Unfair Advantage?

Does the Democratic convention always come before the Republican convention? If it does, why is this? I believe that whichever party stages its convention last has a huge advantage. Its convention can steal the thunder of the other party's convention and replace it with its own.

And, in this year's case, John McCain was able to choose a female running mate after he saw Obama's choice on the other side. If the Republican convention had come first and McCain would have had to choose his running mate first, Obama could have made his VP choice accordingly.

I still believe that, as much as I've come to dislike Hillary, Obama should have chosen her. I now feel convinced that McCain will win and that we'll have at least "four more years" of disastrous Republican foreign and domestic policy.

I believe that the parties should alternate in who goes first with their convention. In 2012, the Republicans should go first.

Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton

The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. The White House should not be a banging, rocking washer perpetually stuck on spin cycle. Many Democrats, including myself, have come to doubt whether Hillary has any core values or even a stable sense of identity. With her outlandish fibbing and naive self-puffery, her erratic day-to-day changes of tone and message, her glassy, fixed smiles, and her leaden and embarrassingly unpresidential jokes about pop culture, she has started to seem like one of those manic, seductively vampiric patients in trashy old Hollywood hospital flicks like "The Snake Pit." How anyone could confuse Hillary's sourly cynical, male-bashing megalomania with authentic feminism is beyond me.
--Camille Paglia

Why Not Winner Take All in the Democratic Primaries?

If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
--Sean Wilentz

I've often wondered who would be ahead in the Democratic delegate count and by how much if Democratic delegates were awarded on a winner-take-all basis in the primaries. Wilentz poses an answer that I suspect is true, and if I weren't too busy (or lazy) to do it, I could confirm or refute my suspicion for myself. If Wilentz is right, I wouldn't expect Barack Obama's supporters to admit it, but I would expect Hillary Clinton and her supporters to shout it from the figurative rooftops and for the media to make a issue of it themselves. I wonder why they don't.

But even more importantly, why do the Democrats award delegate votes the way they do instead of doing it the way the Republicans do? It seems to me that the Democratic party should award delegates to its candidates the same way that electoral votes are awarded to the candidates in the general election. The winner should take all. To do it any other way seems like a recipe for failure, especially if the following assertion by Wilentz is correct:

The latest state-by-state figures (as of late March) updated from SurveyUSA, indicate that if the election were held today, Clinton would defeat McCain in the Electoral College because of her lead in big, electoral-vote-rich states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- and McCain would beat Obama.

Angry With Hillary

I feel disappointed that Hillary won in Texas and Ohio. In fact, I feel more than disappointed. I feel angry. Not so much that she won as how she won. Or how I think she won. Or how I think she may have won.

I think she may have won by throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at Obama and hoping something would stick. It looks like a few things may have including that ridiculous 3 AM spot, the even more ridiculous assertion that she and John McCain are highly qualified to be president while Obama's only qualification is "that speech he gave in 2002." And, oh yes, Obama's only pretending to have any reservations about NAFTA.

I don't know if the last point is true, but Obama says it isn't, and I'm inclined to believe him. In fact, I'm more inclined to believe him about virtually everything than I am her. I have the feeling, justified or not, that Hillary Clinton or her people would say or do almost anything to take the office to which she seems to think she has a birthright. This reminds me of my strongest objection to many illegal immigrants. It's not so much that they're here illegally per se as that they appear to think that they're entitled to be here and to militantly thumb their noses at our immigration laws, and how dare anyone say anything against them or otherwise stand (or place a fence) in their way. Not that Hillary running for president is exactly the same. She has a legal right to run. But the fact that Bill and she seem to think that she's preordained for it turns me off.

But that's not the only thing. Aside from her attacktics, there's her voice. The more I hear that voice, with its histrionic modulations for oratorical effect, the more it grates on my nerves. I confess that I'm hard pressed to think of any female politician's voice and oratorical style that has impressed me with its gravitas. Barbara Jordan's, perhaps. But I'll use the same word that many others have to characterize Hillary's campaign voice--shrill.

What's more, I have the feeling that she's so plugged in to the political scene and so Machiavellian in her political approach that a Hillary Clinton administration would be pretty much a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." No, I'm not saying that she'd be as bad as George Bush, and, at least, she can properly pronounce "nuclear." But I suspect that if she were president, Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in the public at large would remain just as contentiously divided as they were under Bush and that this would not be good.

Of course, I'm assuming that it would be different under Obama. I'm assuming that his inviting rhetoric about uniting across party and ideological lines and working together for the common good and the charisma he radiates when using it would be effective in a way that Hillary could never be. But perhaps I'm mistaken. The only thing I know for sure is that I would much rather hear a president Obama speech or press conference than a President Clinton one.

However, if Clinton attacks and otherwise manipulates her way into the nomination, I feel quite certain that crusty John McCain will be our next president, and we'll have at least four more years of the same old same old, including more Supreme Court justices ready to overturn Roe v Wade and continuing troop "surges" in Iraq on our way to maintaining our disastrous presence there for the next 100 years.

For as much as I dislike the Republican party and its platform, it would be all I could do to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, and if I feel that way, how many others who would have voted for Obama will end up either voting for McCain (or Nader) or just not bothering to vote at all?

Biden Has Style and Substance and No Chance

I watched the Democratic debate last night. At least, I more or less watched it. I haven't yet disciplined myself to pay full attention to things that don't reach out and grab my interest by the neck. And political debates have a very limited reach and weak grasp in that respect. So does almost everything else connected with politics. There just seems to be so much posturing involved. Mostly style. Little substance.

