John McCain talks about Washington like he hasn’t been there for nearly three decades. In the last debate, he said he knew how to solve all of these problems of economics and health care, win the wars and catch bin Laden - well, where has he been? Has he been holding back, saving all of his good ideas for his presidential campaign? Is that putting your country first?

I, and many others, would have a lot more respect for Senator McCain if he would just give us the straight talk. He supported deregulation, believing it was the best way to expand our economic markets, but didn’t account for - or simply underestimated - the opportunity for and impact of greed and corruption. Every economic policy is an experiment, and all we can do is learn from the results and keep trying to improve on the idea.

What’s wrong with that? It has the virtue of being thoughtful, honorable and true. Sure you may get called a “flip-flopper,” but to ignore new information that changes or contradicts your earlier notions is simply foolish. Could you imagine McCain standing in front of a crowd and telling them he’s not about to let fear of a fool calling him a name dissuade him doing what is the best thing for his country?

In 2000, you could.

Instead, now, we get all of this misrepresentation and false bravado. He distances himself from his family’s success to appear as something he isn’t.

We get comments taken out of context, like Michelle Obama’s $600 earrings, that purposely avoid the valid point that she was making: That the stimulus package was only an ultra-short-term approach that didn’t really have a significant impact on the challenges American families were facing.

Was she wrong? Did that check make everything all better for anyone? For us, it paid our rent for one month, and that was nice. But I’d be no better or worse off now without it. 

Consider the cost of the rebate, plus the cost or processing and delivering it. Were those tax dollars well-spent?

But who cares, because Michelle Obama is an elitist, right? 

We also get “who is Barack Obama really?” Really? The campaign has been going on for twenty months now. Barack Obama has to be the most completely vetted man in history, and you still don’t know who he is? Do you really believe he might be a terrorist?

If McCain and Palin really don’t know who Barack Obama is by now, they may be a little too slow on the uptake to really run this country. But we all know that isn’t true. They are simply trying to make Americans afraid of him, which speaks loudly to their character.

All of that being said, it’s difficult to believe Senator McCain when he says he knows what to do about the problems we face.