The movie below illustrates that I am not delusional. I have been concerned all along that the McCain campaign is trying to make this whole race about character and not policy. The problem with that is without campaign promises, you have nothing to hold your elected officals accountable for once in office. When candidates make promises, they can be judged as either successful or unsuccessful. It has political risks, but its just like making goals. If your goal is to be a nice person, you have no way of deciding if you were successful. If your goal is to not exaggerate, its easier to count the number of times that you fail to live up to your own goals. Policy prescriptions, like goals, should be measurable!

I expect politicians to make promises so that there is public pressure on them to achieve certain things when in office. This is a way of making their priorities known. Although Obama is taking a lot of slack about not being specific enough, I feel that he has made more campaign promises than John McCain. In fact, he has been criticized as making too many (in his acceptance speech). John McCain, on the other hand, has selected a running mate that makes it clear that he wants to talk about personality and character. Sarah Palin is a purely political pick. Let me repeat, Sarah Palin is a purely political pick. McCain does not know her, he had one one hour conversation with her before selecting her as his running mate. Now I know this is because his staff is really in control here, but that is also a poor reflection on his leadership. If he cannot control his staff now, how will he in the White House??? Sarah Palin was selected because she would excite right-wing fundamentalist christians. She was not selected because of her ability to lead our country, or because of what she would add to the ticket.

I appreciate that the four people running in this race are people of character, and on a personal level, I think I would be friends with any of them. But these people are not running to be friends with us, they are running to be our leaders! They are running because they think they have the best ideas on how to be president/vp (and because their party thinks they can be elected). Picking a president is about picking the person that you think has the best IDEAS for the country. They are casting a VISION. Consult any leadership book, it will tell you the role of a leader is to cast a vision AND THEN TO TAKE YOU THERE. We can all think of people in our lives who have personal vision, who inspire others. Some of them succeed, and some of them don't, because personality does not always mean you can get things done. So including personality/character in your overall selection of a candidate does make sense. BUT it cannot be the decisive factor. WE MUST KNOW THE PLANS OF OUR CANDIDATES FOR OUR COUNTRY. Ask yourself, what concrete promises have you seen made by the candidates? Let's assemble a big list, and then make educated decisions based on our view of candidates goals and their plans on how to implement them. The below video shows that the man who controls the message from the McCain campaign puts issues second, after personality. please please please put pressure on the candidates to talk about issues by being someone who talks about issues. My poor group of friends who have to listen to me rant whenever the TV is on can vouch that I spend all day bemoaning when candidates misrepresent one another in an effort to avoid the issues. and I guess you guys are familiar with that too.