Michael Signer, who worked as a foreign policy adviser to John Edwards' presidential campaign, offers an alarming assessment of how poorly the media has covered the foreign policy aspects of this presidential campaign. He described the response from major media outlets to John Edwards' foreign policy speeches as a "big yawn" and highlighted the fact that candidate speeches are sometimes good indicators of what's to come:

This is troubling, because what a candidate says on foreign policy matters. Often, major policy proposals are road maps to what the candidates actually do once elected. George W. Bush's famous national security speech on Sept. 23, 1999, at the Citadel in South Carolina accurately portended his most provocative policies as president, from "transforming" our armed forces through technology and lighter brigades, to disengaging from the Clinton administration's many diplomatic commitments.

My life in foreign policy elections has been disappointing. I remember wondering as I considered my first ever presidential vote in 1992 why nobody was really talking about the drastically changed world after the end of the Soviet Era. The Clinton Campaign, the Perot Campaign, none of it was really about foreign policy. (Perot's strange hemispheric populism wasn't quite what I was after.) The rest of the country was voting with their pocketbooks, it appeared, and President George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Subsequent elections in '96 and 2000 had a similar "shoulda-been" feel to me.

But 2004 was supposed to be the "foreign policy election." We had very different paths laid out before the nation. We had very different implementers of each vision. We were going as a nation to decide what direction to take.

We never reached that question, I feel. America scrapped a little bit about our war and the terrorism, but we didn't really go to the polls thinking about foreign policy. Exit polls show that the number one issue on minds of voters was something called "moral values", followed by the economy and jobs.

And so we're back where we were in 2000 and 1996 and 1992, and probably election before then. We're at a point where we can finally make a decision about the foreign policy roadmap our nation takes. So far, nobody has stopped to ask the candidates for directions.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Brain Farts