Woohoo! Campaign Fun 2008

I suppose if you're a Republican presidential candidate following eight abysmal years of mismanagement by your own party in the Oval Office that it makes sense to align yourself as strongly as possible with the Republican president that preceded the current one. 

Of course. . . that won't work out too well because that Republican president had the same name as the standing president you're trying to distance yourself from (I think they might even be related). What is a radical new elderly maverick of the Republican party to do?

How about painting yourself as the embodiment of Ronald Reagan's legacy. After all, Reagan was the Godfather of trickle-down economic policy which clearly continues to work in our favor today. Why just this week my bank of ten years was seized by the government, which will undoubtedly result in an immediate trickling-down of my retirement investments. 

There's really nothing bad that can be said about Reagan now that he's passed on to a better place. During his presidency supply-side economics took off, lobbyists began their ascension to political power, and all the top-40 radio stations had at least one peppy New Wave single on their playlists. I think the only down side that I can remember to the 80's might have been watching my middle class parents struggle to make ends meet while "naively" working public service jobs when everyone else was investing in Wall Street. But the plight of the average family is so Main Street. . .

Let me turn my attention to something else instead. Like Jim Lehrer's flaccid moderation of tonight's presidential candidate debate. Is my memory faulty or didn't there used to be some structure to the way speakers were allowed to address each other's comments? Since when does a moderator insist upon the candidates jumping down each other's throats? Why was foreign policy so heavily covered when the country is in the midst of the greatest financial debacle of decades? Not to trivialize foreign policy, but foreign policy is really only an issue for countries that are still countries, and if the bottom continues to fall out of our financial system we may not really need a president who is all that hip to the intricacies of border skirmishes in Afghanistan. It takes all the willpower I have right now to not bring up a certain Jeffersonian inaugural address from 1801 that, had we any sense of our own history, might have prevented a great deal of our woes these past fifty years.