I think it's sad that name recognition plays such a large part in getting someone elected these days. Bush and Hillary Clinton are good examples of this. Bush never did a good job running anything and did not belong anywhere near a presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton moved to New York and stole a senate seat mainly based on name recognition. First lady, senator, presidential candidate? I'm stunned when the left starts promoting her as a possible candidate in 2008. How could they hang their hopes on her? Name recognition is the only reason I see. When little Georgie ran, polling showed a lot of the people voting for him thought he was his father. Yeah, they really thought big George was running again. Pardon my language here but, are you fucking kidding me?

The Boston Globe has obviously thrown it's full weight of support behind John Kerry. In a long series of articles it did on him the first one had a photo of Kerry sailing with none other than JFK himself. They didn't stop there either, they also plugged the fact that Kerry is also a JFK, John Forbes Kerry. In other words, they were doing  all they could to tie Kerry to Kennedy to sort of create that "brand name" everyone wants to buy. This is part of the political landscape now in a big way.  I like Kerry and there's plenty you could use to promote him as a good candidate but even a major newspaper like the Globe went for the lowest common denominator approach. That's what the public wants. America is a "brand name culture" and it's what's been drilled into us. So to sell us anything now you've got to create the brand. Bush is a brand name, one with a bad track record, but has the fact that McDonald's is bad for you and their burgers don't even romotely resemble anything you could call meat stopped them from selling billions upon billions of them?

The other part of this is a guy like Springer is a media guy. He knows all about how to work a camera or a microphone. He'll come across well on tv or on the radio because it's his job to be on tv and on the radio. He knows how to work a camera or a crowd. People who get their daily intake of information from these sources will probably think he's the better candidate based on this fact. How many people are really issue oriented and know and understand the issues the candidates bat about? People will base their vote on one issue a lot of the time. Abortion for example, is always used to divide us as a population. Those who support it and those that don't. Is it a major issue in the world? No. Is it brought up in every major political campaign? Sure it is. Why? It's a cheap way to score votes and divide and conquer.

We've got a system that needs to be fixed and guys like Springer aren't going to be the ones to fix it. God help us.