Barrack Obama Election

I was recently listening to a normally conservative person making his comments about the Democrat's primary elections. While he did take the time to specifically say he did not hate Hillary, I would have accused him of this. I know plenty of people that hate Hillary Clinton. I swim in a sea of conservative people in my work and personal life, and all I know is that the 90s, while prosperous and carefree from an economic and energy standpoint, were clogged with conservative vile directed at the Clintons. While almost any kind of Republican could have been elected in 2000 without inciting similar feelings of the opposite extreme, instead we got George W. Bush. I wonder if there are more Bush-haters out there than there were Clinton haters. In my opinion, the Bush-haters are much more impotent than the Clinton haters ever were. As evidence, I submit the impeachment of Bill Clinton over lying about a blow job.

I think it's time for there to be a woman President, and I'll be glad to vote for one when the right one comes along. Now is not that time. Hillary is not a good candidate, if for no other reason than that she will keep the cycle of hatred of the Executive alive and well. The Bush Presidency (43rd) was the only thing that could enshrine Bill Clinton's Presidency. While Bill's popularity numbers were pretty high near the end of his term, one thing you can't measure is the extent of the hatred of him. People only get one vote, and so approval polls don't have weighted multipliers. If someone thinks he's ok, he gets a plus. Conversely, if someone rants about him all day long and dreams about his untimely demise with the fervor of a high school boy dreaming about the head cheerleader, he gets a minus. These two votes are not equivalent. People quietly approved of Bill Clinton or violently opposed him. With time, his image mellowed, and the upsets of 9/11, a crummy economy, and rising gas prices helped make the 90s seem like some distant utopia of times gone by. I think Hillary was hoping to ride these feelings right into the White House. Rather than everyone bowing down and handing the reins over to Hillary, she found that she had a serious contender in Barrack Obama. Only by trying to trash Obama and defend Hillary could Bill Clinton manage to make his prestige drop off. He seems a little unbalanced (mentally) now when you listen to him. For the last 3 or 4 years, you'd see him on talk shows or giving speeches and he seemed like this brilliant guy that had a handle on things. Now he seems old and crotchety.

I believe that either McCain or Obama will break the cycle of hatred of the Executive. It's hard not to like the calm maverick style that McCain exudes. There's something about the guy that allows you to disagree with him violently and still respect him. When he speaks you don't feel like he's an idiot, condescending, or lying to you.

But I like Obama better. I think he provides a sense of hope and possibility that this country needs. I can't help but compare him to Kennedy. Kennedy was witty, compassionate, decisive, and visionary. Even if Obama didn't have a solid plan, a sense of optimism and opportunity would make people behave hopefully and positively. I think that simply having a leader you respect pushes the country in the right direction.

One of the things that I have always been dismayed by is the influence of big donors on the President. The winner is always the one with more money. There is a cause and effect feedback present, because donors always try to secure influence with the candidate they think will win. I've always felt that this was a corruption of our democracy because you get leaders that spend their terms paying back all the people that put them in office and ignoring what needs to be done for the good of the country. Obama gets 90% of his donations from people giving less than $100 each. Much of this is done through the internet by individuals, not from big donors. I like to think this makes Obama beholden to the people, not energy companies, polluters, trial lawyers, unions, or investment bankers.

Don't you want to see a leader that can tell some narrow faction of society that they are not going to have their entitlement preserved at the expense of the greater good of society? Think about it, this goes both ways in it's most pure form. Whether your pet indignation is oil companies making record profits or unions dragging the vitality of a manufacturing base down to a fragment of it's former ability, you want someone as a President that can say no to those that drain or disrupt society. At the same time, you want a President with enough compassion that he can help those that need it, whether it's a dying industry or a needy individual.

I think both Obama and McCain fulfill this description. For the first time in a long time, (assuming Obama gets the Democratic nomination) I feel like whichever candidate wins, the American people win too.

4/16/08: Right after posting this, the first headline I saw in the news was a story about Hillary's credibility rating plummeting in the polls. It cited the story about landing under sniper fire as the cause, but that's just the story of the day. I don't know if I agree with that cause and effect.

Stay the Course

At lunch today, my co-worker Nick remarked that he didn't know who he would vote for, since he didn't like anyone that was running. This during a phase in the election, just before the primaries, when we have a maximum number of candidates.

He's right, though. There are no good choices when it comes to elections. The people that make it through the election process are rarely what the country actually needs. And I'm not sure we would recognize what we need or elect a person like that if they actually came along.

