2008 Campaign

 

Blog:www.straightrecord.wordpress.com

          Those who make those claims are either unknowledgeable about the job or trying to fool you. Neither service has anything to do with being an effective president.
          A chart to the left lists military and gubernatorial experience of our presidents of the past 70 years. Between Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, neither of which served in the military, all of our presidents did. So what?
          Only Dwight Eisenhower ever made any military decisions during his service. Only John Kennedy, George H.W. Bush and the would-be John McCain saw any significant action, and none of them actually made significant military decisions. Among all of the presidents we have had the past 70 years, which have served us best during times of military strife?
          Scratch military experience.
          Claiming executive experience in almost all cases means the candidate has been a governor of a state. So what? Maybe the odd one or two of them led a company, but who cares.
          Over that same 70-year period, we have had five former governors as president. FDR was one, but not until 1977 and Jimmy Carter did we elect another. Then followed Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. How did they serve us any better than the elder Bush, Gerald Ford, Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower and Harry Truman, who did not?
          Check the scenario to the right as one example of what a presi- dent faces and a governor does not. And neither does a company exec- utive, who in that phone call would be told what is being done or has been done about the crisis at the plant because he or she relies on the expertise of those below him for snap decisions.
          Supporters of Sarah Palin struggle to tout her “executive experi- ence” as qualifying her to be a heartbeat away from being president in a setting she has never seen and which she has acknowledged she does not understand. To support that idea, the analogy is drawn between a president of a country and the president of a company, a CEO if you will.
          The CEO can hire cronies, maneuver to get friends on the board of directors that would uphold his or her decisions, bribe people with lunches, plane trips and other favors, all of them legal in the private world, but illegal or impossible in government. The CEO’s aim is not to make money—he or she already has oodles—it is to try to accumulate more money than anyone else. The thrill of CEOs is in the making of money, not the having of it.
          Neither a CEO nor a governor has to elicit the help of peers to carry out a policy associated with his or her job. Each is on his own. A president, on the other hand, must conduct foreign policy by convincing his peers, heads of other nations, that his policy is the correct one. We all know what happened when former Gov. and CEO Bush tried to go it alone and how his peers view him today.
          A governor makes provincial decisions. Palin governs a state far more provincial than most; it has fewer than a million people even though it has the largest land mass. The object of the contrast she is intended to make—with Barack Obama, who has a similar number of years in elected office—represents a state of 13 million, but is one of only 535 contributing to decisions that affect more than 300 million people, and on international issues, possibly the entire world population and its future.
          Obama and other senators do not gain experience in making “executive decisions” by virtue of serving in Congress. The experience they do gain is immersion in national and international affairs, the very knowledge they need if they go on to serve in the White House.
          But most importantly, if one reviews the U.S. presidents of the past 60 years, one realizes there are no specific criteria to serving as president. It is a job that requires the ability to inspire people to follow, to develop policies that serve the national constituency and above all, backed by a lot of knowledge and at least a little experience, but most of all, judgment, judgment, judgment.

