Political Field Reports

And While I'm Here...

I've been to three more political candidates appearances since I last posted. Mitt Romney and John McCain over the weekend (although fortunately not the McCain appearance I just posted about) and Barack Obama on Monday night. This brings to 5 the total of candidates I've seen and 6 the number of events I've gone to. Senator Obama was a repeat for me, but since he was the first I'd seen, the only one I'd seen outside, and I'd seen him on a day when it was raining heavily and he was very late due to a late vote on the Senate floor, I felt I should give him another chance to make a good impression, since he did not the first time.

ROMNEY

But in order... First Mitt Romney. We saw him at the Hopkinton town hall, the same place we'd seen John Edwards a few weeks back. I must say, if you want to see a political campaigner, this is a great place to do it! Romney is a smaller man than I'd thought, with a HUGE head. Not that this matters, but my first impression of him was almost that of a toddler, whose head makes up 25% of his total body height.

However, substance should matter over form, so here's my impression of Romney on substance: He seems like a personable enough fellow, an engaging speaker and quick with a joke or two. My wife, Janet, asked one of the very first questions (about his vetting process for Supreme Court nominees) and he kind of non-answered it, but impressively at the end of the event as he was shaking hands, he apologized to me for not taking MY question (on the grounds that he couldn't take them all and he felt one per family was fairest), and I commented that I didn't feel he'd really answered hers, and he made a better attempt at it, without having to be reminded which question it was.

He also stuck the mic in front of Liam (the toddler, not the immature 42 year old) and asked if he had anything to say. For the record, he didn't. :-)

But overall, my impression is that Romney is someone who will get things done, but not any of the things I feel are most important to the country right now. His agenda doesn't do enough (or really, anything) to restore the image of America in the world, nor to correct the mistakes we've made over the last seven years. It's predominantly social conservative issues combined with more of the same in Iraq. In as much as I've never denied the fact that my social leanings are more liberal and my fiscal leanings more conservative, there's simply nothing there to feel good about in a President, for me.

MCCAIN

So, later in the afternoon, on we went to John McCain, whom we saw in Rochester, NH. McCain also had a lot of jokes and funny stories, at some points it almost felt like he was confusing campaigning with stand-up comedy.

McCain's supporters are, in much higher percentage than anyone else I've yet seen, veterans. This makes sense, he being one of the few veterans currently running and the only bona fide war hero and ex prisoner of war. However, being held the day before Veteran's Day, this made for an extremely military-heavy speech. Nothing wrong with this, of course, just noting my impressions.

I was again passed over during the question and answer section, but Janet asked a variant of my favorite question: What would you do to help restore some of the balance of power between the Feds and the states that has shifted significantly away from the model specified in the Constitution? He said something about being a Federalist. I don't remember the exact answer, but it seemed to me the same sort of non-answer posturing you get from a lot of people.

He spent a lot of time talking about cutting out programs that don't work, cutting down the bureaucracy in Washington by pruning out older versions of programs that have had newer, better versions added but never had the older, non-functional versions de-funded. Which worked to his detriment when someone asked him whether he'd support “Abstinence First” instead of “Abstinence Only” sex education, since studies have clearly shown “Abstinence Only” programs do little to curb teen pregnancies and the spread of disease, while “Abstinence First” programs do. He said he absolutely did not support any sex education that wasn't “Abstinence Only”, at which point he went (in my mind) from a crusader looking to rid us of ineffective programs to a partisan who only wanted to get rid of the ineffective programs he didn't politically agree with.

In the end, my impression was that McCain is an old man. I don't mean necessarily physically (he was introduced by his mother, in her 90s, which does kind of put the “He's old” thing into a little bit of perspective), but mentally. Although the phrase is often used to justify some things I think are indefensible, no one can deny that the war against al Qaeda is a new and different kind of war. Traditional tactics used when one country is fighting another don't work when the enemy does not have lands you can take away or a fixed infrastructure you can attack. And yet my strong impression of McCain is that he's so mired in his military history that he's simply unable to have the mental agility necessary to adapt strategies. As badly as President Bush has bungled the war, taking his eye off of bin Laden and the countries he gets most of his support for in favor of a bogus and ill-conceived war in Iraq, I think a President McCain would do far worse, never quite understanding why years of military theory wasn't playing out the way it always has in more traditional wars.

