Ramping Up The Verbal Missiles

With only a few months left to go in the political drama that is a presidential election in the United States, diplomacy withers, good fellowship takes a drive to the backwoods and the duelling begins in earnest. For the Republicans, the Democratic candidate-presumptive's high popularity is the proverbial glove-slap in the face. Let the game proceed as it will, and the winner will most certainly take all.

Senator Obama's popularity - with himself and through his adoring supporters - is likened to that of pop singers. The message of course is that he is about as deep-thinking as the ilk of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton; his popular appeal based on the iconographic appeal of celebrity stardom, sans substance. His detractors see him as a self-infused messiah, promising to lead Americans to the holy land of self-respect.

War-weary, depression-fearful, finance-oppressed Americans have had enough of a Republican in the White House. They yearn for the good old days when the vision of an America beset with huge deficits, the population facing a high unemployment rate, mortgage defaults, worries about Medicare, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were simply not on their horizon. They want to back pedal to the good old days.

Whatever they were. And Barak Obama promises to take them there. And in the process to gift them with something they've never had; universal equality, a state of peace within and without. Acceptance, finally, of one another. He's big on grandstanding, and portraying himself as the equal of any world leader, lending himself an air of international gravitas as Europe's leaders and those of the Middle East see him as a fresh promise for a new tomorrow.

Pity he's fecklessly oblivious to his own demonstrated self-absorption in self as America's Messiah. It does not sit too well with critical observers. Who like their high flying politicians to demonstrate just a tad of humble street-smart credentials along with the hubris of their ambitions, a kind of leavening of the rising yeast of accomplishment and anticipation. So it's no holds barred now, Senator Obama is ripe for dissection and revelation as veneer with no solid wood beneath.

For his part, he's reminding voting Americans that they've been through the Bush years and have no stomach to repeat them through the auspices of yet another Republican who supports many of the decisions that the current president and his cronies made on behalf of a reluctant country, now set to pick up the pieces for a long time to come. "Bush or McCain don't have the real answer for the challenges that you face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me."

Yes, that most certainly. But they're also insisting that the gracious, hope-inspiring verbiage that so entrances Senator Obama's supporters are throw-away trinkets. While Senator McCain's message is solidly rooted in reality, promising solutions to tackle real problems. One candidate proffers the sunshine of optimism, the other a sobering vision of tedious and tendentious liabilities that must be tackled before the sun comes shining back.

That, in the end, is the real message that Americans have to sort out for themselves.