I don’t care a bit about her family issue. My focus is on her record as Alaska governor, where spending is much, much higher per capita than it is in Virginia, and her record in the town where she served as mayor, again where spending is out of line with what most people that I know would be comfortable with. That’s one. Two is this ethics issue that would worry the heck out of Republicans and supporters of the McCain ticket. I don’t think that one’s going to go away that easily. And don’t dismiss it as being partisan. The legislature that is investigating her is majority Republican.

So back to the worry that I hinted to above – McCain seems to have been pressured into doing something that could end up hurting him badly in November.If he survives that and is elected, I wonder if his caving in to the Bush crowd won’t be a sign of more of that kind of thing to come.

I don’t want a Bush Light or Bush Heavy or Bush Anything. It’s time for a change. If Obama loses, then I’ll pray that McCain comes to his senses and tells the Bush people who helped get him elected to go to hell. I have to say that his selection of their favored candidate for VP makes me worry more than I was before.

I would quibble with their partisan observation that the superweatlhy “invest the most in the economy.” Consumer spending drives our economy now, and working-class and middle-class families commit a much, much higher proportion of their income to consumer spending than do the superwealthy.

This news bit also fails to take into account a complete picture of taxes that includes monies paid in sales taxes, property taxes and FICA (working- and middle-class families pay a much higher share of their income in sales taxes than do the superwealthy).

Newsmax has a reason for leaving this information out of their analysis.

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democrats have talked about repealing President Bush’s tax cuts for upper-income Americans. But those who earn the most money – and invest the most in the economy – are already paying almost all federal personal income taxes, a recent report reveals.

Congress’ Joint Economic Committee disclosed that the richer half of the American population pays nearly 97 percent of income taxes. Most of that, 54 percent, is paid by those in the top 5 percent, Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) disclosed.

And the richest of the rich – just the top 1 percent – pay a hefty 34 percent of all personal income taxes collected by the federal government.

Meanwhile, about 14 million lower-income Americans have been removed from the income tax rolls since 2000 due to the earned income tax credit and the per-child tax credit, IBD reports.”

In one sense, the close-to-being identical records of Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin on bipartisanship and ethics and government transparency could be pushing the high degree of partisan bickering that we’re seeing from the two sides and will see through Eleciton Day. We basically have mirror images in Obama (young reformer) and Biden (old warrior) on the one side and McCain (old warrior) and Palin (young reformer) on the other.

To be sure, there’s a wide gulf between the two sides on where our country goes from here to 2013. I back Obama-Biden because I think we need to get our budget back into balance to restrengthen our dollar, which pushes the price of imported goods back down and pushes gas prices back down as well, and I think we need to let the Iraqis take care of Iraq and focus our efforts on fighting the actual war on terror in Afghanistan and whatever other hot spots might flare up in the future.

Obama-Biden has pledged to get the budget back into balance by expiring the Bush tax cuts on the superwealthy and by paring down federal spending. McCain-Palin would protect the tax cuts for the superwealthy and isn’t doing more than paying lip service to cutting federal spending. I fear greatly that we’re going to run ourselves into long-term economic distress if their way becomes the way.

Same for our foreign wars. Iraq was a mistake, but that debate is a debate of the past. The present and future dictates that we put ourselves in a position to be able to fight and win the war on terror in Afghanistan and be able to respond at a moment’s notice if other international situations develop. I fear that we are basically hamstrung right now as being overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan to a point where we couldn’t respond to another crisis should one come up in the future. Obama-Biden has put out there a plan of action to address this problem. To date, McCain-Palin has only promised (sloganeering alert) more of the same. (I couldn’t think of a better way to say it than that. Sorry.)

I apologize if this comes across as partisan. It’s not intended to be partisan. I’m not the type to vote for any jackass as long as he’s a Democratic jackass. This election is too important to reduce the issues to soundbites and zingers and one-liners. The long-term social and economic viability of our republic is at stake.

Scooping my own planned column, then, here are (at least) five Obama legislative accomplishments.

Illinois state senator
- Obama proposed legislation requiring that police interrogations and confessions be videotaped. It seems commonsensical, but the bill got caught up for a time in the old Republicans like to say they’re tough on crime, and Democrats don’t want to be seen as soft on crime tete-a-tete. Police groups also opposed the legislation initially, but the legislation eventually won approval in the State Senate by a unanimous vote. When it was signed into law, Illinois became the first state to require that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

- Obama was also instrumental in the passage of Illinois’ first earned-income tax credit and the state’s first ethics and campaign-finance reforms since the Watergate era.

United States senator
- More on ethics reform: Obama sponsored legislation that created a federal database of federal grant and contract recipients, which is big for government transparency fans out there. He hasn’t been successful with his push to create an independent Congressional Ethics Enforcement Commission and his bill to criminalize deceptive election tactics like deceptive robocalls (like the kind that I fell victim to in my local city-council campaign a few months ago). I admire the effort, of course.

- Foreign policy: There’s the bipartisan Lugar-Obama legislation that has helped decrease the threat of old nukes and biological and chemical weapons from the old Soviet Union getting in the wrong hands.

- Veterans affairs: The Dignified Treatment of Wounded Warriors Act addressed the treatment of military veterans post-9/11.

- Katrina: Obama authored an amendment putting strict limits on the use of no-bid contracts after natural disasters.