(THE BLOG)

HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Posted, September 18, 2008,  12:01 p.m

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As we head into the, thank goodness, last lap of the presidential contest of 2008, sigh, one thing can be determined about American presidential contests: they no longer serve the people.

Call them marathons, call them celebrity reality shows, call them whatever you like. Not only have billions of dollars that could have been used to find a cure for cancer and save many American’s lives been wasted, but as we head to the voting booth ( or our kitchen table where in this modern age we can sign our absentee ballots), really, we haven’t a clue who these candidates are.

Oh, we think we know them. Men like David Axelrod and David Plouffe and Steve Schmidt( a Karl Rove clone), work hard to make us think we do. But in reality all we have after too long of a contest (Obama declared in February 2007) are well-contrived caricatures of what the party’s want us to believe about the candidates they are offering the American voters.

The media this cycle, both the mainstream media as well as the netroots have failed the public miserably. The MSM as we used to know it having bought into America's love of celebrity and its effects on the media's purse strings, their particular party bias, short on staff to do the good investigative background pieces we used to get from the likes of the New York Times, is missing in action.

The Netroots, who by the way accuse the MSM of media bias, are shamelessly biased towards their chosen candidates. So what they mostly have become as we head toward the finish line are angst-reducing web nannies for those sharing their viewpoints,  cotton candy treats for the thumb-sucking fearful souls wetting their pants over their candidate’s possible loss.

Cable television has become the Friday Night Fights of early television, nothing but blood sport. But their power is oddly at odds with their meaninglessness.

Think of the fact that it was the late Tim Russert who will go down in history as the man who ended Hillary Clinton’s campaign on the set of MSNBC, declaring her candidacy dead because she WON Indiana, except not by as big  a margin as Mr. Russert, who was sitting on the NBC News Cable set of MSNBC with the likes of the brainless Tweety-bird lookalike, Chris Matthews, and that bloviating purse-lipped disgrace of a jerk who wouldn’t know the news if he saw it, Keith Olbermann, would have liked.

But back to the candidates themselves, who, in the wake of “The Shattering of U.S. Capitalism,” as Germany’s Der Spiegel wrote in their headline on the U.S. market meltdown, reacted not as Americans but as candidates for the American Presidency, the two men’s initial reactions meant to convey their concerns for both the seriousness of the implosion taking place on Wall Street  and to express their deep sympathy for the poor fools on Main Street the victims of all the greed and supercilious behavior by the financiers legislated or not by the two Senators who are our candidates.

By the way, here was a rare glance of who both these men running for the presidency are when you take away their handlers. Before his team could contrive the best political spin Barack Obama could give, he said what we would want our president to say in the wake of such devastating news. Ah, I, ah, I.”

His rival John McCain first went for that presidential script of scripts, the Bill Clinton school of “I feel your pain,” line, “The economy is fundamentally sound (which, hopefully it is) followed up by an oddly populist approach (McCain is a Republican, need I say more), “We are going to fight the special interests and corruption in Washington. We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street.” 

Fully two days later, after the real people who run this country, the brain trusts behind both these men gathered their wits about them and with the help of the people who create our presidents personae briefed their front men, today John McCain issued his ideas for the solution.

Barack Obama has informed the press that he needs more time to think...a...ah...I…

It used to be that our presidents could stand before us with their genuine, rapid response. They weren’t afraid to say what they thought. That was when they didn’t have the Gallup Daily Tracking Pollsters ready to take measure of the reactions to their every word. No more spontaneity from our candidates, no more insight into the real men behind the persona, and maybe both candidates lack the skill of quick analysis.

You can’t do a piece on the stupidity of the American election process without mentioning the stupidity of the Democratic Party’s undemocratic system of electing its presidential candidates. The Caucus system is a caucus-doodle-do, romantic in its arcane style, but no longer serving the people, allowing only a few their voice in their party’s pick.

In primary states the districts have been so gerrymandered that the count of delegates is a misrepresentation of the popular vote. The Democratic Party’s candidate, Barack Obama, won a game, but not the contest.

The Republican’s model should be the standard for both party’s nomination process in lieu of anything better.

One of the new means of hawking candidates and their ideology today is the webcast, meant to look like spontaneous talk, but nothing more than Guthy-Ranker style infomercials.

In reaction to the naming of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate and the quick movement by independent women to John McCain, the Obama team has two weeks later begun its assault to bring some of those women back into his fold.

Yesterday, the Obama Campaign released a Guthy-Ranker-style webcast starring Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden, and Obama’s should have been running mate, Hillary Clinton, who if Obama had had the courage and foresight to nominate his arch rival in the first place, wouldn’t have had to waste some of those dollars that might have been spent on cancer research on producing the webcast.

Watching Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton was like music to ones ears. Two seasoned veterans of the political wars, smart, informed, thoughtful, quick-thinking, and reassuring even within the constraints of the infomercial.

And proof positive that our system of electing our candidates for office no longer works. Poor handling, an ineffective PR team, bad pollsters and all the other handlers behind Joe Biden’s candidacy led to his bid for the presidency derailment after one caucus.

Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was the casualty of the same, as well as The Friday Night Fight Group over at MSNBC, and the arcane nominating travesty of the Democratic Party.  

Or so some would like us to think. ‘The Maverick' McCain, ‘The One’, Obama, The 'It Girl', Palin, ‘Good Old Joe Biden’, Hillary Clinton, 'The Leader of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pansuits' …

But who knows? Surely not the American electorate.