A recent McCain ad features a voiceover pronouncing McCain “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this ad. Perhaps it’s meant simply to highlight McCain’s heroic service to our country. But I don’t think so. Why include the descriptor “American” before the word “president”? Haven’t all of our presidents been American? The implication is that his opponent - let’s assume this will be Obama - is un-American by comparison. It’s simply an appeal to the people who think that McCain’s military history makes him more of a real American than that guy with the weird name, Hussein something-or-other.

Now, this is a pretty mild ad and doesn’t bother me too much, except that it’s yet another example of the bizarre and disingenuous obsession with defining what it means to be American. How does one person determine how American another person is? Should one focus on whether the other person has the requisite pieces of flair – a lapel pin, proper anthem-singing protocol, a bumper sticker supporting the troops, a love of apple pie, perhaps?

What does it mean to be an American, or to be more or less American? One of the most remarkable things about the United States is that – jokes about fat, rude tourists aside – there is no one set of characteristics that describe its people. We are as varied as our terrain. One only has to look as far as the three mainstream Presidential candidates to get a sense of this. And this is something to be proud of.

Sure, it presents a challenge. In the end, we can only elect one President to represent all of us. Each of these candidates must find a way to resonate with the American people, each of us with a unique cultural perspective and life story. But it does us a disservice to allow the focus to remain on issues like how “American” someone is. Instead, I present a radical idea: let’s look at what each candidate has done, and what they say they will do, rather than looking to superficial clues.

Let’s look at what happened yesterday in the Senate, which voted 76-22 in favor of the Webb GI Bill. The bill will increase the college tuition and other education benefits for soldiers, providing them with full tuition at public universities along with a monthly living expense stipend after completing three years of military service. Twenty-five Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for the bill, one which Senator McCain voted against. McCain’s reasoning followed that of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: that making college so attractive might make soldiers leave the military, which is bad because we need them to fight in the global war on terror.

Senator Obama addressed McCain’s dissent by saying, “I respect Sen. John McCain’s service to our country … but I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the president more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing, but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.”

McCain immediately fired back, saying that he wouldn’t tolerate lectures from someone “who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform”.

McCain’s response was an attack on Obama’s patriotism rather than a policy argument or a defense of his own position. There were other considerations that might have led McCain to vote against the bill, but we haven’t heard them yet. Instead, we’ve found out that McCain doesn’t think Obama’s enough of an American to talk about issues such as these.

Of course, a statement like McCain’s plays better in our sound bite culture than the twenty-seven reasons he preferred his own bill to Senator Webb’s. And it’s easier to point to a naked lapel as a sign that a candidate doesn’t love America. But we should all be insulted when candidates rely on fear mongering and patriotic one-upmanship rather than common sense arguments about why we should prefer one over the other. We should be offended when the media presume us to be a stupid people and rely on lowest-common-denominator, artificial issues to drum up controversy and thus ratings.

And, most importantly, we should be aware of our role in this charade. Take the time to look at the candidates’ voting records. Write letters to their campaigns and party elders if you don’t like how they’re behaving. Turn off the television next time you see a discussion about lapel pins or controversial pastors, or write to the networks and their advertisers to complain. Complacency will only result in more of the same.

If we don’t insist that we deserve better, then we don’t deserve better.