By Joe Honick
In a presidential campaign year that defies description, we might have expected a little more elegance all around. It has not happened….not from the Republican touring circus and not from the White House.
But the real guilty parties are not the usual suspects from the Democratic and Republican functionaries or even debaters.
The real guilty parties are the mediocre media mavens who seem unacceptably limited in their ranges of questioning.
Mostly their challenges are related to charges from the competition and how those stack up…or President Obama’s own politically oriented press conferences of late. Hardly any have insisted on querying the touring debaters as to how to end the conflicts in Afghanistan now that the Iraq mess is closing out with its own problems….or, more about why we have even been expending manpower and money in those places….at $2B weekly just in Afghanistan where Afghan soldiers shoot at Americans.
You would have to go very far to find much inquiry about the technical aspects of the struggling economy and the even more struggling unemployed who have little voice anymore.
None has asked about the pending displacement of Boeing employees in Wichita as the company has elected to upgrade aircraft production in the Seattle area.
In the end, this less than dignified presidential campaign will play itself out in November but with little to say about our national image abroad or even at home.
That is more key to the future than even who gets the presidency on election day, assuming of course ALL ballots are properly counted everywhere according to the real political Ponzi scheme called the Electoral College that makes folks in small states irrelevant.
Understanding how to bait the less than imaginative media, the partisan political flacks have successfully kept the attention on the sex lives, speech income and mutual accusations of the Republican candidates than the substance of what each would bring to America and what people they would include in their major appointments…along with the more technical subjects previously alluded to here.
Perhaps all that candidate Obama will have to do when the real campaign gets going is to replay in ads everywhere what each of the Republicans have asserted about each other. The GOP already has its own attacks ready for the President.
Unless the media mavens find more substantive interrogation for the GOPers as well as the President in the coming weeks, the best that will have been said of their efforts will be “journalistically inelegant.”
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Joseph J. Honick is
president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash. |