A long time ago, everyone was in a tizzy about a McCain campaign ad that accused Barack Obama of being inexperienced. No, that wasn’t the weird part – the weird part was that McCain accused Obama of being a “celebrity,” using brief footage of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to illustrate his point. Footage I am sure his campaign obtained and paid for 100% legally.

It was a strange accusation to make – “this guy’s popular, let’s get him!” But it’s one of the few things you can accuse Obama of without being accused of racism, or worse. He has no substance. The man’s all about hope and dreams, but he can’t fulfill his promises.

Is it true? Is Barack Obama the Paris Hilton of politics?

This past Tuesday night saw our third debate of this 2008 election season, and the second between the two presidential candidates. It might not have been as entertaining as the Palin/Biden insanity, but people still tuned in. They wanted to watch the candidates squirm as they attempted to dodge questions in favor of smearing each other’s names.

And there was a fair amount of smearing. When referring to Obama’s voting record, McCain now-infamously referred to him as “this one,” rather than the less derogatory “this guy” or “this young whippersnapper.” I don’t believe his phraseology was a result of anything more than stumbling over his words, but you can be sure that the accusations of racism and doddering senility will plague him until the end of time (or the end of this election, whichever comes first).

Obama made another reference to McCain singing “bomb Iran,” a hit that scored big in their last debate. He also turned one of McCain’s jabs back on him – when he accused Obama for the umpteenth time of “not understanding” something, Obama responded that this was correct. He didn’t understand how they ended up at war with Iraq when it had nothing to do with terrorism.

Oh snap, son.

This is important. The swing voters are practical moderates: they don’t like the war, they want their 401ks, and they want clean energy so the oil companies will stop bleeding them. On the last two issues, Obama scores big in polls. People trust him to fix things up. And on the first, they just want it to end, and they don’t want to talk about it anymore. Things on the home front are bad enough without complicating everything.

Nobody has an easy choice this election year. But I don’t think it’s fair to reduce either candidate to his least impressive accomplishments; constantly tying McCain to the Bush administration is dirty, especially since McCain is (self-admittedly) disliked by most mainstream Republicans. And saying that Obama is an “inexperienced community organizer” is just as bad.

Would it be asking too much for the candidates to just be reasonable to each other?

Yeah, I don’t know what I’m thinking.

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