Editorial voices: Please, let's get serious

Wednesday's presidential debate between Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tells you something about why the media have credibility problems. The questions were set up to demean the candidates and to bait them into small-minded mudslinging.

If this debate were pulled out of a time capsule in 25 years, observers would not know that the United States in 2008 faced serious crises -- the war in Iraq, economy, health care, retirement pensions -- that will require the next president to marshal the American people around solutions.

SACRAMENTO BEE

First, you have to wonder why ABC News thought it was a good idea to have George Stephanopoulos, who was one of President Bill Clinton's highest-ranking aides, serve up questions at a debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Second, you have to wonder why Stephanopoulos, who has been resurrected as a television commentator, thought to ask Obama about ... Bill Ayers.

Obama knows Ayers, a former radical and member of the Weather Underground who is now an academic in Chicago. They met years ago. They served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which provides money for antipoverty efforts.

Ah, we know Ayers too. And his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. If you know people in Chicago academic circles, chances are you know Ayers and Dohrn. ...So we're going to side with Mayor Richard Daley on this one.

"There are a lot of reasons that Americans are angry about Washington politics. And one more example is the way Sen. Obama's opponents are playing guilt by association, tarring him because he happens to know Bill Ayers," Daley said Thursday. "I don't condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles."

Well said. Now how about getting back to the real campaign?

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

A flag pin that Barack Obama sometimes doesn't wear? Obama's neighbor, an English professor who was a member of the radical Weather Underground -- 40 years ago? And again with Hillary Clinton's bogus Bosnia recollections and Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Those subjects dominated the first half of Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate on ABC News, a debate that was defined more by the moderators' questions than by the candidates' answers. Voters deserve better.... Why no question about the recent food riots around the world as the price of sustenance skyrockets? What about Wednesday's death penalty decision in which the Supreme Court ruled lethal injection constitutional?

NEWSDAY