Homing In on the White House

With thousands of American families losing their homes to foreclosure every week, it's depressing to see presidential candidates in a food fight about how many residences John McCain possesses and how much help Barack Obama got from a fixer in buying his own.

Technically, McCain may be homeless, since none of the eight places he hangs his hat belongs to him but to his wife, children and trusts she controls, but haggling about that may strike voters desperate to avoid losing the places they live as not quite relevant to their concerns.

The hoo-ha about homes is symptomatic of the freefall from focusing on issues and turning the election into a barroom brawl that Rovian Republicans started with their attack ads and McCain's badmouthing of Obama to which the Democrats are now responding with kneecapping of their own.

Ironically, it was Cindy McCain, owner of the houses and condos in question, who started out by making it clear that she and her husband kept their finances separate and that she had no intention of telling the world about her own.

At the same time, she was adamant that, after all the sliming her family suffered in 2000, that this campaign would be different.

“We'd rather not win than to have to do that,” Mrs. McCain said last spring. “That's not worth winning for. This is about being a leader and a person that can be a good example for our children, and a good role model. There are many, many, many more things to this job than just being the president. You are an example. You have to--you have to be better than that. You have to be.”

She said she had asked her husband after the 2000 race not to try again for the presidency if it meant enduring all the attacks and slanders. But here we are, and this time it's John McCain who has found a home with the Republican politics of personal destruction.