Presidential campaigns are stuck in the spin cycle

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http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-ca-shaw19sep19,0,2458683.column

Presidential campaigns are stuck in the spin cycle
David Shaw

Sep 19 2004

I was a college sophomore during the Cuban missile crisis, and I can still remember walking across the UCLA campus with a friend, both of us singing "Once Was the Time of Man" and wondering if the world was about to blow itself to smithereens.

But I can think of no time in my life — not then, not amid the race riots and other civil unrest later that decade, not during Watergate, not after the stock market crash of 1987 — when I worried as much about the future of our country as I do today. By definition, that makes the Nov. 2 election the most important of my lifetime.

So why are both presidential nominees, their supporters and the news media spending so much time talking about what the nominees did or didn't do 35 years ago and so little time, relatively speaking, talking about what they could and should do to safeguard our future?

I don't care if John Kerry deserved his Vietnam medals or if he spent Christmas Day in Cambodia or Culver City. And I don't care whether he threw his medals away. Or what he said about the atrocities committed by other U.S. troops in Vietnam. Nor do I care whether President Bush used high-level contacts to get into the National Guard and then received preferential treatment and skipped a physical exam or any other Guard responsibilities. I don't even care if he used drugs when he was, as he's put it, "young and irresponsible."

None of that has anything to do with either man's ability to lead this country in a world where the weapons now available to terrorists — and the indifference those terrorists show toward human life, including their own — represent a far scarier, far more difficult challenge than the Cold War ever did. Nor do any of Bush's or Kerry's words or deeds in the days before either held public office tell me anything useful about how they will end the war in Iraq, pursue a reasonable foreign policy elsewhere or try to improve the nation's troubled economy, its health-care crisis or any of a dozen other serious issues now confronting us.

So why have the campaigns — and coverage of the campaigns — focused so vividly on the past rather than the future, on charges and countercharges rather than plans, promises and official performance?
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