With the U.S. financial markets threatening to implode just months before the presidential elections, that adage certainly applies to us.
A real crisis seems to put everything else into a very different perspective.
For one, attacks by either presidential candidate on the credentials or positions of the other candidate seem petty when all the voters are focused on whether or not our lending institutions will survive, or whether we and our children will be saddled with enormous debt.
Studies show that negative campaigning is effective, but all those studies were done on races that took place out of the crisis mode.
National elections, after all, are frequently decided by the undecided voters, not those who have already come down on the right and the left. In this election, one wonders if those undecided will be swayed by negative campaigning, or by the candidate who offers the best hope of bringing the country out of this crisis.