I had an opportunity to hike in Zion National Park this summer. A few observations.

First, it is truly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Make plans to get there, take the kids, and be sure to hike in the Virgin River, which in summer is only a foot deep and you can follow it upstream between increasingly narrow, sheer canyon walls.

Second, throughout my time there, as well as elsewhere in Utah and even in Las Vegas, whose airport is a gateway to Zion, I heard more foreign accents than not. The hotel staff near Zion estimated that 80% of the visitors to the park were European.

The weak dollar has made the US a bargain for Euro-rich Europeans, which made our trip seem somehow more exotic, as if we were hiking in Europe, but without the long plane flight and the high prices!

This is the question I keep hearing.

With the economy in severe straits, inflation beginning to rise, home foreclosures turning whole communities into ghost towns, two long and unpopular wars, the disaster that was the management of the Katrina disaster, Vice President Dick Cheney possibly the most reviled public figure in recent memory, and President Bush looking for a good excuse to avoid even attending the convention in St. Paul, unprecedented numbers of Republican members of congress are finding this a good time to retire. Democrats appear poised to make good gains in both houses.

Yet poll after poll shows McCain and Obama in a neck-and-neck race.

McCain, at 72, has been hammering Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. Yet he picks a running mate who until two years ago was mayor of a town of 8,000 souls on the outskirts of Anchorage. She does have more executive experience (as small-town mayor and now as small-state governors) than senators McCain, Obama, and Biden put together, if that experience somehow translates into the ability to take on top world leaders.

So, what gives?

Are we as a nation so unable to imagine a brilliant, stable, charismatic half-Black man as President that we would prefer an old war hero with a famously short temper and a wildly inconsistent record, just because he is White?