Candidate Rehash

Hey, everyone in blog world.

I want to start out by apologizing to the two of you who asked when I was going to comment on the results of the primaries and caucuses so far, particularly ours up here in NH.

The truth is, I've been working long hours because of a couple of things at work that went blooey. To give you an idea, it's Tuesday night as I write this, and I've already completed over 30 hours at work for this week.

This has not left me with a lot of energy (or time) to blog.

Had I finally taken the time to sit down and write something yesterday, it would have been very different, the reasons for which will be obvious in a bit.

On the Democratic side I'm disappointed. Arguably my least favorite Democratic candidate (with the possible exception of Mike Gravel) is Hillary Clinton, and she's currently surging. Obama isn't far behind, he of the great rhetoric on what's wrong in this country and very few concrete plans to fix any of them (and the plans he does put out seem cribbed from the Edwards playbook).

John Edwards is still in the race, of course, but it seems a mere technicality. Of course, it's not impossible that he could have a strong showing in Nevada and be positioned well for Super Tuesday (or whatever the media are calling it this week). But he's certainly the outside candidate at this point.

Chris Dodd and Joe Biden have dropped out, each of whom I think would have been better than the two leading candidates right now. Dodd because I think he showed real leadership in leaving the campaign trail at a crucial time to go back to Washington in order to block a bill which was against the best interests of American citizens, and Biden because from what I've read, he may well have the most raw intelligence of any of the candidates. This is, of course, second hand, but still, he had a sense of humor about things and had a lot of good things to say.

And most recently, Bill Richardson has dropped out. I don't know what to say about him. He has a lot of good experience and seems to say the right things, but somehow he doesn't seem Presidential. He's a bit too much like the goofy fat guy we all knew in college. He seems to lack gravitas. And some voice in the back of my head says "Wait a second, if he was any good at any of the many jobs he's held, why didn't he keep them longer?" I can see why Secretary of Energy is generally a temporary position, but he's been a Governor, an Ambassador, he's run a business, and he doesn't seem that old. The phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" comes to mind.

Or maybe it's just that part of my brain that pipes up whenever I'm interviewing someone to come to work at the company I work for and they have too many short duration jobs on the resume. I always want to know two things: First, if you're any good, why didn't any of these places want to keep you longer? And second, why should I believe after we take the several months to get you trained you'll actually stay with US long enough to be a net gain to the company?

Still, my gut feeling is Richardson would also have been better than Clinton and Obama. But I guess we've got who we've got. I'll still keep praying for a miracle for Edwards, but start to resign myself to one of these two.

Which brings us to the Republicans, and why I consider even the least of the Democrats a better choice in this election. To answer the second part first, I am a strong believer that one of the things that helps keep this country on a fairly straight course is the pendulum of power swinging back and forth. So long as we're stuck with the two-party system, we have to keep jumping back and forth. Let one take power until they start to become corrupt, and then let the other, newly humbled, take it back. Then they start to become corrupt and the pendulum swings back again.

Or think of it like a ship. If you have the day captain and the night captain, and the day captain tends to like to steer the ship towards the right, it'd best if the night captain likes to steer it to the left so that the net result is progress in the forward direction.

Come to think of it, the last time we had anything like a balanced budget was under a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. So perhaps that's what we need again. Clearly the reverse is not working.

So, we come to the Republican candidates.

First, Ron Paul. I hate to tar a man with the nasty label of racism if there's any chance I'm wrong, and the fact is that there are lots of examples in the history of American politics of people being slimed with facts spun to seem more damaging than they actually are. And yet the evidence seems pretty damning. I don't want to support anyone who is actively racist.

Beyond that, he's a bit of a nutjob. There are aspects of his campaign which make a lot of sense, especially the parts about restoring the Constitutionally mandated balance of power between the States and the Federal government, and between the three branches of the Federal government. But then he goes off into nutjob land wanting to pull us out of the U.N. and NATO and most of our treaties and make us a completely isolationist nation. He wants to abolish the IRS without necessarily any plans to figure out how to make up the budgetary shortfall (although to his credit, he's also the most fiscally conservative candidate out there, and he may actually believe he can cut spending to the point that income taxes are no longer needed at the Federal level). But in the end, Paul is more Libertarian than Republican, and with that comes much too great a faith in the free market system, which works great with economics of simple goods and not at all well when it comes to something as complex as medications.

Then there's Giuliani. Every time I start to think that no, he can't really be as much of a Johnny one-note as the media portray him to be, he references 9/11 again on ever flimsier justifications. Asked if he was worried after the Iowa caucus results, he said "No. After 9/11, I worried. This isn't worry." Asked about the famous Hillary Clinton tearing-up moment, he said "I don't think crying is necessarily bad. I cried after 9/11." And the thing is, from talking to many of my friends who lived in or near NYC during the actual attacks on that day, it seems that far from the image he tries to paint, Giuliani's main contribution to that effort was to be on television. He certainly didn't fix any of the problems identified after the 1991 attempted bombing of the same buildings in the 10 years between, and only an idiot puts his main emergency response department's main command center in the single most recognizable (and previously targeted once) building in the city.

