It was no surprise to find Democrats raking over the same old issues in their last debate but it was shocking to find them raking over old Republican issues instead of their own. If they go on doing it they'll give away another election that was theirs for the taking.
In earlier debates it seemed the parties lived on different planets. Democrats talked about health care and getting out of Iraq. Republicans embraced Bush policies, if not Bush, and denied conscience and science to mollify right wing evangelicals. Advantage: Democrats.
Flash forward to Edwards and Obama clawing away at Clinton. They talked about health care but only as a character signifier. Iraq was an afterthought. In their stead came topics Republicans love: immigration, social security, invading Iran and that perennial GOP favorite, the intrinsic evil of the Clintons.
For Democrats to get mired in Republican issues isn't just bad for them. America needs to debate Iraq, health care and the challenges of energy independence and global warming. It would be nice to add in public debt and corruption. Yet Democrats are fixed on an agenda only Karl Rove could love. How come?
A part of the fault is Clinton's. She gets mad when others run plays from the Republican playbook. Perhaps she thought she had the only extra copy. Her annexing Republican language and concepts in discussing foreign and defense policy has set the tone to November regardless of who's nominated.
Fault lies also with her opponents. Beneath the surface, and often not far beneath, all their talking points are about her; not just whether she can win, but whether she can be trusted. Their strategy has served Republican ends more than their own.
Thus Iran is debated because Hillary voted to label Iran's Republican Guard 'terrorist.' The amendment in question was a calculated step to war but so transparent as to be useless to its plotters, a group including few of the 76 senators voting yes.
Democrats think an attack on Iran grows less likely. They talk so much about it because they don't know what to say about Iraq and because Hillary's vote left her looking like more of a hawk than she lets on and calculating to boot. Needless to say, it helps Republicans when Democrats are talking about staying out of Iran rather than getting out of Iraq.
Illegal immigration was an issue because Hillary mangled her answer to a question about driver's licenses. This one's even more of a godsend for Republicans, who need us to blame someone other than them for the middle class squeeze. Who better than Mexicans?
Democrats have a better grasp of the origins of middle class discontent and even some ideas as to what to do about it. But rather than make their case, they shoot each other over immigration. They should endorse a decent compromise and move on.
The most bogus issue of all is social security. After Bush failed to privatize the system, Republicans stopped talking about it. So why have Edwards and Obama resurrected it? Did they swallow Bush's blarney about an impending actuarial apocalypse? Not likely.
The point is again to paint Hillary as a hypocrite. Obama and Edwards would raise taxes on the rich to ward off projected deficits in the social security trust fund. Clinton waffles, while making the reasonable point that fiscal reform should precede tax hikes.
If her position doesn't quite etch a profile in courage, it beats running around screaming the house is on fire when it's not, as Edwards and Obama are doing. Social Security's trust fund is solvent until 2041. If we do nothing at all the shortfall then will be about 25%.
Clinton is right that fiscally responsibility would help. It's why Al Gore said we should put social security in a "lock box." (Nostradamus had nothing on Gore.) Either of Edwards' and Obama's modest proposals would take care of the problem altogether.
The real crisis is in Medicare's trust fund, which slips into insolvency a lot sooner. (2018) But talking about that requires getting all detailed and specific about universal health care and besides, no one's found a way to use Medicare to impugn anyone else's character.
Hillary and her rivals don't get all the credit for turning up the volume on Republican issues. It couldn't happen without the Washington press corps, still acting like marks for right wing grifters.
Reporters have reason to truckle to power: the rise of the right, the corporate culture of the newly merged media, the weakening of the profession, the fall of newspapers. Celebrity journalists are the worst. It was a dark day when reporters became peers of the powerful. It's harder to snitch on someone with whom one dines. Former ink stained wretches start to identify with those who, like them, must bear the burden of power.
Every so often someone tells them a secret but the effect is mostly to take the edge off their copy. Worst of all is the constant need to renew one's membership and the fierce loyalty it demands. When Tim Russert, Chris Mathews and Wolfe Blitzer took up the causes of Clinton's impeachment and Bush's war, their voices were often louder than the Republicans' own.
They're at it again. Matthews says immigration may be the key to the election, perhaps because things have gone so well for Tom Tancredo. All treat the imaginary social security crisis like global warming and global warming like a figment of the liberal imagination. They treat the campaign like it's a football game and they're John Madden. There's something here about being boys. One wishes Washington were less like high school, or that real high school had gone better for them all.
If Democrats must annihilate each other they should do it over issues that matter. Of course they'd have to search their own consciences and then share the findings. In the last debate energy didn't come up till an hour in, at 9:07 pm, EST. Discussion lasted till 9:12.
If the social security alarmists are right, in 34 years we may reduce retirement checks. If the global warming centrist are right, in 34 years we may run out of water. You'd think a Democrat would seize Gore's green mantle. But Gore wins a Nobel Prize, Karl Rove loses his job and Democrats embrace Rove's issues, not Gore's. Clinton needs to be challenged on issues. America needs to debate issues. Not these issues. Real ones.