OBAMA

Which brings us to Barack Obama. As I alluded to above, I have not been impressed with Obama up to this point. He has struck me as being long on rhetoric, short on actual answers. He's a pretty good speaker, getting people fired up, but in the end there's a lot of “We need to support our working people” and “We need to support our teachers” and “We need to support our veterans” and “We need to restore our image in the world” talk, with very little substance on how he thinks we could actually accomplish any of those things.

He was better this time.

I should say, both times I've seen Obama, it's been in a much larger setting. I don't know if he doesn't do the kinds of small, intimate campaign stops most of the other candidates have been doing, or whether I've simply not caught any of the right ones, but for the second time I was in a crowd about an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the candidates were in. This setting may work well for him, since there's a sort of “old time revival preacher” aspect to his campaigning, and it's a lot easier to get a large crowd whipped into a frenzy than 50-75 people sedately questioning you in a town hall somewhere.

But this time, Obama had some answers that I quite liked. I liked the fact that he answered my standard question without having been asked (recall that my standard question is about Constitutional balance of power, either between federal and state governments, or more relevant to Presidential candidates, between the Executive branch and the other two branches). While answering a question about the make up of his cabinet, should he win, he said that he wanted independent people who would feel free to disagree with him, and he made a point of stating that the Attorney General is the people's lawyer, not the President's, and that his first directive to his Attorney General will be to go through 8 years of Bush executive orders to identify every one that expands executive power so that he (Obama) can rescind them all.

He also gave one of the best answers I've heard anyone give as to why he doesn't support gay marriage. Essentially, he says, the word “marriage” is tied too strongly to religious principles, and so he supports a strong civil union law which conveys the same rights, benefits and responsibilities as marriage, but leaving the word “marriage” out of it. He says that when you ask people if they support gay marriage, a lot of people have a gut negative reaction, but if you ask whether they support civil unions with equal rights for gay people, a lot more are supportive. He then says it would be up to the various churches whether they recognized and supported gay marriage.

I'd take his answer one further and say that we should split the definition of marriage into two parts and make all government unions “civil unions” and make “marriages” what is performed by a religious or social group. The legal rights and responsibilities would come from the governmental union (the civil union), which is what you'd have if you went down to the justice of the peace and got hitched, while the marriage would be the blessings of God (or gods or whatever your particular religion believes) on your union, as it has traditionally been. That would remove the “separate but equal” aspect of it and also untie the religious aspect of marriage from the legal aspect.

He also pointed out that he, alone among the entire field (on both sides) has a truly fresh perspective on a lot of things. He's black, his grandmother still lives in a remote village in Africa without electricity, and although Christian, he lived for several years as a child in Islamic countries. This gives him a lot more credibility with minorities, the poor and Muslims than anyone else out there, which is probably a good thing.

Anyway, I've been writing this for about an hour now, and my eyes are starting to go crossed, and I'm having trouble remembering some of the other things Obama had to say, but suffice it to say that I feel a lot more strongly about him as a candidate than I did previously. I still haven't decided whether to support him or Edwards in the primary (or even whether I'll vote instead in the Republican primary for Ron Paul, an option I have in NH because I'm a registered independent, and so can choose on primary day which primary I want to vote in).

Still outstanding, I really want to get out and see Clinton and Guiliani, although so far I have not seen many campaign events from either of them that didn't take place during the work day.

Plus, I have an opportunity on Friday to hear Bill Clinton speak, and like him or not, you have to respect that he's a heck of a public speaker and I think it'd be nice to attend. On the other hand, we're currently forecast to have 3-4 inches of snow on Friday, and the event is about 2 hours drive away (without snow), so it may not be in the cards.

Liam.