When The Talking Points Are Pointless

Barring a mass revolt by the lawyers, we'll have a new President-Elect by tomorrow. Regardless of who is elected, do we know how he will govern?

No. We don't.

We have all heard the speeches, and if you listened to more than one, you probably heard the same thing every time. And, I bet that sounded a lot like what what you heard in the debates. Or maybe it was the same as what you heard on Meet The Press, Face The Nation or Larry King.

And therein lies the problem with how we select our President. Softball debates and set-piece speeches don't test the skills needed to do the job. All the time and money wasted on domestic policy debates (taxes, energy, education, etc.) would be much better spent learning what the candidates believe, and what makes them tick.

What is their core philosophy of government? How do they make big decisions? Where do they see America on the world stage? When, if ever, do they believe our national interest trump the needs of the world?

Here's a for instance: Obama and McCain have told us, time and time again, what they want to do about taxes. And we all know that come November 5th, everything they said goes out the window.

The President has no power, beyond a veto threat and the bully pulpit, to shape domestic policy. Congress does that. Where the office does have power, is in how to administer the programs Congress sends up, and what direction to take foreign policy.

Which is why the record, character and core beliefs of the candidate matter far more than any tax policy they spout out.

The cabinet members they would appoint mean a great deal more than whether they stutter or stammer now and then. And would it hurt us to discover that they really do have a 'litmus test' for judges? I know I do, and I bet you do, too.

The media calls it "going negative" when one candidate questions the other's truthfulness, associations, record or decision making process. Then, they run countless polls to discern if the negativity drives away voters. While bemoaning the denigration of the process, they ignore that they should be the ones 'going negative'.

A reporter's job is to be respectfully cynical and distrustful of every candidate. It is to ask the hard questions, and to dig around in dusty old archives looking for errors in judgment the candidates have made.

If they did that job correctly, office seekers wouldn't have to wallow in the mud in front of the world. They could speak about their vision for the country, and their approach to getting there. And when a skeleton fell out of the closet, it should be up to the skeleton owner to answer the hard questions in a press conference.

The media did us a huge disservice by not really investigating Obama's association with Chicago's radical elite. They shorted us when they didn't ask him about the hubris required to run for president after serving in the Senate only 145 days. They didn't ask about his meddling in foreign policy before he was elected, and after Joe the Plumber outed him, not one reporter mentioned the word "socialist" to Obama. That's just plain malpractice.

The press also failed us by never forcing McCain to explain his pick of Sarah Palin. I never heard a`reporter challenge him about the erratic decision to suspend his campaign during the bail-out negotiations. And besides the fact that he served for a long time on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, do you know anything about how he voted on that committee? Not if you were counting on CNN, you don't.

During the debates, we should have heard more hypothetical questions. Imagine how much better informed we would be if both men had been asked 'If Israel attacks Iran, how will you respond?'

The only candidate that was asked anything like that was Governor Palin, and she declined to answer, saying we shouldn't second guess Israel. Palin was also asked to list some Supreme Court decisions that she disagreed with. She famously fumbled the answer, but the point is that would have been a great question for all four candidates.

It's funny that both Vice Presidential candidates were given more fastball questions than either of the guys at the top of the ticket. Biden went into a wobble, and blathered his way through most of them, while Palin just blinked and offered a retreaded position speech.

McCain, nor Obama, was ever put in a position to reach any deeper into their thinking than a well parsed talking point would cover, and we are all the worse for that.

Let's hope we get lucky, and the wisdom of the crowd gets it right, because we damn sure don't have a good reason to vote for either one.