Blog of Jeff

Yes, it is a good day for the U.S. Many (maybe most) people both here and abroad had doubts that America would ever elect a black person. Sure, it was always theoretically possible but there also that simmering doubt about whether enough white people would really pull the lever. It may not have happened without the incredible damage done by Bush/economy/failed wars, but it did happen.

And it is perfectly natural that the media is spending a lot of time documenting this day but the stock market is falling again and Russia is rattling sabers so it only took a day for a set of reminders that the world is still a dangerous place in a dangerous time. Good luck to you, Mr. President.

After a while of not blogging, I am trying to get back into it. I was going nuts thinking about how much I hate both of these candidates every day and had to stop thinking about it. Fortunately, I have found one policy difference between them that I can actually hang my hat on. Obama would like to shift federal transportation dollars away from highways and into mass transit. McCain would prefer to keep the ratio of those two as status quo. I know that a lot of mass transit projects end up bloated, disorganized and not fully used. However, the bottom line is that there is no way for this nation to reduce our fossil fuel usage without increasing the numbers of people using mass transit. I’ve travelled plenty of placed that had good mass transit systems, so it can be done.

Well, McCain just went on his Latin America tour talking about how he’s going to make comprehensive immigration his top priority if he becomes president. Yipeee, he just went to the biggest source of our illegal immigration and broadcast his intent to give them amnesty. I guess 11 million illegal immigrants isn’t enough for McCain. His plan is to grow the illegal population until it is big enough to swallow the entire country.

Of course, this Boston Globe article shows that Obama is up to his eyeballs in corruption and land deals in Chicago. His plan to hand government money to private developers who build cheap, crappy buildings and then let them run down ended up doing just that. Poor people got screwed and many of the developers involved got cushy jobs in Obama’s campaign.

I’m leaning Obama at this point. UUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHH! But only because electing an African-American would probably be good for race relations in this country. Affirmative action at its finest; I may vote for him to be president because of his color. That’s all I’ve got at this point, because I can’t name one single policy of his that sounds good to me. Hopefully, he will be mediocre enough that he will fail to implement most of his ideas.

Of course, that idea of McCain winning now so that Hillary can save us in 2012 might not be so bad. But I don’t really like her either. I just thought she was better than these two COMPLETE AND TOTAL SELLOUTS that we have running. At least we know who owns the Clintons. Nader is starting to look better and better. And he was right about those NBA referees even though everyone laughed at him at the time …

I’m still trying to wake up from the last Clinton - Obama debate. It didn’t have any of that last gasp desperation that makes these things so exciting. Just a lot of rehashing old mistakes without a lot of energy. Clinton greatly exaggerated her foreign escapades. Obama said some condescending things about religious gun-owners. They both agree on most issues. Same old, same old.

If they want to do something different, how about a debate where the superdelegates attend and ask the questions? Then they vote based on the debate. It could be a winner take all, right here, right now kind of event.

The other option is to start giving them personality tests. Doesn’t it seem strange that corporations throw a barrage of tests at people to examine their personality traits and whether or not they would be a good fit, but we just hand the keys to the Whitehouse to somebody just based on how they look through the media lens. Hell, a sizable chunk of the people who vote for them are voting for a political party and don’t know anything deep about the candidate they are supporting. American Idol probably is a better model for how to select a singer than the presidential race as a model to select a president.

And, as I have from the beginning, I still dislike all the options.

Well, Obama did give the kind of speech that I thought he should give. It might have been a little long-winded and made some strange comparisons (Ferrraro’s comments and Wright’s comments being framed as being equally politically incorrect, for example), but all-in-all, it seems like a good speech. I think the mainstream media did stay true to its “Obamamania” fixation by praising his political courage and ability to eloquently speak about racial issues instead of continuing to probe the issue’s ramifications in terms of Obama’s judgement in staying close to Wright and his church for two decades before realizing that it might have some negative impact.

It seems like Obama should have realized at some point that he could do more for the people of that church if he wasn’t in its shadow before he was 1 year into a presidential campaign, but still, he did stop and address the issue in a positive way. I also found it interesting that he spoke about being raised by white grandparents, because I’m curious what they would have thought of the messages being espoused at that church. But, I’ll take him at his word that Pastor Wright was a strong and positive influence on him despite his anti-establishment rhetoric.

I almost can’t consider Wright’s as purely racial so much as anti-power. Government, rich people, white people and any other perceived power group seemed to be on the pastor’s bad list and they were probably all interchangeable. I suspect he would have been one on the ones to consider people like Colin Powell to be as bad as the rest, because of the assumption that he had to sell out to achieve his success.

I am still probably leaning McCain, but Obama just nudged himself a bit higher than Hillary in my mind for how he handled this issue. Of course, now that it looks like Hillary has no chance, I may just be subconciously looking for reasons to back the expected winner. I’m just deep enough to recognize my own shallowness …

Wow, I like that closing quote. I should probably see if anyone else ever said it first …

The news that Obama’s church is a little left of center and has an inflammatory pastor doesn’t bother as much as his attempt to convince us all that he was an active member of that church for 20 + years and was simply shocked, shocked to hear about these crazy sermons blasting the rich white government of the United States.

