Cloddish campaigns

I have quite the affinity for free stuff.

I’ve accumulated a lot of pseudo-branded, marginally useful items: IU Career Center pens, fridge magnets from Jimmy John’s and various T-shirts promoting restaurants I’ve never eaten at and clubs I’ve never joined.

Election year, however, has provided me with an opportunity to stick it to the political system while simultaneously continuing to add to my semi-useful free stuff collection.

Last week, I walked past a table where students campaigning for both Barack Obama and John McCain were promoting their respective candidates side by side. I grabbed a free ChapStick from the McCain folks, and on the way back, I grabbed a pen from the Obama supporters.

Take that, two-party system!

While my sentiments might seem cavalier to you, I do have a point. Election trinkets are just another visible symbol of today’s dumbed-down politics.

It’s incredibly disheartening to sit through the entire 90 minutes of a vice-presidential candidate debate, genuinely interested in foreign policy and the economy, to be faced with a contender who feels the need to wink repeatedly at the audience and refer to everyday Americans as “Joe 6-pack” and “hockey moms.”

Yes, I’m referring to Sarah Palin, but I was equally disgusted that Joe Biden felt it relevant to counter her by mentioning his conversations with people in Katie’s Restaurant on Union Street and all the time he spent at Home Depot (the happening place to bask in classic Americana culture like football, beer-chugging, Communist-lynching and being consciously middle class).

Voters are entirely blamed for this circus of an election. Well, not all voters: simply those who cry out for “approachable” and “relatable” candidates, while rejecting the possibility of an “elite” president.

Think about it for a second. Do you really want the guy who grills burgers at the annual neighborhood block party to be your next president, the leader of the free world?

The constituency wants competent leaders while simultaneously demanding that the candidate be Joe 6-Pack’s best friend and married to a hockey mom.

Campaigns today seem to do nothing more than alternate between shallow public relations and image building to absurd attack machines.

Democrats and Republicans involve themselves out of the same pack mentality with which drunken students get into brawls at IU-Purdue football games. While this can be amusing to a more rational observer, partisan bickering over the individual characters of elected officials and their personal lives ultimately goes nowhere.

Take the recent conservative whining about John Edwards speaking at IU – “He had an affair, how could he speak at our fine school?” (Insert self-righteous non-verbal noise here.) That can just as easily be countered by pointing out that McCain also had his dirty little extra-marital affair.

And everyone ends up back where they started.

So what’s the result? Voters picking candidates based on who they would rather watch a football game with, candidates being criticized for wearing pantsuits, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in campaign ads, and free, partisan ChapStick.