Every candidate I’ve seen (or at least their campaign) certainly offers plenty of substance and position issues it’s just that the public unerringly chooses to obsess over who’s taller and who has good hair. It’s not a failing on the part of the candidates or the campaigns, it’s a failure on the part of the people for not really caring how the country is run (with the obvious exception of moronic single-issue voters)

If anything is killing this country, it’s pundits who don’t go away after a half-hour, a.k.a. bloggers.

The link you suggest may have roots in places we don’t expect. Obama’s background is filled with hard-core Marxists: his mother was one, his boyhood mentor was one, he hung with them at college, his first job was among them, his professional mentors were Marxist organizers, he hobnobbed with them in Chicago politics. I’ve written about this some, and continue to look for indications of how deeply his Marxist background influences his current intentions.

I’m not sure what the mechanism would be that makes all potential ideological dictators use the same sorts of personal images for their public image, but that such a mechanism exists and produces similar results is likely. The photographs don’t prove much by themselves, but as part of the larger picture, they’re… intriguing and alarming.