I'm really tired of horseracing in politics

David Broder, the dean of American journalism, writes more boilerplate Presidential horseracing in today's Washington Post column.

Presidential spring training

I'm really fed up with this shit. And all of the cynicism in the press that intellectual and leadership virtues are less important than who gets the crowd on their feet, even if the crowd needs to be challenged to think, more, about resolution of the nation's most serious problems.

Hence this terse response to David's article that I posted on the comments section:

"Sadly, pitching staffs don't make for good policy ideas or leadership instincts, two things that Hillary Clinton seriously struggles with. Would that it were true, because then good policy would be something that could be handled by Major League Baseball, and all the hard thinking could be spent on cancer research and the longer lasting battery.

Alas, the substance of candidates' policy thought and their capacity to act with genuine leadership when it is needed are what distinguish politics, in degrees, from baseball.

Barak Obama has the strength of someone who thinks bigger than most of the major candidates and who speaks in tones that seek to transcend traditional liberal and conservative divides even as he is a conventional liberal in many ways. He also is someone who has the courage and foresight to speak honestly when he thinks a policy is wrong. When the Iraq war was declared, Mr. Obama didn't hem and haw about deferring to Presidential authority even when the President's judgment was clearly flawed. He opposed the war and he criticized it openly, a mark of courage that Hillary Clinton cannot count among her virtues. And when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Barak was talking about how to transcend our traditional schisms along racial and class lines to come together to address the needs of those hit by the hurricane, while Hillary Clinton vowed to open a Congressional investigation which neither accomplished anything for people on the ground and which likely undermined the recovery effort by putting emergency personell already under enormous stress and pressure on the defensive and certainly did not one iota to improve that effort.

Stronger thinking and leadership ability doesn't necessarily win elections. Bill Bradley offered both in 2000, but was beaten back by the power-lust and bullying of the Gore-Lieberman campaign and the Democratic Leadership Council. But stronger thinking and leadership should win elections. And better journalists, in the future, should focus on the qualities that make for better Presidents and support candidates who offer them, not just horserace elections into mindless support for leading candidates which reflect the mindless voting of an electorate too intellectually lazy to consider better policy nevertheless better angels.

Barak Obama is not a perfect angel. But he is a better angel than Hillary Clinton. And it does get wearisome to consistently hear the press beat back better candidates in favor of more politically connected media darlings.

Otherwise, the best that we can hope for is that worse and more power-obsessed candidates can be effectively checked by the power-obsession of opposing parties. What a depressingly low expectation of democratic politics.

Perhaps we can aim a little higher."

Love,
Ben