U.S. Presidential Election as a Choice for the President of Pop Culture?

Frank Bruni at the NYTimes has a thought-provoking take
on the Presidential Election in America
at
Pop Goes the President,
suggesting that:

"This presidential election will go down as the one in which the pop-culture pander reached its ludicrous apotheosis...."
[link added by LawPundit]

Bruni closes with the comment:

"I'm not sure if that says more about them [the candidates]
or about us."

and one opinion comment to Bruni's posting writes:

"Sadly, Frank, it says more about "us", the candidates just play to the "culture" of the moment to capture attention....

I just heard a Dick Cavett interview when he says something like we are a nation that is tending toward mediocrity. I think that's optimistic, as I think we are much further down the road to being another failed empire... and so it goes..."

A failed empire?

Those words seem a bit too harsh for us at the moment, but they are a warning for a nation torn by excessive polarization of interests, boundless greed and the absence of core values that once made the country great but today make the United States look more like the countries the immigrants once fled. United the nation may yet stand, but deeply divided it may surely fall.