No, It's About Ideology

If journalists and pundits are going to make a serious contribution to the public conservation, it has to be an investigation of "the issues" that everyone always refers to. The policies of the politicians. How they're implemented. If they're effective or not. At the base, it's about ideology. When the ideology is rotten, the policies will be too. Commentators know this but always seem to find some way to focus on character issues. Andrew Sullivan today:

I am still open to supporting McCain this fall, primarily because of character and decency. Hagee and Falwell should not be ignored; but nor should they be dispositive. Iraq is in a terrible, near-impenetrable flux and how McCain and Obama respond to its shifting levels of crisis in the coming months will tell us a lot about the enormous burden of the presidency in the wake of the Bush-Cheney disaster. And how they respond to the economic clouds will be fascinating too.

But like Marty, I find something deeply rotten in the state of the Clintons, and know in advance that they cannot be trusted and will not respond genuinely to events or candidly to democracy. Like Marty also, I am not prepared to dismiss all that Obama is and represents because of the ugly intemperance of a preacher whose context is wide and complex, some of whose statements are simply indefensible, and many have been sincere and prophetic.

This election, I feel, is less and less about ideology. It is more and more about conscience and judgment.

Wrong. The kinder, more honest, more likable, more decent human being in an election will not necessarily be the better president. Honesty and character in personal dealings do not translate into effective policies.

Let's take FDR as an example. Those closest to him, from his wife to Henry Morgenthau, found him cold, impenetrable, cagey and occasionally callous. He was a dirty trickster who spied on his domestic enemies, dropped his friends in a heartbeat and tried to pack the courts with Democrats. And yet he was the best American president, and perhaps the best world leader, since Abraham Lincoln. Because he introduced the New Deal, because of Lend-Lease, because of the United Nations, and because he took America to the heights of international power. Sullivan uses campaign tactics as a way to measure a potential leader, but it's the wrong measuring stick. We've got to stop using it.