"I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

 

Imagine for a moment that former Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Franklin Rooselvelt not only lived today, but chose to run for President.

Now, we know them to have been America's greatest Presidents and greatest Commanders in Chief: but what kind of campaigners were they, or would they be today? What king of campaign staff would they have assembled, how much money would they have raised (and who would they have raised it from), and how would they have spent their campaign funds? What would they have to say about their opponent (imagine their opponent to be either or both Senators Obama and McCain), and also what slanders and insults and innuendos (if any) would Mr. Washington or Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Roosevelt (or their surrogates) have slung at their opponents? What campaign gaffes or goofs would they have made? Would they have mispoke much or at all, and if so, how would they then have handled the maniacal media fascination with their every little word (but at the same time somehow ignore their every great word)?

How would General Washington have handled the media's incessant talking about his lack of smiling much because of the awful state of his teeth?

Would Mr. Lincoln have had something clever to say in response, to every one of the media's snide quips about his backwoods manner and his self-education and the poverty not only of his childhood but his adult life too?

Would Franklin Roosevelt have kept his cool under a barrage of anne coulter rush limbaugh sean hannity references to lameness and cripples and canes and wheelchairs, in addition to their rants that he's a Marxist or a communist or a socialist or all three and worse?

Because it doesn't matter about issues, does it?

It doesn't matter that General Washington was chosen our first President for his proven ability to command the Continental Army, and our need for a strong Commander in Chief as a newly formed nation torn violently from England...

It doesn't matter that Mr. Lincoln preserved the Union and abolished slavery, and successfully Commanded the Union Army toward that end, and lost his life for it, taking a bullet in the head...

It doesn't matter that FDR stewarded the American People out of the Great Depression, and got people back to work (and offered relief to them also), and salvaged the banking sysyem by REGULATING THE BANKS, and made for a national retirement fund, in addition to commanding the U.S. Armed Forces (and being wise enough to make Gen. Eisenhower his agent) and leading the American People to Victory in WWII...

 

None of that matters, and who would have cared anyway, as the media would have incessantly chattered about and ripped into those glum toothless backwoods cripples.

 

Because it's not like America faces any real problems today, like they did back then, when the American People needed and turned those three men, to solve their many national problems...

It's not like we're at war, or that we are a nation divided, or that there's not a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage and THE BANKS ARE JUST FINE AREN'T THEY?

 

"I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

 

With a media that thinks like that, we're lucky that we're not still a British Colony, or we're not a small U.S.A. bordering a great slave nation the Confederate States of America, or that we're not occupied by nazi troops...

We're lucky, because with a media that thinks like that, maybe THE BANKS GET DEREGULATED AND FAIL... maybe we'd have never gotten out of our Great Depression, and our retirement funds wouldn't be as safe as they are.

Because issues don't matter, do they?

Campaigns are what matter, don't they?

If not for the incessant horse race reporting and an ignorance of issues by this media today, we might be plagued as an American People, by some toothless crippled self-educated gaunt rube to be our President.

 

We have the Washington Post to thank, for the present great State of our Journalistic Union, don't we?