Surrogate Mothers

A quick follow-up to my spot on XM this morning -- something I wanted to elaborate on slightly:

While talking to Scott Walterman, I joked that only in America can you find a presidential candidate (in this case, Barack Obama) giving a quasi-required speech on how patriotic he is, while a bona fide war hero with unassailable credentials (in this case, General Wesley Clark) is castigated by the media for making a comment that's 100% true.

Over the past 24 hours, Obama's been forced to distance himself from Clark's wholly legitimate statement that being shot down over Vietnam doesn't necessarily qualify someone to be president.

The question, though, is -- why?

Clark isn't in any way officially associated with the Obama campaign; at this point in time, he's really nothing more than a guy who's speaking for himself, who happens to support Obama. So why for God's sake should Obama be called upon to repudiate Clark's statement? I support Barack Obama, and yet I make about ten comments a week on this site that Obama would probably not only want to distance himself from, but which might very well cause him to call for my immediate deportation. The thing is -- I'm speaking for myself. I don't pretend to be a proxy for the candidate I happen to support, and yet that seems to be what the media want and the various political camps expect from those who publicly back one politician or another.

I don't have to be a candidate -- or be just like a candidate -- to publicly throw my support in his or her direction. I'm speaking out on behalf of what I believe he or she can do in terms of the greater good; I'm not speaking out on behalf of that person.

In other words, the media can toss the word "surrogate" around all they want, slapping that already-tired label on anyone and everyone it deems necessary in order to create bullshit conflict where there likely is none. All it does is further stupefy the process and burden the rest of us with the immense and unnecessary responsibility of personally agreeing with every single thing the people we politically endorse do and say -- living up to his or her example, as it were.

And besides that, wasn't Clark right?

Does anyone really think that getting shot down in Nam automatically qualifies someone to lead the United States?