Stopping the home stretch U-turn!

Given the long nature of the '08 presidential campaign and all of the history it has made and the wild accusations flung through the primaries and the general election race, I would have thought I'd be pretty jaded to politics at this point.
But this week, I found myself a little more disheartened with the people who are and who could be in charge of America at this complicated moment.
It's a complicated moment, of course, because there are so many problems. I never did think I'd see a day when the two wars that we are entrenched in would take a back seat to anything. Except that now the financial sky is falling and there seems to be no government fix fast enough to prevent at least some temporary, severe pain.
And there are only 27 more x's to make on the calendar before the Big Day gets here.
With under four weeks to go, I hadn't expected William Ayers to come up again, because that connection, described as tenuous at best, had already been exhausted months ago (at least I thought it had) in the Democratic primaries. Even less reassuring was to hear again about Sen. John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal of almost 30 years ago.
There's a bigger problem with these rehashed accusations. The final month, I would think, would be when candidates try to make their best case for why he should be elected, not why the other man shouldn't. To see that the future president (whoever he is) would devote any time to malice at a time like this disproves the notion that either candidate is a change or represents the future.
The good news is that that future in those 27 days includes another debate between the presidential candidates. We should demand that the candidates stop taking chainsaws to each other’s character and firmly nail down how their going to be a “maverick” or bring about “change” in the nation’s highest office. They have to do it because there is a funny thing about change: we don't really have a choice about it whether we want it anymore: We need change in politics now, because the future is coming at us very fast.