Governor Etch-a-Sketch and President Open Mike

Just to illustrate how futile this presidential campaign season truly is, here are a couple of examples that should enlighten you, whatever your political perspective may be. Recently, one of GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney's campaign managers, in a television interview, dismissed his "guy's" shameless catering to the extreme right wing of his party by comparing his campaign to the toymaker Ohio Art Company's flawed product Etch-a-Sketch: once Romney is assured of nomination, he'll just, like the children's toy, conveniently erase the image he's been pushing for the past six years and create a brand new one that the centrist voters will supposedly buy.  And during a recent summit meeting with figurehead Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, President Obama leaned over to confidentially tell real power Vladimir Putin's dupe that once he (Obama) is reelected, then they (Obama and Putin) can deal with some of the more thorny missile defense issues between the two countries.  Unfortunately for the President, there was an open microphone that picked up his comments.

So both candidates, Romney and Obama, should be suffering heavily now for these gaffes, right?  Well, the last public opinion poll shows Obama picking back up the ten percent in job approval rating he had most recently lost due to spiking gasoline prices.  And Romney continues to chug on toward the Republican nomination with his arsenal of fatcat donors and a not-so-surprising endorsement from George H.W. Bush.

With the way that news is presented nowadays, one channel, FoxNews, made a lot of hay about Obama's open mike gaffe, while another, MSNBC, pushed the story about Romney's "Etch-a-Sketch" campaign. CNN covered both but dwelt on neither: both stories are apparently gone and forgotten, as far as they are concerned.  I suppose the upshot to all this is that neither story is strong enough to sway the problematic "undecided" voter, who will probably wait until just before the election and then make their decision based on completely irrelevant, emotional, and stupid reasons.

Being a kid once, I had myself yearned for an Etch-a-Sketch back in the early-to-mid 1960s.  I had seen the commercials showing how easy it was to draw pictures on the screen, which gave the appearance of something very high tech (at least from a child's perspective).  But one Christmas I got one as a gift and was very disappointed when I discovered that I could only draw straight vertical or horizontal lines on it.  Those TV ads were a fraud and I knew it, although I hadn't yet learned the word "fraud".  So when I first heard of the political reference to Etch-a-Sketch a few days ago, my fraud-sensitive ears automatically perked up...