Fido was the Lou Gehrig of beagles.

When it came to watchdog duties, Fido showed up every day. Loyal. Trustworthy. I knew him for 11 years. He had a spine of steel. (Sorry, Evan Bayh’s Hillary Clinton TV ad has crept into my vocabulary.) Anyway, Fido gave our family his best in his time on Earth.

But taking Fido for a walk on a leash was always an adventure. He never heard the phrase “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Beagles like him follow their noses, sniffing the ground and marking their trail by … well … marking their trail. If you let Fido lead, you could end up way off track.

Which brings me to my point.

What affects your life most — the 1960s activities of an acquaintance, or paying 60 bucks for a tank of gas from the Middle East?

Some of the peripheral “issues” of the presidential campaign are admittedly interesting. Still, John McCain’s association with a lobbyist, Hillary Clinton’s memory of a landing in Bosnia and Barack Obama’s familiarity with a counterculture radical just take us way off track. If we look inside our own lives, those revelations don’t seem shocking or consequential.

Instead of wasting time on that stuff, it would be far more helpful to decide which of the three will work most aggressively to substantially lessen our country’s need for foreign oil. That would change America.

But it’s a complex issue. Sound bites on ethanol or biodiesel don’t capture attention like accusations of Obama being “elitist” because he dared to describe America without a shiny, politically-correct coating. (Pretty strange, considering Obama’s single mom once relied on food stamps, and he and his wife just paid off their student loans six years ago.) Yet we let such minutiae divert us in pointless directions, while Obama spent last week living the reality of Billy Joel’s line, “Honesty is such a lonely word.”