Best Weekend Political Story

A year to go before the 2008 Presidential election: the airwaves and print pages are full of this observation or that keynote on what makes Hillary or Barack or Fred or Rudy and the rest of the gang tick, who's the best, who's the wisest, who's the most caring, what their policies mean.


At this point it's just yapping...my favorite comes from The Sunday Times (that's in London, friends) and this piece on true love -- or at least the display for political gain.


Was Socks the cat dumped because it was just too difficult to keep the pet love going strong, what with Bill traveling the world to pick up checks for speeches, Hillary otherwise occupied in the Senate and Chelsea moving on in her own life? Couldn't the Secret Service protecting the Clinton home outside New York City be trusted to take care of Socks when no one was home?


Does this really surprise anybody?


Politics at this level is more about symbolism than reality; take the test of knowing what a gallon of milk costs. It's a nice media trick, attempting to show whether our candidates are human and just regular folks. But would you rather have the leaders of the free world understand macro-global-economics or what we pay for a gallon of milk?


Note: I can't tell you what a gallon of milk costs because my wife does most of the grocery shopping.


All these sidebar stories really accomplish is feeding the marketing machines known as political campaigns, desperately seeking any material to showcase their particular political horse rather than actually focus on issues and specifics. It's easier to talk about where the cat went -- or how sad Socks BFF Buddy didn't last long after leaving the White House -- than get down and dirty on what health reform really entails.