Presidential Candidate Personality Cults: A Rant.

Is Obama -- whether he has "experience" "judgment" -- going to lead us to the promised land of a new kind of politics?  Is Hillary Clinton the last gasp of machine "politics as usual" -- careful, triangulating?  

If you're not a raging candidate supporter, then you probably haven't been able to avoid the increasingly harsh and vitriolic candidate smears.  And you may have been struck by how extraordinary they are -- especially here.  

Step back for a moment.  The problems facing our country are structural problems.  You can list them in any order you want and you can describe them in innumerable ways, but other than the Iraq war, perhaps, they were not created by a single person or a single administration.  

So why are so many people here fixated on a single candidate, one or another, as a solution?

Let's look at a few of the problems:

1. Global warming and environmental degradation -- that's created by you, me and everyone we know driving cars (whether hybrid or not), using electricity, living in suburbs, using heat and air-conditioning.  This problem here is not going to be solved by "experience" or "judgment".  It's huge.  It turns on the trillions and trillions of dollars we have invested in how we live, work, play, how we have defined ourselves as Americans.

2.  Health care:  Costs are rising.  What is it going to take to get costs under control and give universal access?  Probably a non-profit driven care delivery system.  That's a big one.  We believe in capitalism, right?  We believe in the right to make a profit?  How do you cut insurance profiteers out of the system without throwing aside the idea that profit is good?

3.  Politics.  Both major parties have given up defending our constitution in a meaningful way.  They have sacrificed our civil rights, our heritage, to George Bush.  The Republicans will impeach for a blow job, but will not vote to remove an official who perjures himself before Congress.  The Democrats refuse to block the nomination of someone who will not say that the President must obey the law as Congress writes it.  Our constitution has broken down.

And that's just some of the issues out there.

The problems are much, much bigger than any individual candidate for the Presidency.  

I'm going to hazard the guess that the problems are so big and so scary that it is easier to think in terms of an individual candidate than in terms of systemic solutions to these problems.  

It's easier to think, Obama will bring a new kind of politics and will save us. It's easier to believe that Clinton has the experience to negotiate the mine-field of problems out there. Or not.

As Kos has repeatedly said this site is dedicated to electing better democrats.  In other words, Kos has identified a structural problem in the democratic party -- and is proposing that that the solution is getting a lot of better democrats into office -- not just electing one great democrat every four years.  

So, folks, if you are completely invested in getting your candidate elected, step back.  Stop.  If you really believe that your candidate will make it all better, you're naive and a fool. (Ironically, you're also buying into exactly the kind of personality politics that landed us with George Bush in the first place -- rather have a beer with him than with Al Gore?)

These problems are bigger than Obama, bigger than Clinton.