-end housing stock, including trailer parks; African-American locales are concentrated within the deep South.
• Emptying Nests – Clermont, FL – Middle-income, retirement age; and baby-boom populations; presence of evangelical and mainline Protestants, fewer Catholics, stable but not booming economies.
• Monied ‘Burbs – Los Alamos, NM – High-income counties, with high professional employment and formal education; high expenditures by consumers on new vehicles, luxury goods, property taxes, and charitable giving; midsize in terms of population and population density, primarily within metro areas; family age populations, low density; predominantly white, but with some Asian-American presence.
• Evangelical Epicenters – Nixa, MO – Briskly growing small and midsize towns with family age populations; middle income with some affluent and poor; low incidence of mainline Protestant and Catholic churchgoers, higher incidence of evangelical adherents, particularly in the South and border states; Mormons in the West; some minority presence, chiefly blacks (in the South) and Latinos (in the West).
• Service Worker Centers – Lincoln City, OR – Midsize cities and smaller towns with very high percentages employed in trade and service businesses but not manufacturing or agriculture; many new residents, growing Latino populations; more Catholics and fewer Evangelicals or mainline Protestants.
• Immigration Nation – El Mirage, AZ – High percentages of Latinos and Asians; immigrants living in midsize to larger cities; moderately high levels of unemployment; Roman Catholic with sprinkling of religious diversity; lower income with moderate to high percentage in poverty.
• Tractor Country – Sioux Center, IA – Predominantly white, smaller towns and more remote counties outside of metropolitan areas; low level of manufacturing employment, high levels of self-employment, employment in agriculture, as well as small-town retail and wholesale trade; Lutheran Reformed, and mainline Protestant adherents predominate in the upper Midwest.
• Industrial Metropolis – Philadelphia, PA – Older Northeastern and Midwestern cities once dependent on manufacturing; diverse populations, including significant Jewish populations; some high-end residents in established historically wealthy neighborhoods, mixed with lower income populations.

This technique takes things beyond the popular idea expressed in The Great Divide: Metro vs. Retro from back around the time of the 2004 presidential election.  Understanding WHY groups of people with similar backgrounds vote the way they do is going to be very important for any presidential candidate who wants to bring people back together on a national and regional level. 

Some of these community types may seem easy to ignore for some candidates.  There is always going to be the feeling that the "Evangelical Epicenters" and "Tractor Country", for example, are going to go Republican regardless of what each candidate says and does.  Blind acceptance of that kind of thinking played a large part in creating the divides that currently exist.

Following the rest of the election cycle through the Patchwork Nation site promises to be interesting.  The Christian Science Monitor has lined up bloggers from each of the representative communities to act as eyes and ears within their communities.   They have also created MessageBoards where you can register and discuss the issues with people from all over the country and the world. 

Another cool feature at the site is the ability to track candidates based on their appearances at each of the 11 types communities.  From there you can see which candidates are spreading out across different community types and which are limiting their appearances to onlya  few main areas.  You can also take the "How Do You Fit In?" survey to find out how well you fit in with others in your county.   My town, Philadelphia, happens to be the selected community used to represent the Industrial Metropolis community type and my survey results put me at 100% match with my community.

Earlier this week I wrote about how political news is produced and consumed more like entertainment coverage and gossip than serious news.   I still stand behind that position but a few other posts have inspired me to write about another issue that Brian mentioned the other day and that was a theme in Tiffany’s entry.

Tiffany is right; despite such a low percentage of eligible citizens turning out at the polls, we have too many voters.  Wikipedia describes voting this way:  "Voting is a method of decision making wherein a group such as a meeting or an electorate attempts to gauge its opinion—usually as a final step following discussions or debates."   I like that definition better than most dictionary definitions that focus on the act of filling in a ballot or pulling a lever as voting.  There is so much more that must happen first.  Wikipedia’s inclusion of "usually as a final step following discussions or debates" is critical to understand what has gone wrong with the US electoral system.

We no longer have any real discussion or debate in our election system.   We have a surplus of single issue voters and that is the crux of the problem.  When you hear the term "the base" as in Republicans must get out the base to win this election you should mentally translate that the Republicans need to poke a stick at the sore spots that matter to their party members.  In 2004, the campaign ads claiming that a vote for Kerry meant a surrender in the "war on terror" had this effect.  

