Watching coverage of the Democratic National Convention the thought comes to me that operatives are banking on Americans suffering from amnesia. How else can it be explained that speaker after speaker is saying John McCain equals an extension of the George Bush administration? How can it be that the speakers tell us that we cannot afford another 4 years of the same past eight years? How can Senator Joseph Biden keep a straight face when he tells the audience that McCain agrees with everything this administration has done and is doing? Biden has to be counting on a national epidemic of amnesia. Either that, or the rarefied air of the Mile High City has gotten to him.

Do the democrat speakers actually believe that voters have forgotten that it was Senator John McCain who ran against George Bush for President – in an embittered race? They’re seemingly praying that voters don’t remember that it was Senator John McCain who voted against President Bush’s proposed tax cuts when they were tied to pork barrel spending. And they are apparently counting on voters to forget that it was John McCain, the lone voice in the Republican Party, to early on renounce the way the Iraq war was being fought and call for additional troops to go in with a surge and bring the battle to a successful end.

If anything, John McCain is a maverick in his party. His record shows he reaches across party lines and votes his conscience on issues.

Former president Jimmy Carter hit the bottom of the barrel Thursday when he accused John McCain of using his prisoner of war experience for political gain. That accusation is shameful and should be decried by the Democratic Party as a whole. John McCain served this country with honor and that’s a legitimate part of his background – as are his votes and his record in Washington.

It would be good to hear more about Barack Obama’s record. It would be good to know just who Barack Obama is, what he has done, what he will do for America – specifically in the areas of jobs and the economy, national security, and how he would handle Afghanistan, Russia, Georgia, China and the world.

It would be good to leave jingoism and personal attacks behind and begin true talk about issues, specifically the issues that face this great nation today.

As I flip from CSpan to PBS, MSNBC, FOX, CNN and then go to the national networks for prime time, I wait for the real answers to come. I wait to hear the accomplishments of Barack Obama – what he accomplished in Chicago, in Springfield, in Washington, D.C. I wait to learn more about his resume.

Yes, he’s an impressive man with a beautiful family. But the nation needs to know more than that. We all deserve to know more than just that.

It’s all well and good to create a Grecian forum on the fifty-yard line of a stadium and celebrate the stentorian abilities of Senator Obama, but we need to know just who this man is and what he would do.

John McCain is known as a maverick on the Hill. The nation knows who he is.

He’s the man who aired a commercial Thursday—on the night of Obama’s acceptance speech – not criticizing Obama but congratulating him and honoring Thursday as historical for falling on the same date as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. The spot ended with McCain telling Obama that the race would begin again on Friday.

It was a classy gesture for any candidate. It soared above slash and burn politics.

It told us even more about just who Senator John McCain is.

Now we need to learn just what makes up Senator Barack Obama.

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Mary Laney is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer