Category: Politics

From the NYT, “With a Surge, Obama Makes His Case.” Here’s a quote:

The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.

Even before his latest victories, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had whittled away at the advantages amassed last year by Mrs. Clinton.

He now enjoys a big financial advantage. Her big lead in national polls is gone. By most counts, Mr. Obama can now claim more delegates pledged to him. He has won far more states than Mrs. Clinton, although she won some of the big prizes, like California and New Jersey.

Just think about this for a second: three or so months ago, Barack had a fork in ’em and Hilary was measuring the drapes in the Oval Office.

Of course, as the rest of this article makes clear, there’s a long way to go before we figure out who is the Democrat’s nominee. Still, it’s pretty exciting to see my dude still in it. Go Obama!

The Michigan primaries are coming up on Tuesday, but it’s going to be meaningless for the Democrats because of squabbling within the party. As I understand it, when the state party moved up its primary date with permission from the national party, the national organizers said that Michigan’s delegates won’t count. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards aren’t campaigning at all (Dennis “rhymes with spinach” Kucinich is making some stops though). Obama and Edwards aren’t going to be on the ballot and there are no write-ins allowed. So basically, if you don’t want to vote for Clinton or Kucinich, you’re only choice is to vote for uncommitted, as this Ann Arbor News article about a group pushing for “uncommitted” explains.

First off, this is just bullshit. People can complain about the system in Iowa or New Hampshire all they want, and maybe they have a point, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of stupidness that is the way we pick candidates for president. The idea that I can’t even write in the name of the candidate I want (Obama) is ridiculous, and voting for uncommitted is the same as not voting at all. I don’t know what the right way to do these things, but what’s going on this year– especially in Michigan (Florida too, I think)– is definitely the wrong way.

Anyway, this is the climate that just might make me vote for Mitt Romney. This is part of a campaign/joke over at the Daily KOS, which is explained here and here. Basically, the idea is to vote for Mitt and thus prolong division in the Republican party and Romney’s campaign. As the Daily KOS puts it, “We want more of that money spent trashing his fellow Republicans. We want an unsettled field with Republicans fragmented and fighting. We want the theocons (Huckabee), the neocons (McCain), and the corportate cons (Romney) to maintain viable top-tier candidates in the race for as long as possible, since it fuels their civil war. Heck, if we truly hit the jackpot, we might even get a brokered GOP convention.”

It’s an intriguing idea. If it’s easy to do, I will probably do it. But I’m not sure I can vote for a Republican even as a joke….

Oddly, two political posts in a row! Well, four more thoughts, in no particular order:

• Sure, everyone is excited about what happened last night and everyone wants to say that this means that “such and such” is going to happen. We’ll see, but I wouldn’t want to make a bet that the race is going to be between Hucklebee and Obama quite yet. Having said that…
• I do think that this does represent “change,” which I think is an interesting way of saying (or not saying) “shift to the left.” This too will be interesting to see if this is a trend that will continue.
• I watched part of some of the speeches from folks last night (I was flipping around channels), and it was interesting to me how carefully everyone I saw was speaking in terms of volume and decorum. None of this Howard Dean scream stuff.
• My dude won, but considering the fact that I have in 23 years of voting, I was in the majority for president once (well, twice, since Clinton had two terms), I’m not sure if that’s a good omen or not.

I grew up in Iowa– Davenport in much of grade school, but mostly in Cedar Falls. I don’t want to sound like an old man, but I just don’t remember the caucuses being that big of a deal when I was a kid.

I did go to a debate of Democratic candidates in Des Monies in 1984, the first year I could vote (I picked Mondale), and I think I wrote an article about it for my high school newspaper. When I was in college during the 1988 presidential year, I lived with some folks who were very active in working for Paul Simon and Mike Dukakis (I ended up voting for Dukakis). I moved away from Iowa after college, meaning that I haven’t had a lot of first-hand experience with the process since (and it also means I’ve lived outside of Iowa more than I’ve lived in the state). And while my parents and sisters and in-laws will talk politics at family gatherings on occasion, no one in my family is especially politically active. My parents have caucused before (I haven’t), but that’s about it.

So with all that in mind, it’s kind of interesting for me to watch the process this year.

First off, it’s a weird way of electing potential candidates for office. The way that it works, basically, is you go to a precinct of some sort– a school, a church, sometimes even someone’s house– and you chat with folks, have coffee, etc. Then you go to a corner of the room with your candidate– Obama folks here, Clinton folks there, Dodd folks over there, etc. And then, if you are in a group that has less than 15% of the folks there, your candidate is not considered “viable.” So, if you are for Christopher Dodd or Joe Biden or whoever, you basically have two choices: either you stick by your guns and your vote is irrelevant, or you get persuaded to go to a more viable candidate’s corner. Oh, and this whole thing takes time– no just going in to vote and leave. So, to sum up: your vote isn’t a secret, you are being lobbied all the way through the process, and it’s a pain in the ass.

Second, the ads out there have been something else. Usually when I’m back in Iowa, especially in spring or summer, I am routinely amused and perplexed by the advertisements for farm seeds and herbicides. But when I was back for Christmas this year, I was startled by the wall-to-wall political ads, crowding out pretty much anything and everything else, four or five 30 second spots for different candidates all in a row. It started to bug me after about three days; I cannot imagine what it would be like to live with this for months and months.

Is this a way to nominate presidential candidates? Probably not. Much of what you’ve probably heard about Iowa in the national media is true. It is a very white state (though less than it was when I was a kid, especially with an influx of migrant workers from Latin America and Eastern Europe), it is more concerned economically with farming than most other states, and there aren’t that many people there, with more people living within 30 miles of my house than there are in the entire state. And like primaries everywhere, only something like 10 or 20 percent of these people actually participate in the process, and those people tend to be on the extremes on the political spectrum.

On the other hand, there probably isn’t any way to pick a candidate that would make everyone happy, so hey, why not Iowa? Iowans are a well-educated and thoughtful lot, so I’d rather have them making these early decisions than residents of a lot of other places. Because it is a small state, candidates really do have to do a lot of in-person contact with the candidates– my father told me that something like one-third of all Iowans have seen at least one of the candidates speak in some forum, and you can imagine that a lot of folks have seen many more than that. If you had the first test in a bigger state (like Michigan) or in a region of states, you wouldn’t get that sort of contact.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I’d be caucusing for Obama, personally. Instead, I’ll keep half an eye on the returns tonight.

Via Facebook (of all things!), I came across this: “Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy,” an archive of an article that was pulled from the Family Security Matters web site. This one might take a bit of explaining:

Family Security Matters (as far as I can tell) is a very conservative web site with the goal of protecting us from terrorist (the Iraqis responsible for 9/11 type of terrorists), Muslims, Mexicans, the left wing, etc. Think Dick Chenney’s and Pat Buchanan’s love-child of a web site. Now apparently, the article by Phillip Atkinson was yanked after being published on the Family Security Matters web site because it was too nutty for even this group of nutjobs. “Why is that,” you ask? Well basically, Atkinson’s article laments the problems of democracy and how if we wanted to get something done (like defeating the terrorist), it would be a heck of a lot better to have a dictatorship. And Atkinson has an idea about who that dictator should be. Here are the closing paragraphs from the piece:

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Wow. And the thing is is that I think that this piece got pulled from this web site not because it is at odds with the beliefs and hopes of the folks running this organization, but because Atkins is saying something out-loud that these people believe and hope but know they cannot say. Scary stuff, if you ask me.