A discussion for our times

Over at Jerome Cole's Blog there was a post titled Obama Derangement Syndrome has now arrived. From some earlier posts this guy looks like not an Obama supporter. (He is writing from China and actually has some interesting posts.) But it offered me a chance to comment a bit.

This election season has been extremely toxic. More so than at any time in my long memory. Ultimately, as Cole suggests, presidents are human. While it may be important to judge a person's character by looking at his associates (be they a radical former terrorist or a convicted former financier) the more important thing to look at is policy proposals. Not rhetoric but proposals. Bush ran in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" whatever that means. In my view what it has meant is an administration that many times locked itself in a bunker refusing to listen to others and at the same time imposed a 40% growth in federal spending.

Whoever is elected on Tuesday should be judged not by their rhetoric or their friends but by their policies. I am not optimistic about that but I am hopeful. The country needs to take a breath, to analyze the proposals that are offered and to reject the ones that are outside the norm. Bill Bradley, in a book about a year ago, argued that the American system is divided between a concern for caring and one for personal responsibility and that inherently our political system needs a balance between those two extremes. For too long we have let the politicians slice and dice us into neat groups that serves neither us nor our political system.