Why is the front page of the NY Times full of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy and New Orleans near miss, when the second major political convention is about to start and there are extremely important issues facing the United States about health care, clean energy, poverty and others?

She points to the importance of citizens – and by implication bloggers – trying to refocus debate on the issues, and on the necessity of a critical education in cultivating habits of mind which place the emphasis where it should be.

Secondly, the uniformly fantabulous Rebecca Traister at Salon writes:

How we got from the dispiriting political and ideological record of Sarah Palin — that she is adamantly pro-life and anti-gay marriage, that she is a lifetime member of the NRA, that she has no foreign policy experience and supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools — to the uterine activity of her family, makes perfect, human sense: Who wants to talk about boring policy when we can talk about teens and sex and pregnancy?

Traister is distressed that:

this election cycle could turn from one that was electrifying and energizing for women into one that situates their political prospects firmly back in the feminized territory of sex scandals, babies and mothering.

I’d strongly advocate following both links and reading them in their entirety.

I’d add to all this a third point I’ve been making again and again – the obsessive focus on the personalities of the candidates (and it sure as hell ain’t just about a celebrity cult of Obama – McCain’s whole schtick is all about himself and his personal qualities) is one of the most telling signs that the American political system is badly broken. And so is its civic democracy to the degree that people who are active participants in the “process” think that the politics of gotcha and charge and counter-charge is the way to go. It might be the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it sure ain’t the way to bring about “change we can believe in”.

I’m still struck by Naomi Wolf’s remarks, which I cited in a previous post:

Of course the real fault is not Obama’s, but ours. We have forgotten the kind of risk and work it takes to build transformative mass movements, and so settle for iconography instead.

And it’s not just the KosBots who are at fault here. I’m increasingly tempted, despite perhaps being one of the few Australian bloggers who actually has a vote in November’s election, to just ignore all the noise emanating from the “netroots”. The hyper-partisanship and general horse-race point scoring all too characteristic of the American political system just finds its mirror in most of the so-called “left wing” blogosphere. There are some honourable exceptions, particularly among some bloggers of colour and/or feminist bloggers, but on the whole – for anyone actually concerned with social justice for the great majority of Americans who are daily damaged by its sovereign autocracy – it’s almost too dispiriting to read about.