Now don't get me wrong. I love good style. But I want it to walk hand-in-hand with plenty of substance. Political debates don't seem to do that very well. It's probably more the fault of the formats than of the debaters. The formats force the debaters to give thirty minute answers in one minute soundbites, or less. The result is not real debate. I'm not sure what to call it so long as it isn't debate. An "exhibition" perhaps. An exhibition of oratorical skill and personality under pressure. And this is how they're judged by the media "pundits" after the fact.

Immediately after last night's debate, all the analysts talked about were how Edwards and Obama came out swinging, how Hillary gave it back and then some to them, how the crowd seemed behind her when they clapped and cheered for her and booed Obama and Edwards, and how Hillary seemed to "want it" more than Obama did. It was an analysis of style and crowd reaction to style, not of the substance or actual content of what anyone said. I turned it off. I had better things to do. It would have been different if there had been some strong, concise analysis of what the exhibitors (or exhibitionists?) proposed in their rushed soundbites.

Now maybe that's too much to ask of a medium obsessed with ratings involving an audience of people who, in general, would apparently rather hear mostly about style and little or nothing about substance. Or is this only appearance and not reality? And maybe we can't legitimately expect even "the best political team on television" to know enough about the subjects exhibited to analyze the soundness of what the exhibitors presented. Yet, I somehow think that some of them are capable of this. But they, like the exhibitors/debaters themselves, aren't allowed the opportunity to strut their stuff.

However, I believe that the person who came closest to strutting his stuff last night was Joe Biden. He might well be my pick for president if I were voting today. Why? Because he seems to me to have the best combination of what we desperately need in a president at this extremely urgent time including an unrivaled grasp of both foreign and domestic policy, obvious high intelligence, a potent blend of perspicacious realism and passionate idealism, unforced eloquence, and an intriguing mix of gravitas and not taking himself too seriously.

Yes, I know he has supported the war in Iraq, although he's also offered what may be the most realistic plan for getting us out of it:

1. Giving Iraq's major groups a measure of autonomy in their own regions. A central government would be left in charge of interests such as defending the borders and distributing oil revenues.
2. Guaranteeing Sunnis — who have no oil rights — a proportionate share of oil revenue and reintegrating those who have not fought against Coalition forces.
3. Increase, not end, reconstruction assistance but insist that Arab Gulf states fund it and tie it to the creation of a jobs program and to the protection of minority rights.
4. Initiate a diplomatic offensive to enlist the support of the major powers and neighboring countries for a political settlement in Iraq and create an Oversight Contact Group to enforce regional commitments.
5. Begin the phased redeployment of U.S. forces in 2007 and withdraw most of them by 2008, leaving a small follow-on force for security and policing actions. The plan named as The Biden-Brownback Resolution passed on the Senate floor 75-23 on September 25th, 2007, including 26 Republican votes. (from Wikipedia)

Yes, I know he can come off as almost egomaniacally self-promoting at times. So, he's not perfect. But he may be the least imperfect presidential candidate from either side of the political aisle. He seems to me to be the most complete package. If he were president, I would feel assured that we were in the best hands we could probably find. Perhaps we need Dennis Haysbert doing a political commercial for him reassuringly boasting, "You're in good hands with Biden."

Of course, Biden doesn't have a chance of getting the nomination. He's way down in the polls, although I don't know why, and that alone keeps him from receiving the media attention that might elevate his position. But one can only hope that a Democrat is elected president and that she or he appoints Biden Secretary of State.

So much for my post-debate commentary. I realize that it, like the "exhibits" and analyses I criticized earlier, is very short on substance. But then what do you expect? I'm not even a member of the best political team on television.

Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes

I just finished watching Leslie Stahl interview Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes. It sounds as though he is and always has been the stereotypical geek. An economics geek, if you will. He spent his honeymoon with his wife, writer and TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, at an economics conference. His idea of a fun and relaxing read is poring over reams of economic data.

My first thought was how terribly boring that must be. But it obviously isn't boring to him. He loves that stuff. If I loved anything as much as he loves economics, I'd probably be much happier and more successful than I am.

Some of the interesting things Greenspan said were that Richard Nixon's language was laced with so much profanity that he thought there must have been something "extraordinarily wrong" with the man; that Gerald Ford was an extremely decent, good, and moral man; that Ronald Reagan had an unusual kind of intelligence that uplifted the country at a time when it sorely needed it; that George Bush Sr. and he got along poorly in large part because Bush overstepped his bounds by publicly telling Greenspan what he and the Fed should do, such as lower interest rates; that Bill Clinton was the smartest and most "effective" president he served under; that Hillary Clinton is extremely intelligent and eminently capable of running the country even though he would prefer a Republican as president; that he does not approve of George Bush Jr's economic policies of debt-swelling tax cuts and other forms of profligate spending; and that he did not foresee the mortgage crisis but thinks this and the housing crisis will pass even as he anticipates some pretty gloomy economic times ahead, especially with respect to recession.

It was also interesting to learn that Greenspan was a promising young jazz saxophonist as a teenager and even toured for a time with a professional jazz band playing bebop. He also confessed to crafting his "Fedspeak" testimony before Congress as Federal Reserve Chairman to be as obtuse as possible so that when two newspapers published diametrically opposed headlines summarizing the gist of his testimony, he had accomplished precisely what he set out to do.

I did not expect Greenspan to come across as a particularly warm and friendly man, and he surely didn't. But I found his geekiness and straighforward demeanor charming and even inspiring in its own way.