Category: Election 2008

Are you ready for some knock-down, drag-out cage match action? For just $49.99 on DirecTV Pay-per-View you can tune in all summer to watch a gang of vicious Wharton-Schooled MBAs battle a disorganized rabble of mulleted retards from the Florida panhandle. It's a clash of the Republican base titans!

Julia Preston (of noted commie pinko rag The New York Times) writes that as the talk of cracking down on immigration heats up in the political arena, business is becoming increasingly willing to fight back in federal court, local governments, and state legislatures. She cites many examples of the business backlash, including:

In Oklahoma, chambers of commerce went to federal court and last month won an order suspending sections of a 2007 state law that would require employers to use a federal database to check the immigration status of new hires. In California, businesses have turned to elected officials, including the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, to lobby federal immigration authorities against raiding long-established companies.

Our immigration double-standard has been a source of comedy for the better part of four decades. The INS is like Industry's wingman in a quest to bang illegal immigrants. They make a big show of standing on the border and sternly shouting "On ne passe pas!" but then, when Industry is about to try for second base, loudly announcing "OK, well, I'm going to go to bed now, leaving you two all alone along this big, dark border. Good night!"

The Republicans have exploited the hell out of wedge issues in recent elections. I wonder if the tables are being turned. What a fine tightrope they must walk – how does one appease business's endless need for expendable human chattel when Republicans rely so heavily on voters who really, really don't like them brown people with the mexican-talkin'?

Immigrant-bashing infuriates me. The "average" American should thank god that these impoverished people are willing to do the back-breaking, depressing labor that subsidizes the low prices you pay at the grocery store, at the mall, and in restaurants. The same mouthbreathers who rant and rave about building border fences would be the ones complaining the loudest ("Why is everything so expensive? Goddamn liberals and their taxes!") if their xenophobic impulses were taken seriously as matters of policy. As the linked NYT piece illustrates, the current compromise between moneyed interests and rural America involves passing "tough" anti-illegal immigrant laws followed up with dozens of loopholes for employers. How long will these people fall for that trick?

Oh, wait. We're talking about adults who watch monster truck rallies, wear Rebel flags, and spend an appreciable portion of their Speedway paychecks on "dip." It might be a while.

Now that the Democratic nomination process is over, let's ask a practical question: who will fill out the tickets?

First of all, as someone who has logged a fair amount of time boning up (*snicker*) on academic treatments of the presidency, I feel compelled to point out that the choice of running mate is stupendously unimportant to electoral outcomes. We and the media treat it like a big deal because it's something to talk about in the dog days of summer, but when November rolls around there are few historical examples of VP nominees altering the outcome. They have some potential to hurt a candidate and almost no potential to help. Dan Quayle or Tom Eagleton, for example, probably cost their candidates a few votes from people who simply couldn't imagine those tools in the Oval Office. But I struggle mightily to think of an example of a VP who substantially boosted a ticket. Nonetheless.

McCain's choices, in my opinion, are two: Charlie Crist or Bobby Jindal. Crist represents an important swing state and fits hand-in-glove with McCain's vision of conservatism. That is, he's not staking out a position to the right of Fred Phelps on "social" issues but is a reliable economic conservative. The downside is that Crist would do nothing but further enrage the far-right elements who are already wary of McCain. Could a ticket of two "moderates" fly with Dobson and company?

Jindal seems to be the only logical choice. A 36 year-old Roman Catholic Indian-American from the deep south, Jindal literally represents every characteristic that McCain lacks – youth, diversity, strident social conservatism, and southern roots. While Jindal lacks experience (which I personally consider a non-issue) and holds a few legitimately terrifying positions on abortion (i.e., no rape exclusions because every life has value!) he makes too much sense for 71 year-old pasty white John McCain to ignore. So what happens if the right declares Crist unacceptable and McCain decides that Jindal's social conservatism is too extreme?

Names being thrown around – General Petraeus, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, and so on – are lousy options. The only plausible scenario for these folks would be Romney buying his way onto the ticket, agreeing to spend vast sums of his fortune on the campaign, or the Dobsonites insisting on Huckabee at gunpoint. My guess is that McCain would rather go with an unheard of option (the Clinton 92 strategy) rather than a retread. Pawlenty would win out in that scenario. Romney and Huckabee have name recognition, but they already stood for election and the GOP base passed judgment. It wasn't good.

Obama…well, it gets complicated. Since we don't know what goes on behind closed doors, some of this will require pure speculation. So be it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the superdelegates who migrated to Obama in recent weeks may have done so with strings attached. It's unlikely that many of them did so without naming a price. That price, especially for this last handful of superdelegates who brought the contest to an end, may have been picking the VP.

