Give voters a clue

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The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was a sideshow, a distraction, a sham and a shame. So sayeth many of the brightest stars in punditry. How sad that we wasted so much time on what Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post called an "absurd digression." Barack Obama himself constantly frets that we are "caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics," which "trivializes the profound issues." Yes, by all means, the profound issues are what the campaigners should grapple with. Grapple away on matters of substance and policy. Bread-and-butter concerns. Kitchen-table topics and pocketbook issues.

And what are those? Well, according to Obama on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, item No. 1 is high gas prices.

Over on ABC's "This Week," Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed. George Stephanopoulos opened his interview by asking how she can defend her proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer when everyone knows it won't lower gas prices. "Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it," Stephanopoulos noted. "Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing."

Her response in a nutshell: Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.

Clinton says she doesn't mind if every economist in the country agrees that her proposal would do absolutely nothing to alleviate high gas prices. Indeed, when Stephanopoulos pressed her to name one -- just one! -- credible economist who thinks this idea has any merit, she responded: "Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists." Instead, she explained, she's going to break with the "government power and elite opinion" and side with the little guy.

Indeed, unlike John McCain, who also stupidly supports a gas-tax "holiday," the Clinton plan has the added benefit of punishing those evil oil companies by making them pay the tax. The same irrelevant economists insist that the oil companies would simply pass that cost back to the consumers, and the "tax holiday" would artificially hike demand for gas so that pump prices would jump right back up. But never mind that.

Oh, let's also point out that, as a matter of political reality, Clinton might as well be calling for an immediate ban on the use of unicorn meat in dog food, because there is no way her proposal can actually, you know, happen.

Now, in fairness, we should point out that Obama opposes the Clinton-McCain proposal for many of the reasons stated above, and that speaks well of him.

But there's a larger point here. Clinton's new populist demagoguery is entirely symbolic. The "substance" is stage dressing, no more real than the scenery in a play. She is trying to tell blue-collar workers that she's on their side. The language may be economic, but the message is about values. It's I-feel-your-pain treacle gussied up as tax policy, devoid of anything approaching substance. Who cares if even liberal economists like Krugman concede the stupidity of her idea; she's taking the side of the Bubbas against all the fancy pants.

The same goes for the Daedalian debate between Obama and Clinton over healthcare that consumed so many of the early Democratic primaries. In a riot of intellectual vanity, vast amounts of time were wasted on parsing the fine print of their respective policy proposals, with earnest journalists wading hip-deep into the actuarial tables, as if either plan would actually survive its first encounter with Congress intact.

Presidential elections are not referendums on policy papers. Rather, policy papers are themselves mere hints, sometimes very poor hints, of where a candidate's priorities lie. This is not to say that candidates should not offer details, but let's do away with the charade that the dots on the "i" and the crosses on the "t" are the stuff of Serious Politics, while discussions about a candidate's values are somehow irrelevant. It's all the same conversation.

Whatever the true import of Obama's relationship with Wright may be, or whatever the proper weight voters should give to his view that poor whites "cling" to guns and religion because they've suffered under bad economic policies, or, for that matter, what Clinton's "sniper fire" story says about her, it strikes me as absurd to argue that these data are meaningless but their stance on a gas-tax holiday is of enduring importance.

We pick presidents for their judgment and their values. Anything that gives us a clue as to what those might be is not only fair game, it is the game.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com