The general election hit the gutter in less than a week.

Economics 101 dictates the president really has no bearing on the economy. That is Ben Bernanke’s job, and his character, integrity or priorities aren’t up for grabs in November.

That doesn’t mean the economy isn’t in cyclical decline. Or that it’s structurally insufficient in housing, health care, welfare, education and Social Security. It is.

Economic policy is the name of the game for Barack Obama in Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere, hammering John McCain’s flip flopping on tax cuts for the rich and tax breaks for corporations.

In Washington D.C., McCain painted Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal who’s policy is to wreck the incentive for work. McCain the Objectivist? Get real.

Economic policies are boring, and so the media industry provides us finger pointing filling the void of any excitement or action. Any meaningful note is abandoned for shrapnel and sound bytes to feed the mouths of talking heads.

It’s hard to go from filling arenas and breaking records to balancing the budget, and so Obama’s paying the price among his so called friends in the press.

This is unfair. It’s not that Obama’s message is wrong, or bad, or dangerous, it’s just policy, and it’s not exciting. Expectations based on candidate-Obama are being applied to policy wonk-Obama and that doesn’t do anybody any good.

Friendly MSNBC found Obama-the-wonk conventional. CNBC missed the point (and since when does the NY Post care about policy when it’s not prostitution-related?)

But Greg Anrig gets it right: just because something’s been done before, doesn’t mean it should be written off. Especially when it worked!

So instead of a meaningful discussion on extending unemployment benefits, ANWAR drilling as an answer for energy independence, reduced military spending we are left with distorted sound bytes and rehashing old gaffes.

This a day after U.S. oil companies got a life raft in the shape of a filibuster by Senate Republicans on a Democratic proposal that would tax “unreasonable” profits. Oil companies have broken record after record of profits, and most of their money goes to buying back stock rather than finding alternate sources of energy.

And two days after Democrats pulled a climate change bill off the floor. They didn’t bother to give Republicans a chance to filibuster the bipartisan bill.

Congress is framed by the election, just like the Iraq war, and now, the economy.

It happened to lesser issues too. Obama’s address on Latin American policy, something unconsidered since the good ol’ Cold War days, was overshadowed by Hillary Clinton’s invocation of Robert Kennedy.

A larger sense of context is missing. If we want to know about what an Obama government looks like, the news business ought to do more on Obama’s professional peers (versus ex-radicals in Hyde Park), resiliency and his temperament. That way voters can make informed choices on his judgment.

But the way we hear about Obamian governance is by proxy. The latest brouhaha is a great example in its absurdity.

The economics discussion was written off as old news, and now we’re essentially back where we were before the Pennsylvania primary – a period where there’s no contests, no end in sight, and thus our attention must be kept by fabricated controversy and undeserved celebrity at the cost of helping people. Democracy shouldn’t be entertainment, but that’s where the Fourth Estate is forcing it.