That is a long and conjectural way of saying that the "Dream Ticket" may be forced on Obama. I do not believe, not for one second, that he would choose Clinton of his own free will. Aside from the bridges she's burned and the downright insane, indefensible things she has said since losing her grip on the nomination, there's Bill. Obama does not want to deal with Bill. At all. Can you even imagine being president and having an ex-president – and mind you, this is a camera-hungry, opinionated ex-president who really misses the job – hanging around the White House all the damn time? On top of dealing with Hillary's insane bitterness and lust for the top spot? I find it inconceivable that Obama wants to do that. He may not have a choice.

If this isn't the case, I see Obama with a wider range of choices than McCain. The frontrunner has to be Bill Richardson. He backed Obama early, he's enormously popular in a swing state, he has the best anti-war credentials in the party, and he has experience. Being a fluent-in-Spanish hispanic doesn't hurt. Neither does having a personality. That said, Richardson really stunk up the Democratic debates earlier this year. He may be more useful behind-the-scenes than in front of a camera.

Joe Biden is a possibility, albeit not a strong one. He has more foreign policy cred than any Democrat in Washington. He also fights like hell at the drop of a hat. I'd pay good money to see him lay into McCain's feeble record of Bush-backing and egregious foreign policy misstatements. The downsides are his blandness (unknown Senator from unimportant state plus a case of Old White Guy disease) and his penchant for being out of control when he goes into Kill mode.

If neither Clinton nor Richardson are chosen, his next best options are Jim Webb or Brian Schwietzer. Webb is well-known for being a hardass with a leg to stand on regarding military matters. He could potentially take that wind from McCain's sails. He's also from Virginia, at which the Democrats are about to take a serious run.
buy stromectol online buy stromectol no prescription

Schwietzer makes a lot more sense, though. Never heard of him? He's the Governor of going-blue Montana (two Democratic Senators, a Democratic Governor, and a Democratic State Legislature). He has serious anti-lobbyist credentials and could initiate some GOP pant-shitting with his ability to make the plains or mountain west competitive. On the downside, he is a nobody and his ideology is almost too similar to Obama's to be helpful.

Also-rans include Kathleen Sebelius (she blew her chance with the horrible SOTU response earlier this year), John Edwards (doubtful that he'd want it), or the idea of a unity ticket with a disaffected Republican like Chuck Hagel.

It is incumbent upon the candidates to pick someone who won't hurt them; this is a much more pressing concern than picking someone who might help. The potential landmines, in my opinion, are Hillary and Huckabee. Hillary is absolutely loathed on the right (and by an increasing number of Democrats) and both she and Bill are lightning rods. Huckabee has the highest risk factor on the other side. Honestly, it's harder to picture him not saying something idiotic. The less contact he has with the press, the better. Otherwise his words start flowing freely and he becomes a magnet for bad press.

This decision is probably bigger for McCain, who is 71 and has had every kind of skin cancer known to science. Voters will have a much easier time picturing Grandpa Mac dropping dead than Obama.
buy cymbalta online buy cymbalta no prescription

Nevertheless Obama has to put some thought into his choice too. Frankly there are a lot of people who aren't sold on him and choosing an effective advocate could help make his case.

Boy, I wish this had come out before I wrote today's entry:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," Clinton said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Clinton cited an Associated Press poll "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.

buy keflex online www.orthotrophix.com/news/2022/html/keflex.html no prescription pharmacy

"

I rest my case. It would be an act of charity for someone to stop her before she humiliates herself any further.

Stephanopolous and McGovern have abandoned ship.

buy zithromax online taxmama.com/wp-content/forum/styles/new/engl/zithromax.html no prescription

After hearing things like this, I wonder how many more of her high-visibility supporters are going to flee the proverbial bunker rather than stick around for the fight-to-the-last-man followed by group suicide.
buy strattera online taxmama.com/wp-content/forum/styles/new/engl/strattera.html no prescription

We Americans are not renowned for our attention spans.

Needless to say, this primary season has gone on too long. Way too long to be helpful to anyone. I no longer buy it being helpful to McCain, because it's exhausting what limited attention for politics most Americans have.
https://primeraeyecare.com/wp-content/themes/consultstreet/inc/customizer/custom/temovate.html

It will be harder for him, as well as the Democrat, to get people to pay attention in the general election. Eleven straight months of attentiveness is simply too much to ask.

After our 10th "super Tuesday" and another day of primaries that will "finally settle everything," nothing is settled and this is just going to drag on. Hillary Clinton simply isn't going to quit. Ever. As soon as the Democratic National Committee manages to bring the situation to some resolution (likely with Obama as the nominee) she's just going to start filing lawsuits. She and her surrogates just won't shut up about Florida and Michigan, the states the DNC is trying to disenfranchise.

Let's get one thing straight: MI and FL disenfranchised themselves. 48 states managed to follow the rules. Fuckin' Guam managed to follow the rules. Since Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan (non-Hillary candidates boycotted the race) there's simply no way that the delegates can be seated based on that election. In Florida, no one campaigned. Short of a monumental DNC conspiracy to hand her the nomination, those delegates are not being counted as is.
buy clomiphene online www.parkviewortho.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/clomiphene.html no prescription

That point has been made by people smarter than me. What hasn't been noted in the media is the illogic of Clinton's "I'm doing so much better in rural areas" argument. I have so many problems with that, I don't know where to begin.

