THUMBS DOWN FROM DOWN UNDER

Posted at 10:26 p.m. ET

We've said here before that some of the most astute comments about American politics come from the English-speaking foreign press.  Today Greg Sheridan of The Australian, expresses his view about our campaign.  Don't expect raves.  Those you can get at CNN.

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I've ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

The politics of the world's greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.

Sheridan was never a candidate for the Australian diplomatic corps.

This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics. There were presentiments of this in John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was the critical transitional figure who morphed from a traditional politician into a pure soap opera celebrity, with all the baroque plot twists and personal dysfunction.

Ah yes, we remember him well.  Didn't his wife just lose?

Barack Obama is the first pure celebrity presidential candidate. He is a superior celebrity, superbly in control of himself, masterful at presentation, effortlessly detached, as the best celebrities are, from the controversies that swirl around him.

Consider the arc of Obama's presidential rise. He was introduced by Oprah Winfrey on her non-political talk show. She is a clever woman, Winfrey, and she, before almost anyone else, saw Obama's crossover potential as a figure in her world - confessional celebrity psycho-babble - and the world of electoral politics.

Great way to select a president.  Maybe the next one will be runner-up on Donald Trump's next full-employment series.

It is typical to see Obama's life described as an incredible odyssey that could only happen in America. There was nothing incredible about it. His mother was a peripatetic academic researcher. He was reared mostly by his grandparents. His grandmother was a bank vice-president and his grandfather a furniture store manager and then insurance salesman. They gave him a sturdily middle-class life.

He went to Hawaii's best high school and America's efficient meritocracy later saw him attend Columbia and Harvard universities. This is all entirely admirable, but there is nothing the least incredible or odyssey like about it.

But Mr. Sheridan, think of the movie, the opera, the TV series.  How can you say the things you do? 

As celebrity material, McCain's memoir is slightly less user friendly than Obama's. This is because being a prisoner of war is not something most Americans can imagine themselves doing, whereas growing up in Hawaii and resenting your grandpa a bit and going off to New York and feeling the terrible but causeless burden of self, and then going to Chicago to live, these are things the average American can relate to.

But what a dismal and pathetic basis duelling memoirs are on which to vote.

Well, maybe the media could give us something else.  But celebrity is so much easier, and far more fun.  And the TV reports are great.

Although Palin embodied many of the dynamics of celebrity, because her life and beliefs so comprehensively repudiate the liberal consensus around which most media celebrities cluster she aroused a visceral hatred in the elite media. One of the ways in which celebrity has been so destructive of serious political debate in this campaign is that Obama and McCain have had plastic political identities, while their celebrity identities have been zealously safeguarded. This is the opposite of mature politics.

Correct.  Immaturity, a prolonged adolescence, has become an American political disease.

History tells us that either McCain or Obama could possibly make a good president. But this campaign, uniquely, has given us no basis for knowing whether this is likely. Electorates have always been concerned about character in political leaders, but the traditional proofs of character - steady commitment, solid achievement - have given way to the fraudulent tinsel of celebrity.

This is American politics as American Idol. And that's a giant step backwards.

Americans will understand that when Obama faces his first crisis.

November 1, 2008.