"Tented up in a ditch."

Drudge is getting awfully mean about Cindy Sheehan. There's a real danger to centering your political argument on one individual. You get the oomph of the personal, but you have a person, who might any minute say something stupid for your opponents to exclaim over. If I was camping out in the Texas sun – "tented up in a ditch" – with cameras in my face for weeks, I can't imagine what the dumbest thing I'd say would be, and I'm sure I'd completely lose touch with how it would look in the press. The real debate ought to be about the war, not about Cindy Sheehan. But it is human nature to divert our attention from a big, complex picture when we have the chance to think and talk about a particular individual. And so we have this endless focus on Ms. Sheehan.