          It is hard to believe, but after all that has been said and done on the national political scene in recent weeks, there supposedly are still Hillary Clinton supporters who claim they will not vote for Barack Obama, and instead would vote against their own self-interests.
          That is not unusual; Republicans, particularly minorities, who do not have six-figure incomes have been voting against their own self-in- terests for years.
          Oh, the Hillary supporters agree with Obama’s policy stances. After all, they are about the same as Hillary’s. Supposedly, it is because of what he said while he was opposing her in the primaries, or he blocked the chance to elect the first U.S. female president, or whatever. It all comes down to spite. We say supposedly they feel this way, be- cause much of this feeling seems to be generated by those practicing political dirty tricks.
          Nonetheless, the movement is damaging because a surprising number of people vote based on feelings instead of information.
          Here are some of the things Hillary supporters would face if they vote for the GOP ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. And we won’t repeat the mistaken claim that such-and-such candidate “would” do these things, because they require the consent and help of Congress.
          The voters who gave Clinton just short of half the delegates to the late-August Democratic Convention in Denver typically did not have a $3 million estate they needed to protect from inheritance taxes, levied on estates valued at about $3 million. McCain/Palin want to do away with the tax, and, trying to play on your emotions, will refer to it as the “death tax.”
          Most Hillary supporters are not sexist, they did not benefit greatly from the Bush tax cut, they are beginning to suffer greatly from eight years of lax federal regulation, their health care is getting more expensive and harder to come by, it is getting harder to send their kids to college, their homes are not worth what they used to be, and their sons and daughters are more likely to be serving, and dying, in vain in Iraq while their neighbors in the ritzier suburb next door send their kids to binge- drink at a fraternity or sorority somewhere.
          McCain/Palin, as is now crystal clear, would deny the sons and daughters of Hillary supporters access to sex-education in the schools. They would rely instead on “abstinence-only” education, copying the Reagan solution to the drug problem—just say no. We know how effective “just say no” was and we now know the effect of “abstinence- only” is called Bristol Palin. And abstinence-only is a plank in the GOP platform, presented almost in obscurity on the truncated opening day of the GOP convention.       
          Every American’s future rides on decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, the freedoms being taken away in the guise of fighting terrorism, a woman’s right to choose what happens inside her own body, the ability of the poor to get some help from the government when they need it, and the nation’s overwhelming problem of dealing with all of the ramifications of allowing widespread poverty to continue.
          At 61, Hillary Clinton came of age as the women’s rights move- ment was gaining amazing strength, leading to major gains in women’s ability to compete in a man’s world. They still have a long way to go, but the McCain/Palin vice president who was younger than her daughter Bristol during that fight, believes in, besides opposing sex education:
          --Wants creationism taught in public schools along with evolution.
          --Opposes embryonic stem cell research even though scientists say the current ban on the use of them is hampering medical research.
          --Opposes gay rights, not just gay marriage, as in “preserving traditional marriage.”
          --Is for drilling for more oil, including in now-protected areas of her own state.
          --Is anti-abortion and would support a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe vs. Wade.
          --Opposes gun control, which Hillary actually does support.
          --Is so naïve about national and international issues, she would set the advances of women in the United States back to the days of the women’s rights struggle.
          And that is just what we know of her views so far. More probably is to come. None of these is a view that Hillary Clinton has endorsed.
          These are not just Palin’s personal views, all but teaching creationism are embodied in the Republican Platform.
          All of those examples happen to be major differences between the leadership provided by Democrats and Republicans. Voters need to understand that Republicans vote for members of their party primarily to protect their money.
          In other words, any person who would have voted for Hillary Clin- ton would be voting against his or her own self-interest by voting for a Republican. Non-rich Republicans have voting against their own interests for four decades now, but why would a Democrat, much less a Clinton supporter?
          Racists who cannot bring themselves to vote for Obama because of his race never belonged in the Democratic Party in the first place.
          So what about the Clinton supporters who are not racist? What is their excuse? 

Best for Vice President

          As occupants of front-row seats for decades of D.C. doings, we have watched Joe Biden grow from someone who matured from simply playing at being a member of Congress to being a major player in world politics. He should be allowed to be an even bigger player.
          As much as Democrats love their presumptive candidate, Barack Obama, his biggest lack and his main Achilles’ heel in the upcoming campaign is his lack not only of experience, but even knowledge of foreign affairs.
          The replacement for the boob in the White House has a major mess to clean up over the next four to eight years, but he can stumble through on the domestic front—there are plenty of people who can help him out.
          In foreign affairs, the country needs not only to extricate itself from Iraq, do the right job in Afghanistan and finish it, it needs to restore its credibility around the world and demonstrate this is not really a nation of bumbling fools. And the nation needs to act with the greatest authority possible.
          Biden, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is in a position to hit the ground running as vice president to establish and lead a foreign-affairs team to get busy and right all the Bush administration wrongs.
          As Vladimir Putin has demonstrated in arranging to sidestep the Russian constitution and hang on to power for eight more years, and the invasion he led into Georgia to nip off its Russian-speaking sections, he has delusions of grandeur and perhaps illusions of Cold War II. His arguments for Georgia could easily be applied to Ukraine, which is half Russian-speaking, and who knows where else.
          Biden also has demonstrated a deep knowledge of all the other foreign-affairs issues the nation will face in the coming years, inside and outside of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and has the respect of his peers abroad.
          As a senator for 36 years, he also has a background depth on the major domestic issues the nation has faced and the maturity that Obama seriously lacks. Biden has served in the past as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and could be a treasured adviser with that background.
          We all know that with tabloid-cable, bloggers and e-mail swappers, this is going to be the nastiest campaign period in U.S. history. Biden played around a bit when he first came to Congress, but suffered an early family tragedy that appeared to turn him around and cause him to focus more seriously on life.
          Yes, he makes speaking gaffes and overstates his own works that will be exploited to the hilt in this day of gotcha media, but he has been around long enough he should be able to weather a serious probe into his past.
          But for Oprah and Iowa, Biden might have had a chance to last long enough in the presidential primaries to be choosing his own vice president at this point.
          Whom better to have sitting a heartbeat away than a man who fits Obama's wise description of the right person for the job: “I want somebody who’s independent, somebody who can push against my preconceived notions and challenge me so we have a robust debate in the White House.”?

