Take the health care debate between Obama and Clinton. Okay, right now it’s firmly lodged in “mandates for everyone vs. mandates for children only”. Not so bad right now. But let’s deepen it a little bit. What about how to pay for it, and since we know neither program from either candidate is single payer, we now have to look at which providers will be involved and how we’re going to get them to make it affordable.

Then we have to look at how the mandates will be enforced, and then where’s the money going to come from that would make this whole thing a reality. Now we find ourselves in a situation where we’re talking about really big numbers and moderately complex calculations and projections and well above half of the nation’s eyes just glossed over.

Time to look at the next issue: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Welfare.

hoo boy, get a calculator.

Now, I’m an info junkie, I am constantly trolling around for more information and getting properly deep in this stuff makes my eyes roll into the back of my head sometimes. And remember, I LOVE doing this. Take someone who is more concerned getting to work on top, not getting scalped by their boss for filing the reports with the wrong cover sheets, then getting home in time for the kids’ bus, and putting a meal on the table for the sun goes down, and what you have is someone who *says* they want to talk issues, but in all reality they really don’t want to.

The fact of the matter is, where the metal meets propulsion in politics is enough to make someone comatose and I think if the media really covered the issues as much as some people beg for, you would have a stark drop in political participation.

Not that substance is bad, no it’s very very good, but when we talk about covering issues, we have to find a kind of sweet spot where we’re not trying to take someone who maybe drives a truck all day and try to feed them doctorate level economics. (I would have used my own profession, but my own profession sounds an awful lot smarter than it really is).

To Obama’s credit here (and yes I’m an Obama partisan but I really do try to be fair), for all the talk of substance and style, he does have a leg up on the other two candidates still in the hunt for the Oval Office. All three candidates have web pages where they outline their platform one plank at a time. This gives the illusion of substance but one thing I think you’ll find is that when you go to investigate all of them, you will find that each plank is more a collection of platitudes with very little meat on the rhetorical bones.

What Obama has that the others don’t have (unless something changed recently), is a pdf called the “Blueprint For Change”

The really cool thing about the BFC is that it’s a sixty plus page document that, as Mike characterized it last night, is ” a primer for government reform”. So what we’re talking about here is a notably meaty document that’s full of all the issues oriented material one could want, but I doubt it has enjoyed very much circulation.

It definitely has not seen as much circulation as say, whether Hillary wants Obama as a running mate or Ms. Power calling Hillary a monster. If it did, there wouldn’t even be talk about how Obama is all talk.

Now one thing, we’re going to do here at CFLF in coming weeks is we’re going to bring the substance to the blog. For the most part we’ve really focused on the horse race because, as you say, it’s easy to cover and it’s moderately entertaining. But what I want to do is I want to start putting a magnifying glass to the platforms of each of the three remaining candidates and see how they stand up to each other.

This is a pretty big project considering each platform has ten or more planks to it, so this may be weekend content kind of stuff, but with weeks ahead of us before we go to Pennsylvania, that’s plenty of time to really scrutinize these candidates on what matters most.

How they would actually govern.

To be honest, I really didn’t even want to cover this story, and only did so so I could spend some time expressing my opinion on sex scandals in politics in the first place. As you said, you don’t care about Monica and Bill, but if it’s your husband… that’s the right frame of mind.

When these things hit, it feels an awful lot like a couple hundred million people all of a sudden want to be marriage counselors or divorce attorneys.

It’s kind of pathetic.

In that case, he’s going down.

From what I’m hearing on the news, it sounds like his targeting of Wall Street made him a bunch of enemies and that may make it hard for him to stay on in the job. My general disdain for the IOKIYAR mentality makes me hope that he weathers the storm.

My husband is always stunned that I don’t get more upset about these indiscretions (starting with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky). I tend to shrug them off as just about what you’d expect of someone who’s power-hungry enough to seek these high-profile jobs. However, just let him try stepping out on me. . .that would be some SERIOUS and unapologetic hypocrisy on my part.

But the situation with hypocrisy, and here’s what we have to keep in mind. To see this the way you do may indeed not be hypocritical, but you have to admit that it takes some parsing that the general public simply won’t do. Now, I’m not trying to denigrate your opinion on this, and I think as the meat of the post here suggests, I’m largely ambivalent to the whole story. I have certain opinions regarding prostitution that may not necessarily go over well with a progressive crowd, but given the high strung atmosphere of the current debate I want to wait until cooler heads are at the table before I engage in that debate, but my opinions here really don’t much matter.

What matters is that it is easier to see Spitzer as a hypocrite than it is not to.

I don’t care one way or another. If this is really the case, and people don’t apologize when they’ve done nothing wrong, I feel bad for his wife but the infidelity is between them. Soliciting a prostitute, on the other hand is illegal, and unfortunately the kind of story that news dogs latch onto and refuse to let go.

I will reiterate only one other point. As far as crimes and governance goes, I think it is important to emphasize that sleeping with prostitutes doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad governor. Being a bad governor makes someone a bad governor. We have truly got to work to get ourselves as an electorate country-wide into that mindset.

Sex scandals are, well, sexy, and easy for people to understand, so those are the scandals that can end a political career. Next to that you have theft in its many forms. But someone who really takes the reigns of their charge and drives their state or country into the ground is free to continue doing so. Sure, there’s a blowback effect felt in the next election, but outside of that, but for term limited officials, that’s hardly a punishment.

Let’s focus on penalizing politicians for their performance inside the halls of government, not outside, says I.

This just doesn’t seem to rise to the level of something demanding a resignation. Further, I see it as being much milder than David Vitter’s own bouts with prostitution or, as you cite, Larry Craig’s little problem. In Spitzer’s case, going after prostitution rings was part of his job, not some personal crusade. This is no more an incidence of hypocrisy than if a state trooper were caught speeding. Poor judgment? Of course. Playing with political fire? Without a doubt. But hypocrisy? I don’t think so.

What made Vitter and Craig so hypocritical was that they were making political hay out of condemning the very things they were caught doing.