First we have the borderline racist (yet incredibly common) implication that it somehow matters more what "good ol' salt-of-the-earth" rural Americans think. Like those are the voters that really count. Fuck everyone else….what does the guy in the flannel and John Deere hat say? The media continues to put that forward as the Average Man irrespective of the fact that 80% of the US population now lives in an urban metropolitan area (not a guess. I have the data.) Rural America has plummeted in every Census since 1940. The claim they keep making is that Obama's only doing well because those colored folk in Gary and Indianapolis like him. Maybe that's true, but what are those people? Do they not matter? Are they not American voters?

The simple fact is that the Democratic Party isn't even competitive in any recent election if they can't bank on A) urban voters and B) black and hispanic voters. There are about 3100 counties in the U.S. and Al Gore/John Kerry only won about 500 of them. Only one out of every six counties. Yet Gore won the popular vote and Kerry came very close. Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) do very well where no one lives. Democrats win by turning out en masse in places where people actually live.
buy remdesivir online www.parkviewortho.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/remdesivir.html no prescription

Picking up the support of 10,000 stragglers spread across rural Indiana could not matter less in the big picture.

You don't need to be much of a cynic to see through her latest argument in favor of the inevitability of her nomination. "Rural white people like me, and that's more important." Don't even get me started on the electability.
https://primeraeyecare.com/wp-content/themes/consultstreet/inc/customizer/custom/albuterol.html

Let me tell you what hypothetical general election poll questions from March and April of an election year is worth….well, actually, I don't think it's sturdy enough to wipe my ass with.

Watching Lanny Davis on CNN last night (although in fairness any of her surrogates are just as bad lately) was enough to make me puke. The shrill, whiny desperation and entitlement of their demeanor and argument explains everything about why people dislike her. This whole thing is just unfair and a conspiracy against her and the nomination is hers and she deserves it and Obama is some interloper who is stealing it.

I'll say this one last time: the DNC and the superdelegates need to put a stop to this now. It's gone beyond the point where it's hurting the party; now it's simply hurting the entire process. Hillary is not going to stop, ever, until she gets what she believes is hers. They need to do one of two things: relent and agree to give it to her or stop her. We're beginning our fifth month of this process and no remaining primary is going to resolve this. It's time to shit or get off the pot. This can't be left up to the voters. The voters are split. It can't be left up to Hillary, because Hillary is perfectly happy to destroy her party and bring the voting public to a level of disgust that even Bush-Gore couldn't reach. It's time for someone to be the grown-up.

Political scientists widely accept that individuals have no tangible, rational reason to vote. If the decision was made from a pure rational choice perspective, we'd all stay home. A rational choice voting model looks like this:

V = PB – C

V is your net benefit from voting, and you only vote if V > 0. P is the probability of your vote deciding the election, while B is the value of your expected difference between the parties (i.e., if you are a fervent Democrat and loathe the Republicans, B is large). C is the costs of voting – time, information, attention, and so on. Here's the rub: in any reasonably sized electorate, P asymptotically approaches zero. The P*B term, for all intents and purposes, is zero (something like 0.0000000000000001). Since C > 0 (voting is never without some costs) a rational person would never vote.

But people do vote, even though the rational choice model makes sense. This is what political scientists call "the Paradox of Voting." No one should vote, yet lots of people do. The answer lies in Riker and Ordeshook (1968), who revise the model thusly:

V = PB – C + D

It's the same model, of course, with an additional term representing the "expressive" benefits of voting. In other words, you vote because it makes you feel better. D represents a sense of civic duty, the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from supporting someone you like, or the psychological conviction that your vote is helping determine the outcome. D also represents, among more sophisticated voters, an understanding of the free rider dilemma. That is, you recognize that if everyone approached the decision rationally and stayed home, turnout would be zero and therefore one or two individuals could decide the whole election. Translation: you realize that if everyone else is being rational and staying home, it is rational for you to be irrational and vote.

Tuesday was primary day in Indiana, and I did not vote. My "D" term is negative. Not only do I not get a jolly feeling from voting, I actually feel sick when I do it. Psychologically, voting implies that I think this process has any legitimacy or that I accept it as valid. Neither of those things are true. There's an anecdote attributed to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was stopped by a poor woman while traveling through the city with his entourage. He told the woman "I don't have time for your problems," to which she replied "Then you have ceased to be Emperor."** I guess you could say all of these people have ceased to be my emperors.

The phrase "rational non-voting" always cracks me up. All non-voting in the American context is rational. Hell, unless you really get a kick out of it, staying home is far more rational than voting. Given the paucity of parties, the universally unappealing candidates, and the oppressive, naked media editorializing which hammers viewers with the reality that Big Money and Big Media and Serious Experts have already decided the outcome, it's a miracle that anyone shows up.

**Suitably chastised, he stopped to talk with her.