What's Love Got To Do With It?

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Thursday, December 13 2007, 12:10PM

The passing of Ike Turner on Wednesday got me thinking about some of my favorite songs from his ex-wife Tina. With all the attacks and counter-attacks being thrown about in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, I'm first reminded of Turner's famous comeback song "We Don't Need Another Hero." In Tina Turner's words, "Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage, can't make the same mistake this time." That seems to be the sentiment from the Democratic voters who want nothing more than to sweep the Republicans from the White House.

But there's another line from the song that sums up the GOP conundrum. As Tina put it, "There's got to be something better out there." Maybe that's why the Republican voters still haven't made up their minds about their presidential preferences. To put it crassly, should they pick the guy with the three wives, the Mormon guy, or the Southern preacher guy who lost all that weight? While both sides would love to find the candidate who is "simply the best," the reality is that "what you get is what you see."

The truth is that no candidate comes without baggage. Candidates are people, and people are not perfect. Whenever we put our faith in people, we're bound to be disappointed from time to time. But what the voters have to decide is just how much disappointment they're willing to accept.

For some inexplicable reason, someone on the Clinton team was pushing the story this week that Barack Obama had used marijuana and cocaine in his youth. That might be an interesting news story if our last two presidents hadn't also experimented with illegal drugs. And it might have been newsworthy if Obama hadn't already disclosed this information in his first book, Dreams From My Father. Instead, it looked like a desperate ploy from a campaign that has already tried to use its opponent's kindergarten essays against him. Memo to the Clinton campaign: chill out on the heavy-handed attacks.

On the GOP side, the Republicans are busy dredging up the Arkansas River to find any dirt they can dig up on former Governor Mike Huckabee, the new frontrunner in Iowa. So far they've come up with the news that the Huckster pushed for the parole of a convicted rapist who ended up murdering a woman after his release. It's Willie Horton all over again, without the racial baggage.

What they need to be worried about is Huckabee's plan to quarrantine AIDS patients and the news that he once tried to stop an abortion for a 15-year-old retarded girl who was raped by her stepfather. Those views may play well in the Republican primary, but they won't fly in the general election. On the other hand, Huckabee's impassioned defense of providing state benefits to children of illegal immigrants was refereshingly humane, even if it doesn't play well in the primaries.

And then there's Mitt.

That old compromisin', enterprisin', anything but tranquilizing, Right on Mitt.

Forget the flip flops, it's Mitt's Mormonism that may doom his candidacy. Despite Mitt's well-publicized speech on religion last week, a lot of Republican voters still have questions about Romney and Mormonism. They may not say it to his face, but we'll see what they say when they get in the privacy of the polling booth.

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Are Americans more likely to vote for a Mormon, an African American or a woman? And with an electorate hungry for change but with no executive branch incumbent on the ballot for the first time in 56 years, we have no modern template for this presidential election.

Everybody's got baggage. Barack is young and black, Hillary is old school and female, Edwards is a trial lawyer, Mitt is a Mormon, Huckabee is a Huckabee from Arkansas, and Rudy is, well Rudy. So maybe we won't all fall in love with any of the top-tier candidates.

Which brings me back to Tina. Whats love got to do with it? In Tina's words, "What`s love but a second hand emotion?" Maybe she's right. Maybe we don't need to love our presidential candidates. Maybe we just need to find someone who we can respect and trust, even if we don't love them. "Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?"

One of the reasons I haven't endorsed a presidential candidate is because I've wanted to see how they performed under pressure. In the course of the past year, every single candidate has disappointed me at some point. If it's not Obama fumbling the Donnie McClurkin situation, it's Richardson blowing a question at the Logo debate, or Hillary bringing out the brass knuckles against her opponents. But there have also been times when the candidates impressed me and inspired me. You have to take the good with the bad.

If there's one thing I learned from working with Bill Clinton, it's that no politician is perfect and no candidate will agree with you on every issue. But still I want to be inspired. I want to be excited when I cast my ballot. So at some point next year we Americans have to figure it out, although I can't say I've figured it out myself. As Tina Turner says, "It may seem to you that I`m acting confused when you`re close to me. If I tend to look dazed, I`ve read it someplace, I`ve got cause to be."

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