With a month and change left to go before November’s election the narratives of presidential politics have shed the skin of personal histories (who is elitist or a better dinner conversationalist, free throw shooter) and revealed the possibility that our choices may actually be driven by who would be a better leader. Who we trust to make decisions that represent the best interests of our society as a whole, what our individual concept of the social contract is, how best to lead us back toward peace and prosperity are the issues in ascendance ever since Wall Street was humbled into admitting that greed is not good and there is no special genius required in playing with other people’s money – only a facility for appearing to be a genius.

I have written two previous opinion pieces on the race for the White House and with any luck will still be here to write two more before the returns are released. While that may be five too many for some readers, I feel it is well short of an abuse of power as this paper’s editor to take up a bit of space with analysis as uninformed and partisan as any you will find on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Unlike the Sunday talking heads who have the benefit of speaking in real time, the lag  between The Post’s printing and its distribution proves ineffectual during a campaign in which a candidate can suspend and unsuspend their electioneering or the economy can peer over the precipice, step back and inch forward in the time it takes for us to reach your mailbox.

But to borrow one of John McCain’s lines of reasoning from not too long ago, the fundamentals have not changed. The American experiment is at a crossroads and what led us here is the same today as it was a year ago and will be still in a few days time.

We are still enmeshed in a toxic foreign policy financed with borrowed money and hamstrung in our attempts to project and exercise our power to aid friends, protect the innocent and look after our interests.

We have skewed the economic playing field by giving the powerful whatever they want and taking from regular folks the things they need to get ahead or even stay afloat. 

We put bankers in charge of regulating banks, loggers in charge of our forests, oilmen in charge of our energy and political hacks in charge of emergency preparedness.

As the Congress rejected a plan to borrow other people’s money to bail out speculators who lost still other people’s money, threatening a financial system that resembles – in President Bush’s words, “a house of cards” – the Justice Department released a report on how the current administration subjugated prosecutorial power to political interest.

The connection between the two failures, not to mention the myriad other misjudgments, misbehaviors and missed opportunities of the past eight years, is a fundamental disdain for the rule of law.

The obligation of oversight to ensure a level playing field and a government that works in the interest of the common good over enriching friends and serving a narrow ideology shared by a small minority was treated with hostility – until the whole scheme crashed around our ears.

It is important to remember these fundamentals as the news and events convulse from one crisis to the next, day-by-day, and hour-by-hour.

How did we get into this? It was no accident. It is the blowback from a highly orchestrated and deftly executed policy intended to unburden upper strata of our population from imaginary encumbrance – all noblesse and no oblige.

That is the fundamental ideology that has driven public policy for the past eight years and nothing has been so fundamental as its failure.

–Ward Peck