(no subject)

[janradder]

Yesterday's Washington Post had a great column by E. J. Dionne, Jr. about the election and how what should be a big election (as in important) is being turned into a small election.  It really captured why I've been feeling so upset about how this election is turning but was unable to explain.

Here's the main gist:

The 2000 campaign was an excellent example of what happens when an election seems inconsequential. Shrewdly, George W. Bush knew that the country was, on the whole, satisfied with the results of Bill Clinton's presidency. Bush presented himself as being far more moderate than he actually was and even occasionally posed as the centrist inheritor of the positive aspects of Clinton's legacy.

This moved attention toward Al Gore's sighs in the first presidential debate and his alleged tendency to exaggerate.

He then talks about how the 2008 election seemed poised to be as big as the 1968 and 1980 elections until the whole Wright nonsense seeped in and turned it into an election about manufactured issues.  Later, he says this:

The smaller this election looks, the easier it will be for the Republicans to run campaigns such as those they orchestrated in 2000 and 1988, in which the particular flaws of candidates take on an exaggerated importance. The significance of the choice that the voters are making for the country's future recedes. Were Hillary Clinton to win the nomination, she, no less than Obama, would need this to be a big election. This is something Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton understood about the contests in which they prevailed.