Nov. 3, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: The Cost of Shallowness
 
By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service
 
In this campaign season, during which both major parties, news outlets and more than a few commentators have gone to great depths to be shallow, it is perhaps appropriate that a top story as the end approaches is what John Kerry may have meant or not meant when he said something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways.
 
"Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well," the Democratic senator mused in a speech, adding, "And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
 
Now maybe he was trying to say that all our soldiers in Iraq are dumb -- I doubt it -- and maybe, to use his words, this was just a "botched joke," which I also doubt, seeing as how there's nothing the least bit funny going on here.
 
But even if he had something insulting in mind and had never gotten around to apologizing, it was just lamentable, old John Kerry uttering a handful of words, one senator among 100, and a man unlikely ever to lead his party again as its candidate for president. For Republicans to make a big deal out of this as something central to the question of which party should control Congress is as obnoxious as it was for the Democrats to make it seem that Mark Foley's perfidy somehow summed up what all his fellow Republicans are like.
 
Foley, to be sure, is a creep, as he proved in sending especially friendly e-mails to male congressional pages and then blaming, first, the bottle, and secondly a psychological disarray supposedly imposed by a lecherous priest in his own youth. But his days as a Republican representative from Florida are happily over and his betrayal of trust does not begin to compare with that of a Democratic president who actually indulged in sexual relations with a 22-year-old intern in the Oval Office once upon a time.
 
Maybe it will be conclusively shown, as some are eager to assert, that Speaker Dennis Hastert knew in undeniable detail about Foley's actions and did absolutely nothing. If so, he himself has a lot to answer for, but no such thing has been demonstrated to date, and meanwhile this country faces real issues, such as the best strategy to combat terrorism and deal with entitlement programs that could eventually either collapse or wreak economic and budgetary havoc if nothing is done about them.
 
In my neck of the woods , as in yours, too, I am sure, congressional candidates avoid any heavy lifting on these matters, usually engaging in vague or peripheral discussion instead, while often employing TV commercials that not only hit their opponents hard -- I don't care about that; have at it! -- but that are also misleading to the point of outright mendacity, and are sometimes simply obtuse.
 
We Americans can turn to the observers and give thanks for some excellent political commentary while regretting such embarrassments as comedian David Letterman's Iraq debate on his show with Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly.I admit to watching it. My favorite part was when Letterman conceded he didn't know what he was talking about, contended that O'Reilly didn't, either, and O'Reilly responded that his own TV show was very popular. Not exactly a great moment in intellectual history.
 
Less embarrassing but hardly inspiring are the liberal pundits who carry on about the middle class never having had it so bad -- as a matter of objectively certifiable truth, this is total nonsense -- and those libertarian and conservative columnists who have been patting themselves on the back for their non-partisan, honesty-first astuteness in pointing out that divided government will save us from excess.
 
The Republican spending spree on pork and just about everything else is a reason to mistrust Republican rhetoric on almost anything, but you wonder why these columnists haven't noticed that the Republicans' ultra slim majority in the Senate and relatively slim majority in the House have in effect given us something very close to a divided government and repeatedly pushed a politically nervous administration into positions contrary to its stated principles on issues ranging from farm subsidies to an unaffordable Medicare drug program.
 
Over the long run, our democracy's virtues generally overcome its faults, and we muddle through, but let's not be too sanguine that shallowness during political campaigns doesn't have its costs.
 
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.