Google has 80,800 hits for “Obama is too.” He’s described as too young, too inexperienced, too naive, too idealistic, too optimistic, too practical, too boring, too pious, too liberal and too conservative. There are 62,000 hits for “Obama is unelectable.”

Hillary, on the other hand, is also unelectable. So are Edwards, Kucinich and Gravel, for that matter. Add to the “unelectable” list McCain, Guliani, Romney, Huckabee, Thompson and the whole of the Republican Party in general.

There is a clear problem here: too many pundits, not enough substance. Every major candidate has at one point or another been called “unelectable.” And clearly, at least one of them will be elected.

The Internet may allow greater access to the opinions of political experts, but much, much more than that, it allows larger numbers of presumptuous idiots have their own soapboxes ... and any kind of informed political environment is thus suffering. In a grown-up version of the old “My dad could beat up your dad” argument from the schoolyard, thousands of blog owners have taken to making vague, unsubstantiated claims about the stupidity of the opposition candidate, all in the authoritative voice of an overconfident eight year old.

It is the sheer smug overconfidence of these blogs that tips me off to the fact that they must be wrong. In the interest of an ego stroke, or possibly to increase their visitor count, blog owners the world over have redefined standard political commentary. Nuance has given way to fuzzy, meaningless name calling, and with the media now paying so much attention to these blogs, it has polluted our TV screens and newspapers as well.

Just because you can turn a phrase doesn’t mean your criticism will hold any importance, or even mean anything. We have had hundreds of phrases crammed down our throats in this election — Obama is “green behind the ears,” Clinton is “too cold,” Edwards is “thin-skinned.” To what extent are any of these descriptors really relevant?

Who actually knows what kind of experience is necessary to become president? As far as I know, none of these candidates has ever been president before and thus lacks the necessary presidential experience in a very literal sense. Who actually cares if our president is cold if he, or Hillary, has the credentials? And what does “thin-skinned” even mean, in the context of an elected leader?

Furthermore, can any of these criticisms hold sway in today’s complex political machine? Most of a president’s decisions are made by people either outside of the White House (think tanks) or by those on Capitol Hill (lobbyists and the president’s own advisors).

I can only hope for the sake of our democracy that the Stephen Colbert approach does not prevail in our political discourse. In an appearance on the No Spin Zone with Bill O’Reilly, Colbert once said, still in character, “They criticize what you say but they never give you credit for how loudly you say it.” If these obnoxious and extreme commentators (who actually bear a striking resemblance to Mr. Colbert’s stage identity) are allowed to further propagate their exaggerated sound bites, we will have an election that will be won on two to three words.

I can only hope that the average voter has more discretion than to take everything these full-time chatterboxes say for granted. They are, after all, paid to spew opinion, fill a time slot, or meet the word count of a blog, whether their analysis is well-reasoned or not.

Of course, political commentary has a place in our democracy. We need experts, and their opinions, for the sake of informed discussion. But not these kinds of commentators. The more idiots who go around trumpeting “unelectable” like it’s some sort of battle cry, the less we will pay attention to the facts. The more talk of how your candidate can beat up my candidate in a fight, the less able we are to understand the complex political situation of our country.

As I see it, in this race, only one candidate is unelectable, and that’s Bill Richardson. And that’s because he dropped out yesterday.