I am not really an Obama fan to start with, but I would have been a lot more impressed if he had just owned up to the fact that he goes to a church where these types of views are espoused. I would have appreciated a candid statement along the lines of “This is a predominantly black church in a poor neighborhood of Chicago. I don’t agree with all of their views, but I understand why Pastor Wright says these things, why this congregation responds to it and why these folks feel this way. I want to represent them and all of the people in the United States and that means remembering these people and how they feel. They don’t feel like they have been represented by the American government in the past and that is a weight on them just as much as it is a weight on this nation. We need a new government, one that everyone can feel is representative of all of us and that is what I am committed to bringing this country.”

He could have used this as a reminder that he comes from someplace very different from our past presidents and that can be a very good thing. Instead, he’s playing it the conservative “political” way. He used them to get ahead in Chicago and Illinois politics and now he’s dumping them for national politics. His new kind of politics sure looks a lot like the old kind.

It’s an incredibly exciting race now, between two people with light-weight experience to be a President. A few years in the senate doing next to nothing, with Hillary being able to add 8-years of life in the White House as a spouse. And the more Hillary talks about bringing peace to Ireland, facing her fears on her trip with Sinbad and the lessons learned from her complete failure on health care last time around, the sillier she sounds. Sure, she’s smart and knows politics, but her list of accomplishments without Bill is pretty thin.

As far as Obama, now that he is plugging away with the “I never wanted to go into Iraq, because it was a distraction from the real war in Afghanistan,” it makes me wonder if he is actually willing to go on record with a plan to increase our troop levels there. I somewhat agree with the general idea that we can’t forget that front, but as a Democrat running against an unpopular war, does he have the nerve to suggest that he wants to increase support for the war he likes? If he doesn’t have the guts to commit more resources to that region, then he really should shut up about it. Our allies aren’t going to send any more troops into harm’s way for him any more than Bush at this point, so it’s on us to accomplish our goals there. If he thinks Afghanistan is the right war, that probably means sending some units from Iraq to Afghanistan. Not a popular idea with the troops, the Democratic party or the general public at this point in time. You can make a pretty convincing argument that botching up Afghanistan is terrible for the long term security of the U.S., however.

And it would be a “fight fire with fire” way to go after McCain’s national security credentials. Obama wouldn’t be running as a dovish pacifist eager to avoid conflict everywhere, but as a commander-in-chief with a different set of priorities on where to fight. I just think he’ll lose a lot of his hardcore left-wing support on that policy idea if he pushes it.

Yuck. That’s my feeling towards all of the remaining candidates. Right off the bat, I want a strong border enforcement candidate and I’m SOL there. McCain says he’s that guy now, but he’s also the guy that tried to give 12 million illegal immigrants legal status, so I’m not very convinved on that front. The Democrats tend to take the view that as long as the immigrants are likely to vote for us, let them all in. So, that’s a loser issue for me.

My second issue would probably be the war and I suspect that none of these candidates are as different as they would like us to believe. They will all have to listen to the commanders on the ground and here the best-case/worst-case scenarios and decide. And, they will probably all reduce troop levels as a tactical necessity (we’re running out of them) and the decisions will be about how fast and how many get pulled. McCain will pull out the fewest and the slowest, probably Obama would pull out the most and the fastest with Hillary in the middle, but it will all be matters of degree, not radical change; I just can’t picture the field commanders saying a drastic pull-out would be good for the region and they will probably all be scared of us having to go back into a worse situation in the future, which would involve all the costs of mobilizing and returning instead of trying to secure it while we are already there.

I guess my third issue would be health care and that probably puts Hillary slightly ahead of Obama and Obama way ahead of McCain. Their plans on paper don’t count for nearly as much as their ability to actually get a proposal through congress. Which, ironically enough, is probably where McCain is far and away the strongest of the three. If he had a decent health plan, he could probably pass it because of his deep ties in congress. Out of the three, he is the only person who actually has experience passing major bi-partisan legislation. For all of Obama’s talk about a new bipartisan way of doing things, he has never worked with Republican leaders on anything and it remains to be seen if he really could. For Hillary, it remains to be seen if she would even try. She might accept failure if she can hammer the Republicans with it in the mid-terms to try and build a better congress for years 3 and 4. I suspect she has a tendency to think tactically that way, because of what they went through when congress shifted in Bill’s terms.

Let’s see, what else is there? Oh, yeah; the economy. I don’t believe presidents have diddly-squat to do with the overall economy, especially in this age of so many global influences, but I guess I would rate Hillary the best of the three in terms of talking about it. She knows the lingo and understands the concepts. The brutal reality here is that our next president will be taking over a country in a recession, with massive deficits and an ongoing war. Will they increase taxes? They probably should, because low-taxes at a time of war is historically stupid. However, higher taxes may deepen or prolong the recession. So, most likely all three will punt and run up bigger deficits to be cleaned up at a happier time by a different president.

My last big issue would be defense spending. The defense budget includes billions of dollars on stupid, unncessary and non-functional ideas. Missile defense doesn’t work and we’re more likely to be hit with a suitcase bomb than a missile. Nuclear submarines aren’t exactly the weapon of choice against Al Quaeda and we already have the most powerful air force in the world by a factor of 10, so to be building more fighters and bombers is a complete waste of money. But none of these candidates will touch defense spending with a 10-foot pole. In fact, they will probably increase it just to show how defense-friendly they are. At the very least, I wish they would redirect the money into projects with some practical value. Special forces, cyber-forces, cultural forces, law enforcement troops and other things useful in counter-terrorism/nation-building would make a lot more sense at this point.

So, it’s an incredibly exciting election cycle with 3 candidates that I dislike. It’s just a great round of play-offs in a sporting league when you don’t like any of the teams. Yip, yip, hooray….