What Now? A Turn to Substance for Barack Obama

June 9, 2008 – 1:53 am

With Barack the nominee, the question is: what now? In Kentucky exit polls, only 1 in 3 Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama in the general election. About 4 in 10 said they would vote for McCain, and nearly 1 in 4 said they wouldn’t vote at all.

Even accounting for the potential rawness of emotion at exit polls, this is clearly an obstacle. Add to this picture the widespread outrage among women at Obama’s and the news media’s misogyny and the fact that some voters in Florida and Michigan see Obama as the agent of their disenfranchisement, and you can see how Obama has serious challenges in many states boasting huge populations and a substantial number of electoral college votes.

Perhaps these statistics can begin to explain why in the 20 states where she won, Clinton trumps McCain 50% to 43% in daily Gallup polls over the last 2 weeks, while Obama trails at 45% to McCain’s 50%. And why across the board, in a Gallup survey of all 50 states that included 11,000 registered voters, Clinton performed better than Obama when set against McCain (she led 48% to 45%; Obama loses 45% to 46%).

Her wins in swing states like Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, Florida, Pennsylvania and Arkansas support this, and in these swing states she beat McCain according to Gallup by an even greater margin, 49% to 43% (while Obama lost).

Obama needs Hillary supporters, he cannot win without us. So how is he going to achieve this? Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america, women | Comments (1)

Obama: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

June 5, 2008 – 6:53 am

Gerry Ford first addressed the country as President after Dick Nixon left office by saying: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

Tuesday night had me thinking the same thing. Barack had finally driven a wooden stake through the Clinton campaign.

But is the national nightmare over or just heating up? After months of seeking to destroy the party for her personal gain, she is now trying to get herself on the undercard as Veep under the auspices of taking one for the team to unite the party.

The last thing Barack Obama needs is to have Hillary and Bill as the Vice President and Lounge Lizard in Waiting.

One never knows when a Bill eruption will hit. We tolerated that fraternity hijinks when he was president, as he was actually a pretty damn good politician. We don’t need that nonsense from the spouse of the person holding the job described as not being worth a warm bucket of spit. He’d be like the drunken ex-boyfriend crashing the wedding.

Assuming he can sidestep the elephant in the room to take on the elephant party, what can we expect in the way of spin between the two parties? Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america, politics | Comments (0)

A Morning in the Life: John McCain

May 25, 2008 – 4:51 am

In some Best Western on the campaign trail in Red State America, the Republican Standard Bearer awakens.

“Psst,” he says, nudging his wife. “Psst. Cindy? Are you awake?”

“John, it’s 4:30 in the morning. Unless you took that pill and hour ago, there’s no way we can have sex and still be ready for the campaign bus. Remember the last time we tried this and you knocked the donuts off the table? It gave Candy Crowley the wrong idea.”

“No, no, not that,” John says in a huff.

“What is it?”

“Jesus, Cindy, pinch me. Can you believe this?”

“Believe what?”

“I have no right being in this thing. Those right-wing jihadists and their chucklehead cheerleader in the White House screwed things up so badly, I figured I’d be going down to a bigger defeat than Alf Landon against FDR in the middle of the Depression.”

“Why? Were you a staffer on Alf’s campaign?”

“Don’t be a smartass. But how in the hell am I in this thing? We’re losing safe seats in special elections suggesting an ax-handling of epic proportions, yet I am even in the polls with either that latte-drinking dilettante or Madam Defarge and the lounge lizard she married. How can this be when the country hates Republicans?”

“You hate them too, honey.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a maverick, I get it. But I am still in the party of George Bush, and the only guy happy with him right now is Jimmy Carter because he is finally going to be off the hook. When a president steps on his own dick or her own boob, people will no longer mutter ‘this is the worst president since Jimmy Carter.’ They’ll mutter, ‘this is the worst President since George W. Bush.’ That pompous old coot Carter managed to live long enough to see someone actually raise the bar on presidential incompetence.”

“Aren’t you getting a little confused, like that Sunni, Shia thing Lieberman bailed you out of? Don’t you mean lower the bar?” Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Broken News, Current Affairs, election 08, humor | Comments (0)

Heartbreak Hill: Will It Be Clinton or Obama?

March 13, 2008 – 5:53 am

Around mile 20 of the 26 mile Boston Marathon, runners come upon an incline called Heartbreak Hill. They hit a fatigue point at a time when the course calls for some tough slogging before the stretch run to the finish line. Rookie runners are known to pull out in agony at this point in the race.

Has our presidential election cycle reached a Heartbreak Hill of sorts? We have about six weeks before the Pennsylvania primary with nothing major on the horizon after a flurry of primaries in a tightly compressed calendar cycle of about the same duration that was forecasted to settle the issue in both parties.

Instead, the Democratic primary remains very much in doubt, seemingly teetering on the brink of a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Prior to this, there has been commentary talking about all the excitement the Democratic race engendered with the first black man and first female as two viable candidates. It brought a slew of new voters into the process and has been heralded for giving our democracy a badly needed boost of participation after years of declining voter turnouts.

But now these rookie participants have to endure the kind of long, protracted campaign battle that galvanizes voters into opposing camps and disillusions the less zealous among us.