Giuliani is essentially trying to see if he can squeeze one more win out of the Republican fear-mongering tactic of the last six years or so. But we've grown, we've moved on. Most of us just aren't as tempted by the "Elect me because I'll be tough, and sure I may ride roughshod over some of your rights, but it's only because if I don't, the bogeyman is gonna getcha! Booga booga!" argument as we once may have been.

Mitt Romney... is artificial. That's about all I can say about him. He's willing to do or say whatever is necessary to get elected, and it shows. Did you see that he tried having his own tearing-up moment in MI after it was so successful for Hillary in NH? He's probably the most liberal (historically) of the Republican candidates and so he makes up for it by taking the most extreme right wing positions on everything, the end result being that no one believes him. Those of his party's base with whom his message might actually resonate see his record and any who are more moderate hear his message.

John McCain was my favorite... eight years ago. At that time I believed his maverick style and his straight talk express. But then he got trounced by lies and dirty politics, and he learned some tricks from them. Plus, he's too old, not physically but mentally. McCain is a true war hero, more so than just about anyone else running. But he has an old man's mind, sure he's right and not interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Having just gone through 7 years of an "I only want to hear from the people who agree with me" White House, that attitude scares me. But the most important is that McCain believes that traditional war tactics will work in our current struggles, even though our enemy this time is not another nation but a private group. Fighting against al Qaeda is a new kind of fight. Using the term "war" does a disservice to the battle, because it implies that any of our existing warfare tactics will work. The real reason we attacked Iraq originally was because the only tactics we had were for fighting nations. We hadn't the skills to fight this new kind of enemy, so we made ourselves a war in which traditional tactics would work... and thus we left al Qaeda to flourish and grow. And McCain seems to think more of the same is what we need. And old man's lack of flexibility.

McCain's time to be President was 8 years ago. He lost. It's too late. If he wins now, it'll be Bob Dole all over again, the old guy calling for his turn against the young idealist.

I'm not even going to say much about Fred Thompson. He doesn't seem to really want the job. He made the mistake of believing that the mystique of him as a candidate when he wasn't one would continue into support if he became one. It didn't, and now he's staying in mostly so as not to look like a goober for dropping out just after getting into it.

Which brings me to Mike Huckabee, and this is the part that would have been very different had I written this a day or two ago. Because I was starting to like Huckabee. Not for positions, he's almost diametrically opposed to my positions, being socially conservative and fiscally a little too liberal while I'm just the other way. But I liked him because he seemed to believe in his principles instead of believing in power. I liked him because he's a genuinely likable guy, as far as I can tell from hearing him speak. And I liked him because he shows the neoconservatives for who they really are: By embodying just about everything they've been telling us for years they want but being rejected by them for the primary sin of not being THEIR man, hopefully people will finally start to see that the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party is not the party of Christian values nor the party of social conservatism, they're the party of "Let's grab power by paying lip service to whoever's ideals we have to in order to get 50% plus one of the votes".

But then today Huckabee reminded me why he scares me more than any of the other candidates: If elected he would be to America what the Ayatollahs are to Iran, ruling this country from the Bible instead of from the Constitution. It's gotten a lot of bad-mouthing in conservative circles in recent years, but the fact is that the separation of church and state isn't about suppressing Christianity, it's about a country where everyone is free to worship his own way, his own religion of choice, or none at all if that's his wish. Freedom of religion is one of our most fundamental rights, and in order not to provide any hint of favoritism or government sanction for one religion over another we insist that our government remain theocratically neutral.

And then Huckabee says this. Don't just read the article, watch the video, so you can know that they are his words and not merely something someone made up.

He supports altering the Constitution to bring it in line with the Bible. He supports breaking arguably the most fundamental of our founding philosophies (fundamental in that many of the original people in this country came here to escape religious persecution). I'm free to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian or an agnostic in this country, and so are you. We do not need a President who wants to make all but one of those a sub-optimal choice and those who make that choice second class citizens.

So in summary, the Republican field breaks down into three scary candidates, one who is too rigid and one who doesn't seem to want it. The Democrats have two solid candidates and a third who's probably the most qualified who have all dropped out of the race. Hanging on by a thread we have the guy I think is closest to what America needs right now. And at the top someone running on the experience of having been married to someone who actually has experience and someone running on a great ability to recognize and communicate problems without solutions.

I think I'm losing my will to live.

Liam.