I really enjoyed this one.

-- Michael
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Jobs go overseas, and Americans hurt for it, but still the Democrats blame the Republicans and the Republicans blame the Democrats because if they convince us that they are right, that puts them on the "winning team" -- the one that did not create the problem.

Meanwhile, let somebody else holler about it.

Our government has evolved to the point where, from the White House on down, it is run not by statesmen but by pollsters, who in turn create an ersatz wave of public opinion off what the spin doctors have convinced us we really think.

We used to think for ourselves in this country. There were times when we were one of the few countries in the world that did. We didn't even know what a spin doctor was until 1952 when a group of them won a presidential election in the first television-fueled campaign by putting a retired Army general before the cameras, selling him like a breakfast cereal simply by having him grin and say 5,000,000 times:

"It's time for a change."

He won, although he never really said a change to what.

So the floodgates burst open, and we let the advertising industry, the public relations firms, the spin doctors rob us of the ability tell right from wrong and good from bad because it was easier for them to tell us what we didn't know we were thinking. They cowed us into never daring to take a side that wasn't politically, racially, gender-wise or chauvinistically correct.

One night I hope we will sit in front of the boob tube and hear what the pundits have to tell us that everybody in a state or a county or a precinct had voted exactly the way their pundit and pollsters said was impossible.

For the full column by Jerry Izenberg, go to:

http://www.nj.com/columns/l...