What Hillary & Barack can learn from David Patterson.

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on Newstalk 600 KTBB in Tyler, Texas, Friday, Mar. 31, 2008.

You gotta give it to the new governor of New York, David Patterson. He is apparently smarter than either of the two politicians from his party who wish to be elected president.

David Patterson apparently spends sufficient time in the real world with the rest of us so as to be aware of the fact that he won’t be able to get away with much. Clinton and Obama apparently lack such awareness.

David Patterson, if you don’t know, took office a few days ago in the place of the disgraced Eliot Spitzer and proceeded to “come clean.”

He told us straight up that he has had extra-marital affairs and that his wife has done so as well. He went on to tell us that he has smoked pot and snorted cocaine in his indiscreet youth. If you don’t know this it’s because it got next to no play in the national media.

But if he had kept quiet, these facts would certainly have come out. Somebody knows that David Patterson did drugs and somebody knows that he and his wife both played around and if he hadn’t told us, someone else would have.

Gov. Patterson is sufficiently savvy to understand that so he acted pre-emptively. He got it out ahead of the bloggers and the mainstream press and, as a result, the story is now a non-story.

Why are we talking about this?

We’re talking about it because I want whomever it is that becomes president to be at least as real-world savvy and at least as honest as the governor of New York — who wouldn’t even be governor were it not for the fact that his predecessor wasn’t.

It is shocking when you consider that Barack Obama appeared to believe that his raving bigot of a pastor would never be discovered and brought into the campaign. It’s shocking to consider that he actually thought we’d believe him when he said that he really had no prior knowledge of Pastor Wright’s extreme anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-white views.

It’s shocking to consider that Hillary Clinton thought she could just create out of whole cloth a story about being shot at when she knew there were reporters there with her at the time. Reporters who are still in the business and who are sure to remember what actually happened – and report it.

What is going through the minds of Clinton and Obama? There’s no way to know for sure but we should consider the possibility that both of them actually believe that we – the un-sophisticated Wal-Mart shopping clods that we are – actually aren’t smart enough to be able to tell when they’re lying. They could actually believe that they’re that much smarter than us.

Or it’s possible that they are so cut off from the world you and I live in by their staffs and handlers that they cannot appreciate the fact that anything can now be found out by anyone on the internet. It’s possible that Hillary Clinton is so cosseted by staff that she, herself, never goes on the internet.

And if these two are that cut off from the very world they wish to lead; or if they are so fundamentally contemptuous of our intelligence; or so fundamentally unaware of how easily information now flows in the world; that they believe they can tell huge whopping lies and not get caught, how can either of them be president?

No matter your politics or party, the best thing you can hope for in an election is two worthy opponents. Worthy opponents will bring conviction and belief to a hot crucible of debate from which the best ideas have the best chance of survival.

With a frightening world knocking at our door, a huge crisis in Social Security and Medicare just a few years over the horizon, a weak dollar, a faltering economy, a failing education system and so many more challenges facing us, some good debate from two worthy adversaries would be healthy.

Instead, we are lined up for a general election starring one or another of the tragicomedies of Barack Obama denying knowledge of his pastor’s frightening racisim or Hillary Clinton’s congenital inability to tell the truth.

How sad for us.