Attacks don't help voters

By Fort Worth Star-Telegram - 10/28/2008

Can we all please get a grip? As the presidential election nears, the political dirty tricksters are on overdrive.

Donald Segretti would be proud.

(For those born post-Watergate, Segretti worked for Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign sabotaging Democratic candidates, particularly Sen. Edmund Muskie. The Washington Post exposed his work through its Watergate scandal reporting.) Scurrilous accusations and unfounded insinuations have abounded this campaign season, from both the left and right of the political spectrum, aimed at the presidential candidates as well as their running mates.

We won't dignify the most well-worn and thoroughly refuted ones by repeating them here.

But things are getting out of hand when anyone believes that the election should turn on a malicious report that turns out to be completely fabricated.

Conservative talking heads had barely finished thoroughly trashing Michelle Obama for supposed profligacy when The New York Post's Page Six ran this correction: "The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation." Neither Michelle Obama nor Cindy McCain is a villain unworthy of the White House. From all available public evidence, both are decent, accomplished women who are as human as the rest of us and would make fine first ladies.

But voters should be considering their husbands, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain and whether their records, their proposals and their personalities are best-suited to guiding the country for the next four years.

Petty personal attacks on the presidential or vice presidential candidates, or any of their spouses, do not help voters decide who would make the best leader.

Nothing good comes from losing our minds, our manners or our decency in order to win an election.