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    How Would Pavlov’s Dogs Vote?

          Feel like salivating when you hear a campaign speech? Whether the response is drooling, anger, joy, whatever, the response is no accident, because as far as the two presidential campaigns are concerned, you are little more than one of Pavlov’s dogs.
          Just over a century ago, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist whose biggest achievements were in the fields of medicine, became eponymus for conditioned reflexes when he conducted experiments on training a dog to salivate at the ringing of a bell.
          Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for showing that a dog, conditioned to expect a treat whenever a bell rang, actually salivated at the ring of a bell in anticipation of a treat, regardless of whether the treat was proferred.
          The Pavlovian bells in a presidential campaign are certain phrases, known as propaganda techniques. We’ve already heard many, we are about to be inundated the rest of them. Some lists have up to a dozen items, but the major ones we'll see in the campaign are: glittering generalities, assertion, lesser of two evils, plain folks and transfer.
          To be a responsible voter, one needs to be able to recognize those and other lures in the candidates' speeches and statements in- tended to ring whatever bell they believe you want rung, and make you salivate for their election.
          Thanks to the early primaries, we have been inundated already with a plethora of propaganda techniques that can be classified as Pavlovian bells. More are coming. We are not talking here about the moronic tabloid-cable gotcha quotes, mostly taken out of context.
          Most of the moronic stuff you have heard so far comprises the "transfer" propaganda technique. It includes tying the statements of Barack Obama's former minister to Obama himself; tying the incumbent president to John McCain, even the positions of the president with which McCain disagrees.  
          The serious Pavlovian statements are the ones candidates, both McCain and Obama, make to tweak your patriotism, prejudices and similar feelings, but mostly to take advantage of your ignorance.
          You have McCain saying early on, “I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”
              First, let it be known Obama did not say he would rather “lose a war in order to win a political campaign,” this is a phrase inserted into Obama’s mouth by McCain (assertion). But McCain did say he would rather lose a campaign than lose a war (lesser of two evils).
              This is a rah, rah statement (glittering generalities), meant to appeal to your patriotism, a false patriotism. The United States has not won a significant war since World War II. The best it has done is fight to a draw in Korea. In making the statement, McCain may feel it in his heart, or he is simply counting on the outcome of the Iraq war not being decided by Nov. 4.
          Do we really want a president so gung ho he would have had us fight on and on and on in Vietnam, far beyond the 58,000 American dead? If someone had had the guts to admit defeat and leave Vietnam (as we eventually did) years earlier, tens of thousands of American lives would have been saved.
          You have Barack Obama saying, “We meet at a moment when this country is facing a set of challenges unlike any we’ve ever known. Right now, our brave men and women in uniform are fighting two different wars while terrorists plot their next attack.”
              Today’s situation is bad, but we have faced worse times, and recently (card stacking). Candidates never talk about the military, whether it is engaged in a dust-up or all-out war calling them “brave,” (glittering generalities) even though they have not had a choice but to follow orders once they’ve signed up.
              And Obama is counting on a Pavlovian response to the fear of terrorists plotting a new attack as evidence the United States needs a new way to deal with threats ((pinpointing the enemy).
              Finally, in most of his speeches, Obama attempts to char- acterize himself as an outsider who wants to bring about change (plain folks). He is a U.S. senators and that makes him an insider, but talking against “Washington,” of which he is an elite part, elicits a Pavlovian response from the voters.
          Not that more than a few dozen wise voters will ever get the chance between now and November to ask a candidate a question, much less challenge him on his statements, but these statement carefully intended to elicit Pavlovian responses are the very ones that need to be challenged.
          It is the news media, which has its access as representatives of the public, that must ask these questions, challenge these statements and, force responsible answers to the real issues of the day.
          Don’t bet on it. This is the age of tabloid-cable and blogging—the campaign will be about little more than how many houses a candidate knows his rich wife owns (name calling) or whether the other candidate is enough of a Christian to lead this supposedly secular nation (name calling).
          Other propaganda techniques, already professionally massaged in the commercials and programming that floods the airwaves, include bandwagon and stereotyping. There is one other.
         Where did both candidates plan to be on September 11? Of course, in New York City as each attempted to elicit the same Pavlovian response by the voters (testimonials).

