The Maverick Tribe

Barack Obama introduced the term "silly season" in one of the debates, and the pundits seem to have taken a liking to the word.  I guess it refers to when a supposedly high-minded, issue-focused campaign off-roads into the sludge of ad hominem attacks, tits-for-tat, and innuendo.  And lately when I look through that window to the political world (my TV), it's a blizzard of silly on every channel.  Let's hope it stays that way for awhile.

The "issues" are overrated, and I, for one, am sick of them.  If I have to sit through one more debate on the minutiae of Clinton's and Obama's health care proposals, I'll end up with some mental health care bills of my own (which I'll send to each of them).

In the past week we've had Bill Clinton imply that Obama is unpatriotic, an Obama ally compare Bill to Joe McCarthy in return, ragin-cajun James Carville refer to Bill Richardson as a "Judas" for what he saw was as a sell-out to Obama, the punditocracy slurping up McCain's mix-up of al Qaeda and Shi'ite extremists, and Hillary Clinton reviving the Rev. Wright story soon after having to face up to her bald-faced lie about a trip to Bosnia in the 90's.  Some especially talented flacks even managed to pepper the discourse with Tony Rezko.

You might think all this stuff amounts to an unproductive distraction in a time of raging war and a cratering economy.  But is it really?  A debate over Iraq invariably swerves to character issues of judgment and preparedness anyway, since their policy positions are so similar.  And does anyone think that a debate over economic policy will be all that illuminating?  The differences between their approaches are likely to be minor as well, but magnified in a way that is both disingenuous and confusing to everyone.

By contrast, I think a lot of the pot-shots, attacks, and gotchas of the past week have been instructive.  We know that the Clintons will continue to play up fears of Obama's readyness to take on the Republicans and be commander-in-chief.  Her only hope is to have him bloodied up so bad that the superdelegates, driven by their survival instincts, will have to hand her the nomination out of fear of losing the general.  We know that Bill Richardson, despite the offical Clinton line, ain't never gonna get a job in Clinton town again.  And although a transparent political move to distract from her whopper about Bosnia, I actually think her taking up the Wright issue is within bounds.  The issue unveils for us a communitarian feature of Obama's character that is unwilling to make enemies.

We have schadenfreude that McCain's misstatement is catching a lot of flak, "flak" being the very word into which Obama's Senate office inserted an extraneous 'c'  in a written statement last May.  McCain pounced on the typo, eager to portray Obama as a preening ignoramus on military matters.  Silly season, indeed.

As far as Clinton's "misstatement" over the alleged sniper fire she evaded during her trip to Bosnia (a delegation that included her daughter and the comedian Sinbad), I hope we are all finally clear on what kind of politicians she and her husband are.  A lot of Democrats appear to have gotten through the 90's too busy cashing out their Yahoo! stock to notice what shameless phonies they both are.  Do you get it yet, Democrats?!

April Fools Day is coming up.  Get ready for more silly!