When I was first learning to drive, I had a little problem. I tended to veer back and forth on the road. I had a problem that someone figured out and explained to me. I was looking at a point about 10 feet in front of the hood of the car. My focus was so close to the car that I was overreacting to every little bend in the road or movement of the car. Whoever figured out that I was doing this also had a cure for the problem. I remember being told to focus on a point further down the road, to lift my viewpoint up and align myself with where I wanted to be farther out down the road.

And so it is with the country. We elect leaders that are so short sighted that they have the country veering back and forth from the left to the right instead of barrelling forward and taking us where we need to go. Due to the 2 year election cycle, we are always campaigning. Leaders are not rewarded for making tough choices and fixing long term problems. They are rewarded by the public - this IS a democracy - for coming out on top of the most recent news cycle. And the people are to blame because we forget so quickly as a group. We forget the problems and mistakes that people make and re-elect the same bozos year after year to go back to Washington and raise funds for their next election rather than working on what the nation truly needs to have done.

If you were a professional assessor and were hired to make a prioritized list of the biggest and most important problems that the nation has, that list would not reflect what we see on the news. Budget, health care, social security, medicare, national defense, space defense, and education and investment in research and technology. That's the highest priorities I come up with (given just a few minutes reflection). Instead, we argue about immigration. We don't even have honest arguments about any of the subjects. It's like a trial where both sides hire their expert witnesses that come in and give opposite views and everyone that wants their side to win thinks their expert is perfect and the other side's expert is a crackpot.

I was recently asked if I thought that America had seen its high point and if our greatest days were behind us. My answer to that is that if we don't correct course and learn to focus on long term problems, that it certainly could be a downward slope for us. But all we have to do is raise our focus up from the ground right in front of our feet and start looking at where we want to be a bit further down the road.

Post Election Blues

Letter to the Editor
Sent: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 7:46 AM
Subject: No Reason to Gloat

For those people out there that look at the results of the recent election and feel the urge to gloat, that may not be warranted. Consider that the election results in almost all issues had razor thin margins. We live in a country that is still strongly divided and highly polarized. How did we get to this point? How did we get to the point where we not only have strong opinions about subjects, but feel that anyone that disagrees with us is out of their mind and trying to hurt the country? How did we get to a point where it's normal to seek information sources that only agree with us and to reject any news or data that does not support our beliefs? When did we stop listening to our opponents?

If you fell into the large segment of the population (74% according to the latest Gallup poll) that voted "against Bush" because you feel the country is going in the wrong direction, what reason do you have to believe that Democrats can turn it around? What reason does anyone have to believe that the structure that puts people into office is functioning well and providing this country with the leadership it needs? We still have a system where special interests are throwing money at perpetually campaigning politicians, who return the favor by providing those interests with whatever legislation and oversight (or lack thereof) they need to have an advantage and to gain profit. Who's looking out for our future? Who is thinking about the shape this country will be in 20 or 50 years from now? The system rewards those who only care about immediate issues. If you need examples of this phenomenon besides politicians, look at wall street, the oil industry, labor unions, executive compensation, political punditry and bloggers lack of fact checking, and people's failure to plan for retirement. No accountability for long term consequences is the common thread. In more stark examples, look at the obesity epidemic, drug addiction, or even athletic doping.

If you were a parent and your child wanted to gorge himself on cake and cookies all day, people would understand and approve of your restricting his diet to healthy choices. That child may not understand the long term consequences or be able to control their urges and desires for instant gratification. How is this any different than a government that spends out of control and does not collect enough revenue to cover those expenses? The problem with focusing on the now and ignoring the future is that the future will come, and when it does, the choices you make in the now govern the costs or benefits you'll see in that future. This is why we need to continue to look at how to fix the problem rather than sitting back and gloating at the latest election results.

Another Election Cycle

Biden was just putting out his talking points this morning and it occurred to me again, as it does for each election, that what we really need is a blend of the primary candidates.

I remember watching a debate with Sharpton in it, years ago, and thinking "OK, he's completely unelectable, but I like that feistiness, that speak truth to power element".

I like Obama's freshness and his idealism, I like Hillary's compassion, I like Edwards' earnestness, and I like Biden's "enough of this bullshit"-ness. On the Republican side, I like McCain's straight talk and Giuliani's can do attitude and Romney's energy.

But I don't like any of them enough to vote for them. I always feel like we only get the candidates that get some rich interest's seal of approval (money) before they even get to a ballot where I can choose from them. Why didn't Kurt Vonnegut ever run for President?