Funk Babblings

(This is way later than I intended, but hey, the polls have only been open for half an hour!)

First things first: In the grand scheme of things, the positions of Clinton and Obama are pretty close. Despite what you may have heard, both have detailed plans on all manner of issues, those plans and their overall positions are fairly similar, and those plans will inevitably get modified if they ever even make it through Congress.

Each has a life history that prepares them for the global stage. Both are highly intelligent. If you're concerned about ability to accomplish their goals, Obama's legislative record is actually more impressive, writing and passing legislation on all manner of important issues. There's plenty of substance there if you care to look.

On the life experience issue, I should also note that Obama has (at least) as much life experience as Bill "The Man From Hope" Clinton did in 1992 (when he was the same age Obama is), and John F. Kennedy did in 1960 (when he was three years younger).

But my major goal in voting today is to make sure the Democratic nominee will win in November. The biggest reason for that is the Supreme Court -- in replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Sam Alito, Bush has pulled the court to the scary-right, and there's no doubt that McCain would continue that. McCain is also the guy who wants to stay in Iraq for centuries and joked about bombing Iran, as well as somehow keeping an image as a "maverick" while staying in lock-step with Bush.

So the first thing I look at (both last time around and this time) was the polls vs Republicans. Yes, it's early and things can change, but many of the candidates are already well-known, so those polls haven't changed a whole lot (especially when you consider the margin of error). It's striking that, rather consistently, Obama has polled better against McCain than Clinton has.

Then I look at the way they run their campaigns. The Clinton and Obama campaigns look very much like the Kerry and Dean campaigns four years ago, except that Obama learned from Dean's mistakes. Clinton is running a swing-state campaign, ignoring the "red states", and taking for granted the "blue states". Obama is running a 50-state campaign, bringing voters over to his side not by shifting his positions to the right, but by framing his views in ways that appeal to people who normally vote farther right. The 50-state strategy not only gives a better shot at winning a lot of states we might not otherwise win, but also gives a better shot of helping Democrats win House and Senate seats in Republican seats. More Democrats in Congress means more chance of a Democratic president actually getting their goals accomplished.

In addition, Obama's campaign has shown a remarkable ability to plan ahead, while Clinton's campaign was apparently unprepared to go past Super Tuesday, and has repeatedly been caught by surprise by the quirky rules of various states (such as Nevada and Texas). When the rules that were in place from the start have turned out later to have unfavorable consequences for her, her campaign has even sought to change them after the fact. (Watch for the coming fight over Michigan and Florida delegates, despite everyone knowing the rules ahead of time, those states flouting the rules, and therefore everyone knowing that those contests wouldn't count.) We don't need another president who tries to change the rules after the fact.


It's probably too late to change anyone's mind, but for all these reasons and more I intend to vote today for Barack Obama. And in November I'll happily vote for whichever of the two is still standing.

So, any bets on who Kerry picks as Vice President?

The leading candidate these days seems to be John Edwards, the last competition standing in the primaries. (Sorry, but Kucinich didn't count as competition.) But his total governmental experience amounts to a Senate term he's finishing out now.

For a while it seemed like Kerry would pick Dick Gephardt, but the only people that excites are the rapidly-shrinking ranks of union members. Gep turns off everyone else.

If Kerry wants national security and diplomatic credentials he might pick Gen. Wesley Clark, but he's never held elective office, and showed himself to be a weak campaigner in the primaries. There are also some senators that might be chosen for similar reasons, but they're all pretty old -- not a good match for a guy who looks like a cadaver at 60. (Compare with the buzz for young-looking 50-year-old Edwards.)

Not too long ago rumors were floating around that Kerry wanted Republican Senator John McCain as VP, but McCain doesn't want the job. For a Republican in today's partisan climate, I like McCain, but I wouldn't want him as Kerry's VP. The interest does give some clues about what Kerry might be looking for - war hero, national security, unification of the country, making a splash with a bold choice.

Well, it seems that the latest rumor is that Kerry is considering Howard Dean. Dean had been initially discarded (even by Dean himself) as a VP possibility because he's another New Englander, and everybody always wants geographic balance. On the other hand, Clinton/Gore are both southerners, and Bush/Cheney are both Texans (despite Cheney's house in Wyoming). Maybe that "geographic balance" thing is just code for "there has to be at least one southerner on the ticket, preferably two." Dean also has plenty of executive branch experience and loads of followers.

The most interesting thing about choosing Dean is that Kerry's image is more centrist than his reality, while Dean's image is more left than his reality. I guess the combination would let them merge the image and reality of both.

Anyway, I know I'd be happy with a Kerry/Dean ticket. I don't think it'll happen, but it would be really cool. I'm sure next week there'll be some other rumor floating around.

The second of two entries inspired by chronarchy's newfound anti-Republicanism

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, I supported Howard Dean. One of the reasons I did goes back to a conversation I had with autumnfey a few years ago after she moved to Vermont. She had said that Vermont was deeply divided between the conservative farmers and the liberal hippies. So when Dean came along on the national scene, I figured that anyone who could get re-elected over and over again in a state divided like that had a pretty good chance of winning over people from both sides of a divided electorate nationally. I became more convinced of that the more research I did; in Vermont his critics included people on the left who thought he was too pro-business, and people on the right who thought he was too pro-environment. And even though some of his positions were to the right on mine, they were the kinds of things that would make many on the right take a closer look and possibly support him.

Yet early on, the press branded Dean a liberal. Strange, since most of his positions were to the right of many of his rivals, including John Kerry. This perception of Dean as a wacko liberal seems to have been fed by three factors:

• Many liberals gravitated to his campaign, despite being more idealogically aligned with Dennis Kucinich. Those liberals decided that Kucinich was too far left to be elected, and Dean was far enough to the right of Kucinich that he seemed electable (as I described above). (It also helped that Dean came out early on against Bush's policies, rather than trying to gain the support of people who like Bush's policies.) Since liberals liked Dean, the press concluded that Dean must be a liberal.
  
• He came out against the Iraq war when most of the country was in favor of it, making him *obviously* an antiwar liberal, even though he supported Gulf War I and Afghanistan. (Unlike Kucinich, he was not in favor of just pulling out of Iraq once we went in, but rather wanted to put more troops in, including getting many more countries to help out.)
  
• He was in favor of civil unions for gays, and had signed a first-in-the-country law enacting them in Vermont (after the Vermont Supreme Court said something needed to be done). *Such* a liberal thing to do. (However, unlike Kucinich he was not in favor of gay marriage.) This endeared him to the gay community, which made up a large portion of his early support.
  

(A side effect was that the Kucinich people resented Dean for being considered the liberal candidate when he really wasn't all that liberal.)

That's the way things stood a year ago. My how times have changed. Now more than half the country thinks Iraq just wasn't worth it, and even people on the right are saying we need to get out now. And now with gay marriage happening, more than half the country is in favor of either civil unions for gays or gay marriage; civil unions are on their way to acceptance, and the debate today is about gay marriage. The landscape under Dean has shifted to the left, putting his positions on these two issues slightly on the right of the debate, and Kucinich doesn't look quite as nutty as he used to.


BTW, the gay marriage thing gives me another reason to wonder why so many people like Orson Scott Card so much.