Oh, Bring Me Back Old FDR

The new, long presidential campaign season needs banning by law because it inflicts great pain on those of us who cannot resist tuning in to what the candidates are saying, just to see if they say anything coherent.

Not that Americans demand coherent candidates. Look what the Supreme Court pulled out of the gutter in 2000 and, miracle of miracles, what in 2004 the citizens of the greatest republic on earth re-elected (if that is the proper term under the fishy circumstances of the Republican Supremes’ earlier involvement).

Even so, it would shock and delight to hear one candidate offer a skein of sense and logic.

To say that stretches the imagination as far as the Republican runners are concerned. Giuliani is the buddy of crooks and acts like a two-bit chiseler when it comes to hiding the expenses for visiting his honey. Huckabee is a two-bit chiseler, who as soon as he ascended to being Arkansas’ governor put a wicker basket beside his office door for cash love offerings, took free suiting to clad his puffy person, and with his lady posted a Target shopping list for those who wanted upon his departure from office to furnish the Huckabees with candelabras and humming-bird-tongue tweezers. McCain has a few moments of sense between bouts of lunacy about Iraq. Romney, when he reincarnates, will return as a pancake flipper. Thompson incarnates ennui. Paul is the only one among them with brains enough to get out of Iraq, but that’s about all he has going for him unless you’re in labor and he’s standing nearby; he does know how to deliver babies.

One expects the Democrats to offer more sense. They do in part. But none of the lot of them offers a coherent program that calls for federalizing all health care and making it universal, for fetching the troops out of Iraq before the war bankrupts the nation, for slapping grinding controls on credit-card peddlers and gougers and for once again pulling the rapacious banks out of the honey pots of creating and selling such bad investments as annuities, recently invented mortgage securities and other offerings for suckers. Nor does anyone call for cracking down on Wall Street, a casino with fewer rules and controls and more cheats now than the card room behind the Kitty Kat Klub.

Biden wants to be secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton trades on having been First Lady and having Bill at hand (sometimes). Dodd seems a smart fellow who should have known better. Edwards wants to go after the rich crooks and help the poor, but what about the rest of us? Gravel is a fool. Kucinich seems the only one with a philosophy, but he must know that disqualifies him in the U. S. Obama preps himself as the preppie of change. Anyone of these would be better than any Republican, but of them all, who looks as if she or he has enough gravity to anchor the country?

Where is FDR now that we need him again?