Getting Down and Dirty

Four months to go in a long political process in the United States of electing a new president. The process has already been in tedious operation for far too long for most Americans. They're tired of it all. But the competing parties and their candidates have to maintain their momentum and they're concerned with continuing to capture the interest of their audience, that great American electorate.

Diplomacy, good fellowship and courtesy can still be found on the surface. It's generally what emanates from the mouths of the candidates themselves. They cannot really be seen and heard to be mouthing what they permit from those who support them. They've got to maintain the fiction of amicability throughout the process, of desisting from expressing what they may really feel.

That's what their heavy-hitting supporters are for. Whose outpourings of emotional tirades can be loftily dismissed by the candidates themselves, while the echoes of the claims can continue to resonate with the public for good or for ill. Critical, sometimes mean-spirited and always clouding the real issues, the diminishment of a candidate's appeal to the public. And the candidate issues admonishments to his ardent supporter.

It's a game of superiority, actually. To establish which of the candidates has superior background experiences, superior intellect and ability, integrity and courage, vision and capability. And oh yes, of course, which has the superior ability to fund-raise. That's critical. Not that the presidency can be bought outright. Merely that the means by which the electorate can be manipulated, can be.

So here's Barack Obama squirming again - at least outwardly, superficially - at another pronouncement by yet another high-level supporter. Causing General Wesley Clark to seem to back-track, denying that his candidate had anything to do with his pronouncement. That Senator John McCain's experiences in Vietnam with the U.S. military and his brutal confinement doesn't particularly suit him to the job as president.

Just a little bit of bitters there, in one who attained a high military rank, and whose experiences in some degree mirrored that of Senator McCain, and whose sole attempt at high-level politics came to naught. Dwight Eisenhower could do it; why not Wesley Clark? And why should someone whose military rank and experiences were inferior to his own - in his estimation - have opportunities the voters denied him?

Of course, Senator McCain has his long experience in the Senate to account for his potential suitability. On the other hand, Senator McCain and his supporters have appealed to the patriotism of Americans through the continual re-telling of the Senator's experiences as a prisoner of war, as his defining character-building resoluteness, so they've, in a sense, brought this upon themselves.

It's nice though, that the candidates themselves manage to keep themselves aloof from dirty partisanship. That they remain high-minded, and complacently allow their minions to do the other stuff.