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Honorable Politics, R.I.P.

          Back before the ides of March, when it ap- peared John McCain would be the Republican nomi- nee for president, we noted that if Barack Obama were the nominee that because of his race, he would face a particularly uphill fight this fall. We added, that much depended on whether the Republican nominee “comes up with another Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater or Karl Rove.”
          It appears to have happened. Kevin Phillips, who began bringing Madison Avenue tactics to presi- dential campaigns with an angry Richard Nixon run in 1968 and the “Southern strategy,” has changed his stripes. A somewhat repentant Atwater, who honed the craft with shiftiness, distortions, exaggerations, dirty tricks and character assassination, has died and we are left either with Rove or somebody or somebodies who learned the craft as enhanced by him into one that vicious, mean and not ashamed of outright lying or duplicity.
          The Rovian way appears to take the Nazi theory of “repeat a lie often enough and the people will believe it” to a new level, realizing an increasingly ignorant American electorate would never catch up to lies quickly enough for them to have a negative impact before the election.
          The theory appears to be a correct one, having been tested by Rove not only in the previous two elections, but throughout the two junior-Bush terms inside the White House. The more the electorate relies on being spoon-fed the news instead of seeking out information and reading it in print, a method that aids comprehensive, the more effective the Rovian strategy becomes.
          He probably did not anticipate the birth of tabloid-cable, the perceived need by a dying newspaper industry to compete by dumbing down the news and making it more exciting, the fast spread of e-mails and the increased ability to plant false ideas into the media the elec- torate does rely on.
          The biggest shame of the today’s GOP campaigning strategy, which is old politics with a cruel edge, is that in order to win, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are beginning to believe they need to get down into the gutter with the competition.
          Another shame is that McCain, a man we knew to be honorable and ethical, if not a person very tolerant of those who disagree with him, appears to have bowed to expediency and decided to take the dirt road to get elected. The selection of Sarah Palin, which could not have been the choice of the McCain we knew, appears to have been a stroke of genius straight out of the Phillips/Atwater/Rove playbook.
          One can excuse some excesses on the part of a presidential candidate. These people have to have tremendous egos to believe they can do the job better than anyone else in a nation of more than 300 million people. And if they believe that, then logic might tell them that if the country is better off with them at the helm, then however they get there is justifiable.
          As an honorable presidential candidate said in 1964, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Today’s mantra would appear to be “extremism in the interest of getting elected is no vice.” But would an honorable person stoop so low?

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'Maverick' Chasing Own Tail

          Have you heard the McCain ads that blame something called "Washington" for our ills? This "Washington" is called the Bush administration and McCain (as he says in an ad) voted with Bush 90 percent of the time.
          A McCain ad famously says Democrats will bring us a string of deficits. What McCain forgets is that George Bush, whom many call the worst president in history, inherited a huge surplus from Bill Clinton--a surplus that promised to reduce dramatically the national debt and its accompanying payment costs--and frittered it away on tax breaks for the rich and powerful and on a futile and stupid war.
          Yes, in the short run, a Democratic administration may be forced into a period of deficit spending just to repair some of the Bush damage, but Obama promises to rearrange the ill-thought Bush tax cuts so that the middle class benefits and the rich and super-rich pay much more. This rearrangement is what McCain calls increasing taxes.
          The other thing we must remember is that when people refer to a "do-nothing Congress," they are forgetting who wields the power in the final analysis.
          Because of his veto power, a president can engineer virtually whatever legislation he wants if the a house of Congress is closely divided. To overcome the veto power of the president, two-thirds of those present and voting in each house must vote to override a veto.
         More importantly, for more than 20 years the Senate has lacked a "super majority" of 60 to overcome a threat of filibuster any senator can launch. And the Republican minority, for the past 40 years, but par- ticularly in the past two years, has not been shy about using that legis- lation-blocking device.
          With the Senate elections this time around, neither party is likely to reach a super majority last enjoyed in 1978, by the Democrats. The Democratic party may get closer to that number, but it has not had any- where near that strength since it gained a one-vote majority in the Sen- ate in 2006, thanks to now-independent Joe Lieberman who is not likely to be welcomed, much less vote for a Democratic majority on Jan. 3.

