No doubt you recall from last decade that "character," which Bill Clinton seemed to lack wholesale except in the negative, was the right's supreme focus in politics. It's about character and little else but character, pounded the right; a pol's positions on the issues are one thing, but far above that, there hovers the question of character.
Clinton's was bad, so he must be rejected, meaning impeachment and banishment.
Al Gore defended Bill Clinton and was of course guilty by association in all manner of vice-presidential ways, hence Al Gore should be rejected, too. The 2000 presidential campaign was framed by the right as a necessary exercise in "character"-exposure.
Bush, good person. Gore, bad man. That's all the voters needed to know. They were to forget that the economy was bubbling along nicely, that the budget was more than balanced, and that the excellent character of George W. Bush would obliterate the federal surplus through another unhealthy dose of voodoo economics.
Bush, good. Gore, bad. End of message.
We do remember that, do we not? -- the right's overriding, nauseating simplicity of peddling character, character, character as the only slice of legitimate concern?
Well, now comes Christine O'Donnell's previously unvetted past, which, in sum -- since she has no office-holding past by which she can be judged -- totals a question of character only. No need to rehash here all the verifiable character charges which have been made, such as her encouragement of staff to fleece vendors or her hidden agenda of building a political profile just to snare a lucrative television contract. Hers is not a suspicious case of a little smoke indicating some fire. It's is a virtual mushroom cloud.
Yet what did we hear from the representative right on CNN's "Reliable Sources" yesterday morning? A Townhall.com writer assessing the media's exposure of O'Donnell's character as nothing more than "prurient interest."
That's the liberal media for you, charged the right-winging guest -- bamboozling the electorate about irrelevant character issues rather than focusing on where Christine O'Donnell stands on the public-policy issues of the day.
Pinball politics. Where the right is today it may not be tomorrow, since where it was yesterday is no longer profitable. This, the right calls a coherent philosophy of principled leadership.