Please talk about yourself and NOT the other guy!

You, President Obama, don't want your
first term to be history's sole
remembrance. The agenda you brought
to the presidency — narrowing our
society's inequality, reuniting the body
politic in a time rife with schisms —
... isn't completed. A second term would be a second
chance.

And you, Governor Romney, need Americans to evict
the incumbent president before you bring your own
agenda to the Oval Office. You crave the opportunity
to demonstrate how private-sector expectations and
business-minded deliverables can reinvent the
American jobs machine.

But month upon month, not just day upon day, these
aren't the topics the two of you discuss with your
fellow Americans. You and your campaigns
increasingly focus only on each other. Your daily
attacks and verbal jousts may enthuse the extremists
in your respective camps — and may even keep the campaign contributions coming.

But look at yourselves. Both of you are diminished by your failure to articulate how you would
lead the United States of 2013 and beyond. You are good men who, as you've intensified your
campaigns and your assaults on one another, look nothing like leaders whom 314 million
Americans would want to trust and follow.

Instead of inspiring the voters buffeted by your comments and advertisements attacking one
another, you have become human minus signs to an America fast losing sight of your pluses.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney, in seven months one of you will stand in the January chill and take
this nation's presidential oath of office. You will face a populace that, barring some radical
turnaround, will be gravely troubled about the direction of this country. Having chosen one of
you, Americans will look at their array of economic and other problems and will want to be part
of the solutions.

Tell us now what you'll say then. Instead ...

Mr. Obama, your inartful scolding about what built whose business was beneath you. While we
realize you were trying to suggest that it takes a village to make a business successful, your
harping tone helped only those who accuse you of resenting individual success stories other than
your own. If you win re-election, you will need to work with business leaders and Republicans to
promote job growth. Let's hear less scolding, more vision about how you would lead an
American economic renaissance.

Mr. Romney, your assaults on the president's economic performance would ring more authentic
if voters were absorbing some vision of what a Romney White House would demand of Congress
— and of Americans. Stop five people at your next streetside campaign event and ask each one
what he or she understands to be your recipe for job growth. For debt reduction. For balancing
energy needs with Mideast diplomacy. We'll bet you get five blank stares. Your endlessly
emphasizing that I'm-not-Barack isn't a reason for us to fire him.

Gentlemen, you have 15 weeks to talk less about each other, and more about how, exactly, each
of you would go about solving our problems come January. We'll likely still have a debilitating
level of unemployment, including millions of people who've walked away from the workforce.
Our economy may be sailing off the "fiscal cliff" created by the expiration of tax cuts and the
mandated cuts to defense and domestic spending at the start of 2013. We'll be adding to our $16
trillion in public debt at a rate of $3 million every minute of every day. And we'll almost
certainly still be stranded deep in the political divide that keeps us from dealing with those
problems.

So start over. Inspire us.

And if you can't inspire us, at least tell us the truth about yourselves. Look us in the eye and
say, "This is who I am and this is what I do."

So far, neither of you is leveling with us. You bury problems in platitudes and boasts, as if
rescuing our ruined public finances — rescuing our nation, really — will be painless.

Mr. Obama, your Mediscare pandering in Florida on Thursday — your claim that a President
Romney would undermine Medicare — was a disservice to everyone who relies on it. The
hospital insurance program's trustees now expect it to spend its last dollar in 2024. That's five
years sooner than they projected as recently as 2010. Someone had better end Medicare as we
know it or there'll soon be no Medicare.

Mr. Romney, your insinuation that the president is interested in protecting his own job but no
one else's is beneath you. Criticizing Obama for holding 106 campaign fundraisers since he last
met with his jobs council six months ago might have some throw weight if Americans knew
exactly how your jobs council would grow employment. What federal spending would you kill, or
redeploy, and to what? Lately, all we've heard is that you can't live with the federal budget cuts
that are set to be triggered in January.

Gentlemen, you can do better. Enough with your cheap and cheapening attacks. The American
people need to know the explicit solutions you propose, and what they'll cost us.

Instead the two of you are locked, increasingly isolated, in your dispiriting Olympic biathlon — a
gladiator slugfest and a race to the bottom.