As I mentioned before, McCain released a new ad almost immediately after Biden was announced as Obama’s running mate. Biden, of course, ran against Obama in the primary and had some pretty harsh criticisms of him at the time. Perfect fodder for a McCain ad:

There’s only one problem with this ad: people today don’t care. We live in a world where cognitive dissonance is the norm. We’re so conditioned by our society toward relativism and cynicism that an about-face in opinion like this doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s a modern ad in a postmodern world.

In earlier times, people would look at this ad and decide one of three things: Biden was lying during the primary, he’s lying now, or he was grossly ignorant of Obama’s “readiness” during the primary and in just a few short months has discovered his error. Whichever one they landed on, Biden’s credibility and trustworthiness would be severely damaged. People still believed in integrity; they believed that insincerity in one area was a character flaw that would affect all areas of a person’s judgment. That is, they would think to themselves, “if we can’t trust what he says about Obama, how can we trust what he says about how he would improve the economy?”

Not so today. Today we shrug our shoulders and say, “that’s politics.” We can do that because we have replaced the values of integrity and character with the values of pragmatism and utilitarianism. In other words, no one cares whether Joe Biden has personal integrity; they care whether he’s going to help or hurt the Democratic ticket, and whether his ideas for change will benefit the nation.

We’ve been conditioned to think this way over many years, through many political campaigns and administrations.

This isn’t the first time a bitter primary opponent became a cheerleading running-mate. Remember the 1980 Republican primary? Who was it that ridiculed Reagan’s proposed economic policies as “voodoo economics”? That would be George H. W. Bush, during the primary. Later, of course, Bush became Reagan’s veep and suddenly supply-side economics was okay. Nobody cared about that — but they did care when he pledged not to raise taxes and then broke his promise. When it impacted policy and, ultimately, people’s pocketbooks, it cost him reelection. We learned.

Then there was Bill Clinton. Sure he was a louse — unfaithful to his wife, lecherous in the Oval Office — but nobody cared as long as the economy was going well. Since his moral lapses and character flaws didn’t appear to impact public policy, everything including perjury was rationalized away. We learned.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned about and highlighted the moral failings of earlier presidents — Kennedy and FDR having mistresses, Washington and Jefferson owning slaves, etc. — and these facts have been used to convince us that no leader has ever had real integrity. All perceived heroes are deconstructed. We’ve given up hope of the possibility that any candidate could ever really be a person of character, so all that’s left to us is the practical and utilitarian.

And that’s why McCain’s ad doesn’t work. He’s not going to get any traction trying to tear down his opponent’s integrity, or for that matter playing up his own integrity and heroism (’96 also-ran Bob Dole was a war hero, too). What voters want today is someone whom they perceive as competent and having domestic (primarily economic) and foreign policies that will benefit them (voters) the most.

Pragmatism and utilitarianism are the only currency in modern political campaigns. Integrity is passé.