[Note: We still do not have power at our home in Baton Rouge, but through the magic of the Internet, I am posting this piece to keep you entertained until I can catch up on things.]
You’ve heard it — all the breathless hyperventilating about McCain’s bounce after the convention. You’ve been hearing how that Trojan Moose, Sarah Palin, is going to energize the Republican base and carry them both into the White House. Well, it could be. Stranger things have happened.
And/But regardless of how close the polls are (and they are close) you’re hearing this common refrain:
Democrats should be wiping the floor with McCain.
OK. Let’s play a thought-game. You’re Rip Van Winkle. You went to sleep, oh, around late 2003 or so. You wake up 5 years later. You want to know how the presidential campaign is going.
“Well Pres. Bush got re-elected and now John McCain is running,” they tell you.
“Great,” you say. “He’s a terrific guy. Couldn’t ask for a more qualified candidate. He must be kicking ass. After all, the Democrats are just a bunch of pointy-headed appeasers.”
“Well…it’s not going so well.”
“What do you mean? McCain should be mopping the floor with the Democrats. The war on terror! Bush is a war president! The Islamofascists are at the gate! The transcendent struggle of our time! Bush endorsed McCain, right?”
“Well…yes.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The Democrats are running a …. unique candidate.”
“Oh my God. Hillary finally got the nomination? McCain will FOR SURE kick her ass.”
“Um, no. She didn’t get the nomination.”
“You’re kidding. Who could have beaten her? You said it was a unique candidate. It can’t be that loser Edwards, right? He’s nothing but a phony skirt chaser.”
“No. It wasn’t Edwards.”
[pause]
“Well then who? Not Kerry again?”
“Nope.”
“Jaysus. Gore??? It’s Gore isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it’s not.”
[pause]
“Howard Dean?”
“Um, no. Listen. You better sit down. The candidate’s name is Barack Hussein Obama. And he’s black.”
[stunned silence]
“Let me get this straight,” you say. “We’re in the middle of a war on terror. We’re going to elect a wartime president. We’re in a fight to the death with Al Qaeda and the Democrats are running a Black Muslim candidate? And McCain isn’t 40 points ahead? What the fuck is going on here?”
“Have you got a few minutes? Let me fill you in on what’s happened since you fell asleep…”
I could continue, but you get the picture.
P.S. Buy a hat and hang the f*ck on to it. And stop obsessing over daily tracking polls, OK?
Excellent, Ara. You make more sense without electricity than most of those plugged directly into the intertubes. I think I’m going to turn off the lights and sit in the dark for a while.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, Ara. Its point is not lost on me. I would remind you, though, that it is not as if Bush won 2004 in a landslide. The country has been in the neighborhood of 50/50 since 1992. John McCain is not entitled to a theoretical lead over Obama for any reason. We are where we are, it is what it is.
I don’t pull for either side and see as much to be concerned with regardless of whether McCain or Obama ascends to POTUS. I also have a large concern that if it is McCain the 50% that has lost three elections that it regards itself as entitled to have won could do serious damage to our esteemed representative republic. By all means root for the side you have chosen, root hard. You are as entitled to choose as I am.
I’ve been losing at the national level longer than you have. But, the least imperfect yet bad system is the one we are saddled with for better or worse. Prepare your self for the worst, even if only in private.
Shep: I think I’m going to turn off the lights and sit in the dark for a while.
Take it from me — it’s overrated.
Eric: I’ve been losing at the national level longer than you have.
Well, I go back so far I’m in front of me. How old are you anyway?
35
I’m batting .333 since voting in my first presidential election. Sounds good, but only in baseball. In electoral politics it sucks — especially when you consider who won those other 67% of the elections.
You started voting in presidential elections in…hmmm… 1992? And your batting average is worse than that?
Ara,
If we are using baseball analogies, I’ve been hit by the pitch all four time to the plate. I may actually go third party this time around, but none of them are very appealing either (Bob Barr is a libertarian ..since when). I go to the polls for the local elections and statewide ballot issues.
I also consider my 0’fer streak going all the way back to March30, 1981 when I was home from school on the day Reagan got shot and I started paying attention to the news and politics. To frame my views on the choices we have in current election cycle slogans, I have no hope they’ll change and if this is straight talk then lie to me, please.
Until they start treating us like adults, acknowledge the world we live in, and start dealing with the world we created after WWII then any person aspiring to the highest office is not worthy of a vote. In this world America is not entitled; to every job it wants, in forcing our views on every person on this planet, in denying that socially progressive attitudes are held by a majority of our citizens (we want freedom and privacy, we all need our own space to define), that we cannot continue to accumulate debt forever (we cannot just spend funny money on anything we want), and that since the dawn of organized humanity we have gone forward, building on the past, to do better with an ever increasing group of people (the Dark Ages excepted).
/rant
P.S. Hopefully you understand all all the grammatical tools I used in that last paragraph. I feel like an amateur Brett Easton Ellis (fiction) or Jacques Derrida (non), only woefully short.
Re your last paragraph…and/but you think voting for Bob Barr or Ralph Nader (or John McCain) is going to move us in that direction?
