Early Thoughts on the Presidential Campaigns

Though you might find it hard to believe, it's early in the current race for the American Presidency. Neither of the major parties has yet formally anointed their nominees or held their conventions. No dueling press conferences, I mean debates, have yet taken place. No surprising developments, either here or abroad, have taken place.

I go back a ways in experiencing Presidential campaigns. The first one I remember, though I was ten at the time, was Nixon-Kennedy. The current campaign reminds me a lot of that one (at least as I have studied it since; my recollections as a kid are limited to rooting for the Catholic, which I was at that time). That campaign had a young, inexperienced, charismatic Senator up against, a well-known, politically experienced, reasonably handsome sitting Vice President.

Prejudice played a big factor in that election, as it does in this one. Lets not kid ourselves by all the media talk about how this campaign can't be about race. Frankly, it's all about race. As you know, I'm an old white guy. My life experiences and acquaintances are more like those of John McCain than they are like those of Barack Obama. The same is true for almost all white Americans. The same is true for most Americans. Americans who studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia are rare. So we're not going to have had a lot of the same formative experiences that Senator Obama has had.

We should acknowledge that race relations are tenuous at best in this country. (Frankly, they're pretty tenuous at best all over the world. All people seem to prefer "their own kind" to those who are of a different race or ethnicity from us. American race relations actually led to a bloody war that only partially settled anything. I lived through the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, and that advanced the rights of minorities (at the expense, it must be noted, of the privileges of the majority), but the Civil Rights movement did not advance race relations. We still live in primarily segregated neighborhoods, go to primarily segregated schools, and attend extremely segregated churches (that is, when we attend church at all). So anybody who isn't a white male (like John McCain) will be viewed with unease and suspicion simply because he's different.

I was a big fan of John McCain in 2000. I thought that what the Bush campaign did with its dirty campaign against him in the primaries was despicable, especially coming from someone who used what loopholes he could to avoid service in Vietnam where John McCain became a hero for getting shot down and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese.

So it saddens me greatly to see the turn the McCain campaign has taken with its negative ads portraying Obama as an empty suit, at best. All the ads that are getting play on the news (I have a DVR and don't watch commercials) are negative, negative, negative. According to those ads, Obama is responsible for higher gas prices, would rather lose a war than an election, doesn't support the troops, and has the brains of a Paris Hilton.

What happened to the campaign of ideas that John McCain promised us? Should be elect John McCain because he can't draw a crowd in a phone booth? Because he can't give a soaring speech? Because he was a POW?

I would have voted for the John McCain of 2000. I won't vote for the one I'm seeing right now.