This is some ridiculous bullshit.

The deluge of responses to the now-infamous Off The Bus article by Mayhill Fowler on The Huffington Post have been an exercise in putrid American punditry. With a few weeks of downtime in this already absurd primary process, it was like a freshman fratboy had gone without getting laid for a few months and then suddenly found himself in Cancun with the Girls Gone Wild film crew and a bag of ruphies.

Yeah, that depraved. A sickening explosion of verbal diarrhea on the part of both candidates not named Obama and anyone with a keyboard and an axe to grind.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the responses were well-reasoned and balanced. Others were predictable. Others, especially some from the same site where the crackly audio file first appeared were honest, jumping to the defense of Ms. Fowler. (full disclosure: Pop + Politics currently has a cross-posting deal with Off The Bus) Some came from across the ocean. And many were so idiotic, they couldn’t have even made the cut at a presidential primary roundtable at my cat’s birthday party. With other cats…debating politics…

You get the point.

Maybe I’m just fatigued with the entire horse race. Maybe I’m giving my own elitist, out of touch, condescending rant to the bevy of folks who have to crank out a piece covering said horse race every day. Or maybe I’m right.

Right when I say that Hillary and McCain are so desperate to slow Obama’s historic roll that they are taking their shrill criticisms to peaks Ken Starr would be proud of by lobbing petty, vindictive criticisms of what boils down to the semantics two words: “bitter” and “cling.”

Right when I say that if they want to get technical, they are throwing around words like “elitist” from the porches of their Mediterranean-style vacation villas in the Hampty Hamps. While being served (bitter) lemonade. By my politically savvy cat, who apparently whispers sage advice in their ears in between puffs of catnip.

Right when I say that at the two most critical sink-or-swim junctures for his campaign, Obama has shown his true character. He could have thrown Jeremiah Wright under the bus, but he stood by someone who is flawed but a huge part of his life, just as you or I would a friend with a gambling problem or a coke habit. And instead of retracting his comments, he attempted to clarify rather than ditch them entirely, clinging to what he saw as an important observation in the face of a media maelstrom. Doesn’t that suggest he actually means what he says the first time he says it?? Something uttered by a candidate that isn’t meticulously scrubbed by focus group numbers and drizzled with political expediency? Pinch me.

And if nothing else, I just may be right when I say get over it, people. Someone who is wealthy and (at best) slightly out of touch is bound to occupy the White House. You know, the giant mansion in Washington D.C. where there are round-the-clock servants at the entire family’s beckon call and an army of secret service larger than the amount of competently trained Iraqi police force currently patrolling Basra. It’s the nature of the beast.

In that vein, who is the LEAST out of touch? If you want to judge by tax returns, Obama is the clear winner in terms of dollar separation from you and me.

But even that is a bit silly to use as a measuring stick. I personally want someone who is Ivy League educated running our country. Someone who has tasted the upper crust but is somehow still cynical. Call me an elitist (gasp!), but it just doesn’t work any other way.

I’ll throw this one out there: I want our president to be like Steve Jobs.

I want a visionary man who isn’t mired down in the rhetoric and systemic impossibilities of his counterparts. I want a man who transcends his job and his organization, not just fulfills his obligations and goes to bed at night. I want a man who surrounds himself with quality talent, draws on them for day to day advice, but is independently dynamic in the decisive moments.

Does Steve know that the mailroom guy just lost visitation rights for his two kids because he was desperately searching for the bottom of a Jim Beam bottle?

Nope. Would he be able to compassionately understand the man’s plight if he were given some facetime? I don’t know Jobs, but he absolutely has an uncanny sense for humanizing otherwise soulless technology. There is a depth of understanding of people in that man that few others in business possess.

And that is what I would expect of Obama as well in the political arena. That is what he has shown me. He transcends the punditry and takes honest looks at American society that go far beyond the Bush-era pandering to arcane moral and political standards of the same working class Obama supposedly insulted.

I think Linda Hansen sums up who is really doing the insulting rather nicely in a recent post:

The GOP has been masterful at identifying that need of ours and feeding it. If they can redirect our rage (Don’t pay any attention to that poverty behind the curtain!), make us focus on pseudo-morality wars, we’ll direct all that rage against the candidate they tell us is the root of all evil. We vote for the guy who tells us “All Muslims are evil terrorists and we gotta fight ‘em there so we don’t have to fight ‘em here!”, “Homosexual unions will destroy the American Family!”, “They’re going to take away all your guns!”, “God wants you to vote for me–He loathes liberals (and, by the way, they’ve even declared war on Christmas)!”, “Women who want reproductive rights left to themselves, their partners, their doctors and their God are all baby killers!”, and “Illegal immigrants are getting all those (factory and tech?) jobs you used to have–and some of them are terrorists!” If we don’t vote the Right way, the “other guy”, that anti-American, troop-hatin’, anti-Christian liberal, will take away what little we’ve got left. Damned if we’ll lose that battle.

I, for one, am sick of the bullshit. I’ll be the first to admit that I am no Derrick Ashong. I don’t know every issue front and back, the minutia of every candidate’s health care and economic recovery plans, or every detail of their voting records.

Every proposal is going to get put through the Congressional wringer several times over and will likely resemble nothing close to what is posted on their websites right now, so again, are we trapped up in semantics? Aren’t they really just reflections of ideals instead of concrete policies that will be implemented the first day someone assumes office?

If so, what are we left with? The question of who inspires. The question of who isn’t afraid to step outside the mainstream to not only say things that are brutally honest, but defend them when the aftershocks keep coming. The question of who won’t say anything to preserve an individual goal at the expense of a collective belief in a certain set of values. The question of who wouldn’t take a meeting with a foreign leader, smile to his face, and then call him a fucking asshole on the ride home.

Is Barack Obama the answer? Just like Steve Jobs and the mailroom guy, I can’t really say. But everything I’ve seen so far leads me to believe it’s even marginally possible. Based on what I’ve seen from everyone else, I’ll take those odds.