In November of 2004, eleven states had ballot measures where voters could vote for state constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Getting Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah’s voters out to the polls based on these measures benefited Bush and the Republicans immensely.  Same-sex marriage, like abortion, or immigration, or gun control is an issue that will draw people out to vote who would have otherwise stayed home.  If we have any hope of salvaging our republic we, as voters, need to make a supreme act of will and stop letting campaigns and parties press our buttons.  

Yesterday, I did an informal poll among my co-workers to determine what single issue they would find most difficult to ignore in selecting a candidate.  The idea was to see what we could take off the table for, say twenty years while we tried to fix wider issues that are less emotional but affect more people.  The people I asked, three women, and one man, all between 25 and 35 years old, all settled on the Abortion controversy as a make or break issue for them.   For two of them, both women, it was an instant decision.  They decided that even if they agreed with a candidate’s position on most other issues, if they disagreed on this one issue, it would change their vote.

I came of voting age well after Roe v. Wade and all my voting life, the one thing I usually know about a candidate is their position on abortion – often that is all I knew.  As a life long Democrat, I’ve watched my party use the issue of abortion and the threat of changes to the Roe v. Wade world as a way to bring out voters.  I’ve seen the Republican do the same thing on the same issue, as well as on the issue of same-sex marriage, and immigration.

As  gay man, same-sex marriage laws actually affect me.  Brian and I traveled to Vermont in 2001 to have a civil ceremony.  It doesn’t mean anything legally here in Pennsylvania, but it was important to us.  Despite the fact that it matters a great deal to me.  I am going to make an effort to not let that issue overshadow other issues in my selection of a candidate.

If enough people did that, we could actually elect people who can address the issues that affect the nation as a whole instead of special voting blocks.  Divide and conquer has been a very successful tactic on the part of both the Republican and Democratic parties for at least as long as I have been able to vote and it only works with the cooperation of us voters.   I don’t believe that voters in the US have the desire or the will to look past the big hot button issues, but I can dream.

If we want politicians to set aside their differences and work together for the good of the nation, we voters need to set a good example for them.  If we want to make voting the end result of true discussions or debates on the issues we have to go into those discussions and debates before we have made our decisions based on a single issue.

read more

The biggest problem I see is that voters have willingly surrendered the framing of the campaign issues to the candidates and the news media. We accept the fact that the news media treats presidential candidates like any other celebrities instead of treating them like the job applicants they really are. The run up to the election should be like a job interview. It should be the voters who decide what questions are asked of our candidates. The huge amount of hype surrounding the YouTube.com based Democratic debate tells us how unusual it is in this day and age for real citizens to play a role in framing the campaign debates. However, even that was filtered through the news media because CNN’s politics team selected the questions to be asked.

Candidates as celebrities adds a huge layer of fog to the campaign cycle. When a Google News search finds 90 articles mentioning John Edward’s and haircut and only 62 articles mention his position on gay marriage, you can see that something is seriously wrong with the way the news media handles coverage of the election and the candidates. I really wish I could blame this on the news media, but I can’t.

With the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980′s coverage of politics and elections lost its special status and became just another product for news rooms that are under increasing pressure to act as profit centers for the corporations that own the networks and newspapers. With profit as the goal, the news media will cover the stories that will attract eyeballs. If CNN knows that they can get a spike in viewers by spending an hour on Britney Spears’ legal and custody woes and that in depth coverage of the details surrounding Barack Obama’s position on education will result in people switching to another channel, the choice is perfectly clear from CNN’s perspective.

News departments of major networks, and dedicated news networks in particular MUST cover politics to maintain their credentials as a "news" outlet. Under the Fairness Doctrine that meant airing coverage of all candidates in an even and unbiased manner. Now that they no longer have that constraint, they can cover the election in any way they see fit. They have seen that American’s suck up gossip and ignore drier policy coverage so thats how they structure their political coverage. Even the New York times is featuring two big stories on their political page today that focus almost exclusively on Hillary Clinton’s gender instead of her positions on issues.

As long as voters who are also consumers of mainstream news outlets are willing to settle for gossip and conversation about the candidates personal lives instead of their policy positions, nothing much will change and the election will remain more like the selection of a Prom King or Queen than the sober selection of someone to elevate to the position of a major world leader.