BY STEVE JANOSKI
With five months left until the fateful day, the general election circus of national politics is roaring with all of its pitiful melodrama, boring speeches, and media pundits who are hired simply to hash, rehash, and re-rehash what the boring speeches and pitiful melodrama all means to the nation.
I try to ignore the up-to-the-minute minutia because I am not one might call a "swing voter." (See "one who votes for a different set of principles every four years.") I know where I stand and I vote accordingly, and that more or less keeps me above the fray.
But I can never help but worry about the effect that all of the garbage "narratives" have on the outcome of a given election, and while petty issues have always been a part of politics, one could easily be inundated with worthless information due to the incessant tickers of the 24-hour news cycle.
The latest "story" to gain traction has come from the Republican camp. The GOP, desperate to win back the ever-important dog-lover vote in the wake of criticism over Mitt Romney's practice of strapping his dog's crate to car roofs for long trips, has attacked President Obama over a passage in his autobiography where he states that he ate dog meat while living in Indonesia at the age of 7 — at the age of 7.
Although it's disgusting that the election has gotten to this point already, I know where it comes from, and I can't say I'm surprised. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan explained it concisely when she said, "There are literally thousands of people in the United States now who are employed to cover these campaigns minute by minute, and they need something to say."
I, however, was truly hoping that they'd say something of a bit more consequence that doesn't further encourage this awful practice of digging further and further back into a candidate's past to "expose" innocuous, meaningless events and shape them to reflect on that person's ability to lead.
Evidently, if one holds the slightest notion of running for president some day, they must watch every step and guard every action from childhood onwards so as to not give the media fodder in 35 years when they decide to put their name on a ticket.
Many of the presidents whose names decorate the very top of the "Greatest U.S. Presidents" lists would likely not even be seen as near electable today if the current standards had been applied to them.
Andrew Jackson, the legendary general nicknamed "Old Hickory," was a quarrelsome man who had killed an attorney in a duel 22 years before he was elected. It was said that he had taken so many bullets as a result of the practice that he "rattled like a bag of marbles."
Did that make him "unfit to lead?" Or, perhaps, in today's terms, "unelectable?"
Thomas Jefferson is another. His indiscretions with his own slaves have been slowly revealed over the centuries, and one can't help but wonder if they would have been laid out in detail the day after it was announced that he'd be writing the Declaration of Independence had Fox News been around.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt married his own fifth cousin. JFK couldn't keep his hands off of women, before or after being elected. Ulysses S. Grant (along with many other presidents, including W) was known as a heavy drinker in his youth. Lincoln was, well, ugly, as well as a borderline depressive.
And some of the finest leaders from other countries — Winston Churchill springs to mind — would never be allowed near the highest office given their natures.
Leaders, no matter how perfect they seem, are still just people. They are flawed. They screw up, they falter when others push on, they lose faith, they regret.
But elections are not about the past. They're about looking toward the future and putting faith in the intellectual ability of a candidate to set a strong course for the country and drag it toward that objective.
It's not about being a celebrity, and it's not about being perfect. It's about being the right fit for the nation at the time it needs them most. Like Jackson. Like Jefferson. Like Roosevelt. Like Lincoln.
It's troublesome that this country, which once prided itself on being the land where one could forget the past, forge a new life, and meet with unbridled success (so much so that it became known as the "American Dream") seems to be on this path of making the ghosts in one's closet the focus of so much attention.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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