America spends too much time on our politicians personal lives and not enough on the issues.

Americans are naturally concerned with the personal lives and conduct of their elected leaders. Scandals at the national elective level draw even more attention than scandals among Hollywood stars. There is a very simple reason for this: We elected them. What do John Edwards, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Bill Clinton, Kwame Kilpatrick, Gavin Newson, Elliott Spitzer and Gary Hart all have in common? They were elected. A vote is a mark of trust, and when those on whom we have bestowed our votes betray that trust, we naturally regard it as a serious personal affront; something to take offense at, something to SPEND TIME investigating. You may say this this does not follow, because you do not view adultery and sexual misdeeds as a betrayal of the trust elected leaders earn. But they are. Let us take Edwards for example. The man was an irrelevant piece of furniture in the 2008 campaign in my opinion, and so toned up the us-vs.-them, two-Americas rhetoric to keep himself in the news. While he was trumpeting about injustice towards the poor, the evil rich, and the need for the eternally vague term "change," he was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife with a blonde vamp in expensive hotel rooms. Do these strike you as the actions of a trustworthy man, of a man fit to be elected to the country's highest office? Why is this relevant? You say people concentrate too much on the people, and not the issues they deal with. But you would trust the day-to-day navigation of the Ship of State to people who would engage prostitutes, solicit gay sex in a restroom, betray their spouses on yachts named "Monkey Business" and dare the media to catch them at it, or be pleasured by a fat aide--in the Oval Office? I certainly wouldn't. Underlying your argument is the obvious fallacy that people's "personal" lives are completely divorced from their "public" lives, and thus what they do in private is nothing of our, their constituents', concern. If you are right, then the media coverage and the attention people pay to these misdeeds is out of proportion, and they should indeed concentrate on real issues that face America. But if I am right, then this concentration is merely a symptom of the TRUST we place in our leaders, those who DETERMINE the response we give to your vaunted issues, and our natural anger when that trust is betrayed. You can't, I repeat, chop a person into two parts: public and private. What he or she does in one sphere affects the other sphere proportionately because they are part of the same person. So, any misdeed in one sphere has reverberations in the other. In the case of a self-righteous hypocrite like Edwards, this makes him a hypocrite. With less outwardly puritanical politicians, it merely makes the people who elected him, most of whom have far more self- and zipper-control, disdain him as a phony. It is accepted that leaders in this civilized society are accountable to the people who elected them, thus if their sins meet with disapproval in the electorate, they must account for them, therefore, all scrutiny is called for. You paint a disturbing picture of America today, and not without reason. I think, however, that people complain far more about gas prices than they do about being deceived by John Edwards; they are more alarmed by Russia's invasion of a sovereign non-aggressor state than by the fact that Edwards could have been President. I certainly am. Certainly, it would be a pity if people ignored the destruction being rained on Georgia in favor of whether or not John Edwards fathered his mistress' child. I certainly did not; the Georgia story is far more important and alarming--and neither did CNN.com. On the day after the Olympic opening ceremonies, did the choose to concentrate on that, or the Edwards affair? No, they chose to devote their front-page headline, so to speak, to the Georgia invasion. So in conclusion, Americans spend enough time on the issues; in general more time than they spend on the sordid, but maddening and important, affairs of politicians; but what time they do spend on these politicians is merited by the fact that their actions were a betrayal of the vote of trust bestowed on that candidate.