DETROIT -- As we slide into 2008, the real election season begins. Sure, 2007 helped cull the herd and gave the presidential candidates plenty of time to try out their themes and one-liners -- and, for many of them, to practice new lies and repeat old ones.
But the real business of nominating the candidates and electing a new president will unfold over the next two or three months. The Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and the Nevada caucus are the first string of contests likely to position the candidates and give us some indication of their electability.
Their suitability is another question altogether. The presidential campaign season is entirely too long, with election cycles overlapping. The prolonged process numbs an electorate with a limited attention span. Until now, I have refrained from devoting much space to presidential politics, other than to sound clear warnings about the candidates who cause me to shudder, cringe, pray or lament. In order, that would be Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton.
President George W. Bush proved in 2004 how easily the American people could be fooled after the disgrace that put him in the White House in the first place. The U.S. Supreme Court stole the 2000 election, trampling on the state of Florida's constitution, laws and court decisions governing vote counts.
Justice Antonin Scalia, Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting pal, crafted and imposed a supremely partisan decision that made Bush president and set the nation on a disastrous course. A few more informed voters in a few states could have changed history.
Four years later, the American people had the chance to oust the selected president, whose record richly merited a speedy exile to Texas. The tragedy of that horrible election will be felt for decades. It also underscored just how easily people can be fooled.
Voters bought Bush's recycled lies, and his campaign -- abetted by the mainstream media -- ruthlessly but successfully got people to dwell on Democratic candidate John Kerry's military record in Vietnam more than 40 years earlier.
The Democratic candidate helped scuttle his own campaign with his aloofness and reluctance to counter-attack the Bush lie-machine. People were fooled into believing waging war in Iraq made the nation safer and gay rights were the greatest threat to domestic tranquility.
Former political columnist Jack Germond offered valuable advice on how to become smarter voters in the December 2006 edition of "Washingtonian" magazine in a piece titled "Don't Be Fooled."
Germond has had great influence in shaping my own views on politics and how to cover and understand what politicians are really saying and doing. From 1961 to 1974, Germond worked at Gannett's Washington bureau and wrote a column carried in many Gannett papers -- including the Niagara Falls Gazette, as it was then known.
Germond is no ideologue. He understands politics and politicians and uses his keen eyes to help translate for his readers what the politicians are really up to, not what they told us they were doing. Germond nobly quit Gannett when an editor spiked one of his columns highly critical of the criminal Nixon administration at the height of the Watergate scandal.
He moved on to the Washington Star and then the Baltimore Sun, and his column gained wide distribution. He often appeared on "Meet the Press" and he became one the original panelists on "The McLaughlin Group." That gig made Germond famous.
While the other panelists typically screamed, sputtered and frothed, Germond could be counted on to wryly offer his well-informed opinions, minus the excessive decibel level and wretched rhetoric heard from others in the group.
Germond did his time on "The McLaughlin Group" to put his daughter through medical school. When she completed her education, Germond quit, saying he was tired of being "pissed off" one day a week during the taping of the program presided over by the pompous John McLaughlin. After his departure, Germond told the "Columbia Journalism Review," "I never had any illusion that it was journalism. I never defended it. It was entertainment. And I think that used to irritate John, because he thought it was journalism." Let's hope voters get much less entertainment and far more journalism during this election year.
Germond argues that by becoming smarter voters, we end up with a better president.
First he urges us to "let the candidates be human." We've already heard much more about the cost of John Edwards' haircut than the cost of obscene corporate executive salaries and the increasingly unfair income distribution he often speaks about so eloquently.
Germond says limiting reporters' access to candidates creates a "sterility" and a "false picture" of what they are like as human beings. He describes how Robert Kennedy was often labeled "ruthless," but Germond's access taught him otherwise.
He tells a story about the 1968 presidential race, when he learned Kennedy was much more complex:
"I spent one evening on a flight from Omaha to Washington sitting with him in the back of his campaign plane while we drank everything but the furniture polish and talked about the life of kids in America -- the poor black kids we had seen in Omaha that day, the children of affluence like his own, the children of the middle class like mine. I didn't take a note or write a word about it, but it shaded my view of Bob Kennedy in a way reflected in my coverage. He was a serious man trying to find answers as well as to win the Nebraska primary."
Germond was prescient in what he wrote one year ago about religion and faith in the campaign. "Remember that we are electing a head of state, not a moral arbiter or a national pastor," he noted. "Turn a skeptical eye on candidates who blather on about 'family values' and spread God over their campaign rhetoric like so much molasses." Amen, Brother Jack.
Beware of checklists of issues "like those presented by the League of Women Voters and other terminally earnest people," Germond warns, adding that finding a candidate who is "right on, let's say seven of ten issues, isn't the way to do it."
He reminds us not to buy the notion that "foreign affairs and national security are so arcane they require special preparation." That's the card Clinton is trying to play on Barack Obama, and it's not working. Careful study, restraint and common sense are essential, but you don't have to sit in the White House Situation Room to make sound decisions about the world.
"Don't put too high a priority on intellect," Germond cautions. He points to Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter as great minds with failed presidencies. Never mind IQ scores, Germond argues, "voters should try to determine what the candidates read other that the Bible."
He wrote about having dinner with a campaign aide to then-candidate George W. Bush in 1999 before the New Hampshire primary. The Bush staffer complimented Germond on one of his books he had just read. In it, Germond had described Bush the Elder as "the most vacuous man" to occupy the White House in his lifetime.
Worried that the younger Bush would cut him off from any campaign access if he read Germond's bleak assessment of his father, the veteran reporter made a proposal:
"'Do me a favor,' I asked the adviser. 'Keep the book away from the candidate for a while. I'll owe you one.'
"'You don't have to worry about that, Jack,' my dinner companion replied. 'He never reads a book.'"
Bush's closed mind, incuriosity and intellectual laziness are a large part of his inability to make sound decisions, resulting in a series of disasters in his failed presidency. Reading is vital.
Germond urges us to "put presidential debates in perspective" and warns us that "too many voters have come to believe they can learn all they need to know in 90 minutes. Not so." Again, this is where reading can provide important information not found in the candidates' well-rehearsed sound bites.
One of Germond's best pieces of voter advice is "Don't believe the television spots, none of them on either side." In 2008, we will be deluged with TV spots intended to cloud the truth and sell the simplified.
This is the final full year of Bush's horror show. He has waged an illegal war, trampled on basic freedoms and carried out tax and fiscal policies rooted in injustice. The American people better wake up.
"The Progressive" magazine's Howard Zinn once wrote, "The mark of an enlightened citizen in a democracy is an individual who knows the difference between what is legal and what is just."
That's asking for a lot. Germond just wants us to pay attention:
"We are choosing a president of the United States, not a sewer commission in Buffalo or another member of Congress. ... The decision on choosing a president makes a profound difference in the world and nation we live in. Anyone who argues that it doesn't make a difference should be sentenced to a long tete-a-tete with Ralph Nader -- or perhaps a hunt breakfast with Dick Cheney."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 28 2007 |