One of the two camps is going to lose. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america | Comments (2)

America’s Prison Problem: If Iron Bars Were Cellophane

March 3, 2008 – 3:31 am

America loves prisons. Not just in the sense of just thinking they’re a good idea, or that we need to build more of them. No, prisons appear to American voters much the way strippers appear to drunk businessmen at 12:07 a.m.; irresistible, shiny, and worth throwing money at.

We also treat strippers and prisoners alike as deserving recipients of rape when it happens to them, but perhaps I’m stretching the analogy too far.

Prison reform is not a sexy topic to most people. If you suggest that maybe, just maybe, building more prisons is dealing with the wrong end of the supply/demand problem, it sounds to people as if you just suggested that they should let someone slit their throats and go sell their TV for crack.

If you suggest that maybe we should try to make prisons a less volatile, criminalizing environment, you may as well have personally signed the order for Willie Horton’s furlough. I try to avoid this conversation, because I’ve been treated to one too many Bronson-esque tirades about how “they’re animals and belong in cages,” or “no, if anything, prison is too good for them,” etc. But America can’t afford to continue avoiding this conversation.

It shouldn’t be a hard one to have, after all; how many of us have had a relative or a friend do time, or done it ourselves? Statistics say quite a few of us. From a cold, practical standpoint, how many of us are looking at an ex-con moving into our neighborhood at some point? Statistics say much the same thing. How many of our tax dollars go into building and maintaining more of these things? You probably don’t know an exact figure, but you know it ain’t cheap.

Ignoring the statistics on how many prisoners are inside for non-violent drug offenses, or how many are serving time for a questionable conviction, or even how many are guilty but serving ridiculously long sentences because of bad legal representation or a legal panacea like three strikes laws (all three situations seeming to correlate somewhat with race and class, but I digress), we still need to look at the function of prison in American society: Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, Society, north america, rape | Comments (5)

Super Tuesday: A Political Perfect Storm

February 6, 2008 – 5:41 am

As I recall, the term “perfect storm” was coined in New England in October 1991, when several storm fronts merged to spectacularly clobber the coastline.

Now, the American political system this year has a confluence of factors that have made this election cycle the most volatile in recent memory.

For the sake of clarity, here are what I believe to be the main issues (or storm fronts) at play this year:

1. For the first time since 1952 no sitting president or vice president operates as a presumptive nominee.

2. We have the first viable female candidate in the race in Hillary Clinton, whose First Husband would be the indefatigable Bill Clinton, and the first viable black candidate in the race in Barak Obama, who represents a new generation entering politics.

3. We have a compressed primary process manufactured to minimize the impact of first-in-the-nation strongholds Iowa and New Hampshire, creating a semi-national primary last night of 22 of our 50 states holding primary elections at once.

4. As a nation we’re antsy, worrying about the economy, the Iraq War, and the general partisan bickering that has kept our national leaders in the gutter for the better part of sixteen years. In 1994, we booted out seventy three incumbent Democrats, bringing in a freshman class of Republicans called the “Gang of 73.” These people deluded themselves into believing the vote was in favor of “them” rather than a repudiation of the incumbents. Republicans did not get the message, and now we’re ticked off about it.

5. The Hispanic community, soon to become the largest minority, is seriously flexing its political muscle.

OK, so the facts are out on the table, but what the hell does all of this mean? And what happened just now, on Super Tuesday? Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america | Comments (11)

The Clintons Are Graceless. Is It Finally Good Night?

January 31, 2008 – 1:55 am

I sat mesmerized as I watched Caroline and Ted Kennedy symbolically pass the torch of Camelot and all it represents to the loyal opposition, Barak Obama, the other day. I started out as a good Republican would, by looking for ways to blow holes in all of this. Here’s a guy, Obama, trying to get us to look forward by embracing 1962, I thought. Didn’t Reagan do a good job of deconstructing that?

And there was the Ambien-addled third generation scion, Patches, sitting behind the new standard bearer who was assuming what would rightfully had been his, if Patches wasn’t such an inveterate screw up to begin with.

But I couldn’t start blowing holes. I thought back to 1980 working a campaign in Pennsylvania where I would bump into Kennedy staffers. I recalled them telling me the reason why the networks insisted on each having two camera crews following Senator Kennedy around was to be able to have several angles covered in the event of an assassination attempt. How does one seek to serve a country when their life might be on the line? You can’t help but empathize with that.

And, for all of his faults, our Senator has been an active surrogate father in the lives of his many nieces and nephews, those whose fathers’ call to service ended in tragedy. How much was Caroline’s preemptive endorsement a factor in Ted’s decision to get off the fence and enter the fray? Caroline lost her dad at 6.

I lost my dad at 8, and I didn’t have a Zapruder film to haunt me about it. For her to say this man reminds her most of her father must have a profound meaning to her

So there was all that treacly drama of a political movement brutally dashed through assassinations. There was the fatherless child of the movement founder standing beside the aging surrogate, now hunched over and stiff from a bad back ravaged further still by a less than healthy lifestyle, to be kind. He essentially admitted his time had passed with considerable grace and dignity.

And then came Obama. Man-oh-man can that guy give a speech. It was totally devoid of substance, which is OK. Obama understands our national hunger for a new approach to politics. The Rove/Carville strategy has been to divide and conquer. Depress voter turnout by turning off the middle and hope your tin foil clad zealots rule the day. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america | Comments (4)