Is There a Candidate Who Can Rise to the Occasion?

Crabby Old Lady is sick of this election campaign: the candidates, their surrogates, the media and by god, the electorate too. Every day, there is a new non-issue blown out of proportion that has nothing to do with the serious problems our country faces.

Flag pins? Guilt by association at age eight? Sisterhood? Let me tell you how little Crabby cares about any of them when millions of people have lost their homes while Wall Street barons enrich themselves. While the Iraq war drags on maiming and killing our young men and women along with some uncountable number of Iraqis. While our borders and ports are still not secure. While our food is tainted and doubles in price between trips to the supermarket. While our kids are growing up ignorant because the schools don’t teach. While Crabby wonders if she will be able to afford heating fuel next winter? While the Constitution has been ripped out from under us and nary a candidate has addressed these issues seriously.

“I’ll get us out of Iraq in six months,” says one. “The Iraq War will be over by 2012,” says another. “My health plan insures more people than his/her plan,” they all say, apparently not caring about the citizens their plans don’t cover.

Crabby is equally tired of the media who are barely reporting even the horse race now (beyond the delegate count) compared to their fortune telling. They may as well be dealing Tarot cards or throwing yarrow sticks: Can Obama get the working class vote? Will Clinton take the fight to the convention? Does President Bush help or hinder McCain’s chances of winning?

Who cares - we’ll know those things in time and don’t need guessing games masquerading as news. Meanwhile, where is the hard information? Why haven’t reporters analyzed the healthcare issue with a thorough examination of the possibilities and difficulties? Can’t we have an intelligent public discussion of the country’s responsibilities to Iraq’s infrastructure which is nearly non-existent now thanks to our bombing? Hope is an admirable leadership quality in a candidate – better to have it than not - but we also need facts and plans and achievable goals to be outlined in black and white.

Why aren’t candidates answering the hard questions? When will the media ask them:

What will you do as president about those hundreds of Bush signing statements that negated laws duly passed by Congress?

What are your plans for the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, habeas corpus, secret wiretapping and all the other administration acts of the past eight years that have left American citizens stripped of rights guaranteed by the Constitution?

How will you address the terrifying deficit and the U.S. debt paper held by countries in the Middle East and China? Specific steps, please.

Where do you stand on that fence between the U.S. and Mexico? And what are your ideas to deal with the immigration issue that has been shoved off the public agenda without an answer?

How will you hold accountable those in the government who have approved and/or carried out torture in Guantanamo and all those secret prisons the U.S. has set up in other countries?

What will you do about laws and regulations that allow giant corporations to avoid paying billions in taxes by having not much more than a mailing address in places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands?

What are your plans for repair of the crumbling U.S. infrastructure – the bridges, roads, sewers and water conduits that are falling apart? Where will the money for it come from?

Crabby Old Lady wants specific answers to these and a hundred other questions.

And you in the electorate – get serious. If you’re a Democratic Clinton supporter and refuse to vote for Senator Obama - or vice versa - because he/she is not your original candidate, you’re an idiot. If you’re a man who won’t vote for a woman on sexist grounds, you make Crabby wish for intelligence tests as a prerequisite to voting. And if, as a woman from somewhere in Appalachia said on cable news recently, you won’t vote for a person “with a name like Barack Obama,” you are beyond contempt.

In the lifespan of anyone alive today, there has never been a more important election. Our country and its people have never been in worse trouble. And if you believe it can all be solved during the tenure of one president, you’re dreaming. It will be a long, hard slog of a generation or two to set things right again and then, only if we elect someone this time with vision, integrity and intelligence who will call on and appoint helpers who are equally so – people who won’t make conditions worse.

Crabby doesn’t believe any of the candidates sufficiently meet these criteria. She longs for a great man or woman to lead us out of our abyss, who won’t sugarcoat the huge number of problems we face, who will tell us what we each will need to sacrifice to get the country on the sound footing we now lack.

But we are stuck with what we’ve got. And Crabby can only hope voters will pay enough attention to choose the one who comes closest to what we so desperately need – who has the will to reject partisan politics along with the almighty corporate lobby interests and rise to the occasion.

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Mort Reichek delivers another of his MEMOIR essays: How My Dad Downed a Nazi Dirigible and Became a "Saint".]