Last night this page was flipping channels between Star Trek and CNN's coverage of John Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama. During Anderson Cooper's turn at feeding Time Warner's stable of pundits, Obama was criticized for a dearth of new ideas, while John McCain was lauded for such 'new' ideas like the President submitting to a question-and-answer session with Congress, "just like the Prime Minister does with the Parliament in Britain".
First of all, any idea that begins with the words "just like..." is not a new idea. On this one McCain is cribbing from Jon Stewart, who was obviously cribbing from the BBC during an edition of The Daily Show a few months ago. Captain Kirk and Captain Picard can claim that the U.S.S. Enterprise travels "where no man/no one has gone before", but why is it that in every episode there's always somebody to meet them wherever they go? It's 2008: are there really going to be any new ideas? Does America need new ideas, or new leadership to make the ideas that already exist (affordable health care, reduced dependence on foreign oil, reality-based foreign policy) actually work?
There's a reason why there's no longer a Star Trek TV series in production anymore: this page may still be a fan, but most of the audience has seen all the phasers and transporters and warp drives and all the other neat stuff, and it no longer captures their imagination, just like how Question Period stopped capturing the imagination of Canada's electorate decades ago. For American voters, won't be the candidate who throws out dubiously new ideas with a limited shelf life, it's the candidate who people believe is most capable on delivering the solid good ideas.
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