To paraphrase Mark Twain, if President Clinton and Bob Dole had been there when the deity said "let there be light," there wouldn't have been any.
This presidential campaign has been one of the less illuminating in modern political history and the last few days can't be expected to produce what the past six months has failed to accomplish.On the one hand we have an incumbent president, apparently about to be re-elected by at least a minor landslide, who has enough questions about his character to challenge "the answer man" for the next 10 years, while on the other we have a septuagenarian war hero who wanders from issue to issue, strategy to strategy in a futile effort to catch up.
Neither candidate can seem to stir voter passions and for the first time analysts expect less than 50 percent of those eligible to cast a ballot to do so.
Only the strange little billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, can be credited with stirring much interest during the last two weeks of this farce, and that was mainly because of a long overdue recitation of the disasters waiting to befall the White House once it is over. Bob Dole should have welcomed Perot to the so-called debates.
Perot recited a list of potential ethical and legal problems facing the Clintons in their second term ranging from White-water to campaign contributions from the Indonesians.
But the electorate cares only about the state of the economy these days, and because that's pretty good, they will overlook most anything. Dole blamed some of this on a liberal media and he has a case to make. The three major television networks, for instance, have ignored a series of Clinton-damaging stories and one wonders why. The problem is those who try to do a balanced job get tarred with the same brush as those who don't. We all get lumped under the now derogatory label, "The Media."
Meanwhile, Dole's campaign is in such disarray that it is in danger of completely unraveling before the first Tuesday in November. So frustrated is the former highly respected Senate majority leader that he has begun committing the cardinal sin of politics - lambasting the voters.
Sadly, neither candidate has leveled with the voters about several key issues, not the least of which is Medicare. The growing weight of this great burden could sink us all without some major surgery. Anyone who tells you that the budget can be balanced without severely retarding the growth of Medicare is lying and both candidates know it.
But the fear of the 37 million older Americans who won't tolerate any tampering with the program is so overwhelming most politicians won't touch it. Anyone showing any courage in that area is immediately demagogued to death by his opponent. So, as with Social Security, the very mention of these entitlement programs is taboo except to express unqualified support.
While Dole becomes increasingly shrill and searches for anything that will bring about the miracle he knows won't happen, Clinton stonewalls nearly every question about anything of substance. He and his vice president, Albert Gore, would make us all out to be a bunch of saps by professing ignorance about such matters as a fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple where the monks have taken a vow of poverty.
This entire procedure has gone on too long and Americans are turned off. There should be a time limit on campaigning, and clearly the fund-raising apparatus needs to be overhauled to curtail the power of special interests.
The history of presidential elections, however, isn't encouraging. What we have now is the result of decades of abuses. And unfortunately, if Clinton wins as it now appears, history probably will treat him as just another mediocre chief executive who got lucky with a good economy and an opponent whose time had passed.