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We Also Wrote:

     Consider the ineffable unpredictability of the presidential campaign.
     Much of it is puzzling and too much of it is personal. Bottom line: I wish the candidates would talk only about their own proposals to get the country out of what we on this site call "The Bush Messes." Economy, environment, war, world standing, security, debt, housing, crime, you name it.
     Barack Obama proposed a specific timetable for with- drawal from the Iraq fiasco. Even some of his friends were un- easy. Then he "clarified," but seemed to modify, that. His enemies were energized and derisive. Flip-flop, they said.
     Then, even Nouri al-Maliki, our puppet in Iraq, and some in the Bush administration are thinking of a timetable, albeit of varying intensity. John McCain continues to believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is a very long-term one. That position brought him considerable moans of dismay.
      McCain was ragging Obama about not having gone to the hot spots in the Middle East. The hidden message was, I have been there, even been kept in a bestial prison.
     But then, when Obama announced his several-stops trip to the region, the McCain reaction was, When I went it was to form my policies; but when Obama is going, it is AFTER he has announced his policies.
     Obama said he would talk with foreign leaders, even some who are very unfriendly to the United States. The Bush administration derided the idea of talking to the "evil."
     But now, the Bush administration has caught something of the national mood, and decided to talk with Iran. An undersecretary of State, in fact, just met with Iran's top nuclear negotiator, but just to listen, his bosses said. The Bush administration still does not call the discussions free conversations; the Bush condition is: Iran must first pledge to end its nuclear enrichment that would prepare it for a nuclear weapon.
     The fact is, despite the continuing angry national debate about the wars, it seems most Americans are worried about the increasingly desperate American economy. Instead of ragging their opponents, the candidates should flesh out every day their ideas on that issue.
     McCain is wedded to a continuation, even perpetuation, of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which largely brought us to this deep recession because the increased money in rich hands did not help across the board. The old trickle-down idea (remember David Stockman?) that the rich would invest and hire, and help us all, did not work.
     Obama makes the possibly impossible pledge that he will balance the budget in his years in office, with some new tax breaks for the middle class, but restoring some of the old tax rates for the very rich.
     Both candidates should be held to the standard: List specifically how your ideas add up to your promises.
     Complicating the campaigns of both Obama and McCain is the behavior of Congress. But the argument of a selfish, do-nothing-good Congress ignores some of the facts of the legislative/presidential process.
     Even with a slender Democratic majority in Congress, the president still has the veto power, which means every piece of legislation has to have a "super-majority" to get past him. So the Democrats have an argument in that way. But they still have to defend their continuing support of the greedy habit by both parties of passing "earmarks," those special home-district projects not subjected to the usual scrutiny in the legislative process.
     And the silly sidebar of the election campaign: When you are in the Senate and running for president, you must schedule carefully so you are in the Senate at just the right moment for some very important things--and absent, campaigning, for the rest. The trouble is, your opponent is watching and can say, "Oh my; my opponent did not see fit to be in the Senate when the important Hangnail Control Act of 2008 was debated today. Shame on him."
     And this tongue-in-cheek comment about this year's cam- paigns: Considering the statements that have hurt the candidates the most in this interminable campaign for the presidency, I hereby propose that NOBODY with "The Rev." before his name be allowed to utter a word, publicly or privately, when the campaign has begun.