Eric:
You sound like a thoughtful person — you write like one anyway. I’m with Shep: what makes you think anyone but Obama is thoughtful in the way you are?
I guess, in the end, I haven’t seen anything from Obama that makes me comfortable with him on the spending side of the equation. I’ve never heard him say anything that makes me confident that he will even hold the line on current spending.
I’ll quote two numbers; GDP (a very rough approximation of income) $13 Trillion, total debt (all gov’t, financial, commercial, housing) $53 Trillion (rough 2007 numbers). Obama has never said that he will stop writing IOUs to the Social Security Administration. He has never said he will not raise the debt debt ceiling. We are in a debt crisis right now (credit=debt). Debt is why Wall Street firms are in trouble right now. The “credit” crisis is all about debt-to-equity ratios. This is THE issue of today and the foreseeable future. Japan took the path we are set to take (to a much smaller degree) two decades ago and look at what it got them. Total stagnation to this day.
We have a chance to let the blood that needs to flow spill into Wall Street and then recover and embrace the markets of the future (green, IT, service jobs). Feel the pain now and get past it in a shorter time period, or not. We are going to have/feel pain in this country. We can do it smart (make hard choices) or do it dumb (like Japan). Obama is in the dumb camp until he proves otherwise.
There is a lot to like about Obama rhetorically. He’s very good. I am sure I’ve mentioned this on your site before, Ara. He has IT, whatever IT is. But, IT, isn’t enough to win me over into his camp.
P.S. – Normally, I only post only about what I think, objectively, is going to happen or is happening. What HAS happened is a matter of decent Google-ing. But, I’ll say this. Part of me does want to vote for Obama, but it is the part of me that was laying on quad while the other part was sitting in logic class. I cannot ignore the latter part.
P.P.S. – Ara, I’d like to have conversation with you about Obama and FISA, vis-a-vis his vote and the reality of the network. Use my email address (posted, but not published) to initiate. (Your domain home page leads me to think you are in IT.)
“Obama is in the dumb camp until he proves otherwise.”
I guess that being “thoughtful” doesn’t mean that you’ve yet managed to buy a clue. Obama doesn’t have to prove anything except that he’s smarter than McCain. Sorry, THAT’S IT! That’s your choice. Everything else is mental masturbation and a waste of the locomotion needed to get to your designated polling place. What about the lesser of evils don’t you get? Yeesh.
Against my better judgment, I’ll reply to you directly, shep. If I told you that you had two choices for a driver to take you home a) a guy who just took his 6th hit off a bong in the last two hours or b) a guy who just blew a .237 who do you choose? Me, I call a cab. Maybe I’m clueless. You never ONLY have two choices.
The lesser of two evils is fine if the importance of the decision is the color of my shirt, not my life and finances and happiness.
OK, so maybe it isn’t a choice between the lesser of two evils, but a choice between the lesser of all evils?
Or are you suggesting that if all the choices are evil, “no choice” is the best course?
Mostly b, but not entirely. Take Nader for example. I don’t think of him as evil, but I like him right where he is, not actually running the country. But, yes, both of the two people who can win the election qualify as the lesser of two evils, so not endorsing either is better. I’ve never felt like anyone who can win, should win.
So of all the candidates who “couldn’t win,” which did you like?
And a yes-or-no followup question: did you vote for them? If not, why not?
“Me, I call a cab. Maybe I’m clueless. You never ONLY have two choices.”
Yes you are…clueless, I mean. There are only two people who might wind up in charge of the United States in January. If you don’t pick one, you’re just jerking off. There is no cab.
I’ve never voted third party. I guess I’ve never found one that I could take completely serious. They all seem to have a radical disaffection for our current system and want to react in a radical way, completely incorrectly. I need someone who (while maybe radical) says if we are going to change radically, let’s redraft the Constitution to work with a modern society of 300 million, not demand that 300 million simply go back to the rules that worked for a country of 4 million that didn’t have paved roads, running water, electricity, a national highway system, airplanes, helicopters, worldwide interconnected packet switched networks, and 1,000 other things I’m overlooking.
I don’t exactly know what helicopters have to do with our Constitution (unless they are painted black, eh?)
Count me among those who believe our system of governance is not perfect but it’s better than most everything else out there. I just wish we’d, you know, actually use it in the way it was meant to be used, e.g., impeaching a power-hungry chief executive every so often to keep their successors from getting any crazy ideas. The founders knew what they were doing when they wrote up the checks and balances in the Constitution.
Agreed. Other than a few tweaks that have already been made (e.g. abolition of slavery, right to vote for blacks and women, etc.) the Constitution is pretty good as written, even for a 21st Century society. Most of our problems have to do with corruption of it’s meaning, especially the anti-constitution (corporate) invention of “corporate personhood”. Legislate that out of existence and, all of a sudden, the 1st Amendment no longer corrupts our political process.
Bottom line: we don’t have a Constitution problem, we have a corporatist and, therefore, a Republican problem. You claim completely progressive political goals, Eric. Shame you can’t reconcile them with our actual politics.
I probably could have left more than that off the list, but you got the point.