 McCain's Arrogant Economics Adviser

      We preach on this site about being informed about the elections as well as practically everything else one opens one’s mouth about. But we also plea for discernment about what one chooses to rely on, partic- ularly for news, i.e., tabloid-cable.
     On the same day came two “gotcha” quotes that once again sent tabloid-cable off on a screaming frenzy, one from a supporter of Barack Obama, the other from a supporter of John McCain. One we normally would not address, the other is right in our ballpark.
     First, Jesse Jackson’s quote about Obama for “talking down to blacks,” leading him to add he would like “cut his nuts off.” A stupid, but meaningless remark by a hateful andhighly overrated man, merely a tabloid-cable “gotcha” moment that has no bearing on the election. The only meaningful part of the episode was his accusation that Obama was talking down to blacks in order to get elected, but that was not addressed in the controversy.
     Then came Phil Gramm’s remark that the nation’s response to what he calls a “mental recession” is the response of a bunch of whining Americans, meaning not him, of course, but people who have never earned a 10th of what he makes, the segment of society that has known for weeks we have not only inflation, but stagflation, even though the situation does not yet meet the government definition.
     Gramm’s refusal to retract any of his statement, even though McCain denounced the statements of the man serving as his chief economic adviser and a campaign co-chairman, speaks volumes about the Gramm arrogance. Finally someone convinced him to quit the cam- paign a week later, but he never recanted and McCain never renounced Gramm's policies. In Congress, one meets a bunch of arrogant people, but Gramm seemed hell-bent-for-leather to be No. 1.
     We crossed paths with Gramm between 1979 and 2002, first when he was a Democrat in the House, then as a Republican in the Senate at a time Republicans were on the ascendancy in the Texas. He quit, of course, when it became obvious Democrats would regain control of the Senate and he would lose his chairmanship of the Banking Committee.
    The party switch says enough about him, but he also reminded us of a guy who walks into a restaurant and presents his name for a reservation as “Dr. Gramm.”  
   Gramm’s doctorate is a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Georgia. Throughout his time in Congress, Gramm treated anybody who did not agree with him as an intellectual inferior and tended to talk down to them. His arrogance was not earned.
     His biggest achievement was to lead legislation effectively deregulating the nation’s financial industry, allowing banks to merge with insurance companies and firms selling securities, collectively today’s “financial services,” the industry credited the subprime mortage crisis that played a large part in putting the nation’s economy in the state we find today. But don’t expect help from any Gramm advice.
     Gramm’s view of the economy is the classic conservative view—the Herbert Hoover view that even in the face of the Great Depression, the government not only could, it should, do nothing; the economy will correct itself. TGforFDR.
     At the other end of the spectrum, Gramm fought hard to deny any welfare for people who find themselves in dire economic straits, no matter the reason for their plight. Essentially, they were not worth considering and a drag on the economy, i.e., the well-to-do.
     By himself, Gramm could be dismissed as just another crackpot, but in fact McCain has long relied on Gramm’s economic advice, including in previous presidential tries. If this is the source of what would become the economic policy of a President McCain, voters need to take a very close look and beware.

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     Barack Obama’s decision to eschew public financing for the general election is disappointing at best, hypocritical at worst. We are fairly certain this is not the type of “change” his supporters thought they were voting for during the primaries.
     The type of change they thought they were voting for was the type that followed the corrupt years of the Nixon administration and its Watergate scandal that led in part to several campaign-funding reforms enacted into law beginning in 1974.
     We hope Obama’s decision is not some sort of old-politics manipulation to box John McCain into a corner, knowing his name is on the McCain-Feingold bill enacted into law six years ago to make several campaign reforms, i.e., plug loopholes found in those 1970s laws.
     McCain, of course, cannot risk the obvious hypocrisy of violating even the spirit of the campaign reforms since his name is on a key element of them, thus his immediate declaration he would accept public financing, Obama’s decision notwithstanding.
     Even in legitimate news media, there is likely to be a big brouhaha about Obama’s decision (let’s hope it is too complicated to deal with in the usual stupid and silly manner of tabloid cable—not). So here is why this it important, and hypocritical of Obama.
     In 1974, the same year Richard Nixon became the only president to give up the office and leave, or else be kicked out as he assuredly would have been, Congress enacted new election reforms to fix some of the glaring campaign funding abuses uncovered as part of the Watergate investigations.
     One law created the current Federal Election Commission and established a system for public funding for political parties during the general election, a sincere effort to end the rampant skullduggery inevitably attached to gathering campaign contributions. But the candidates could have that public funding only if they agreed to limit the amount they spend on the election and on the contributions they receive as matching funds.
     The restrictions were challenged, and after the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 against other spending restrictions in the law, but upheld the constitutionality of the ones applied to their acceptance of public funding. If they refuse to accept public funding, the court said, their spending cannot be restricted. A few months later, Congress adjusted the law to comply, and that is what that little $1 box on the annual 1040 income tax form is all about.
     Until Obama, all candidates in the general election, even Ronald Reagan, even George W. Bush, have accepted public financing, even if they had eschewed it during the primaries.
     By refusing to accept public financing and thus have no restrictions on the amount of campaign money he can spend, Obama not only is reverting to the old politics he complained about during the primaries, he is practicing the old, old politics of the infamous Nixon years, politics almost as old as Obama is.
    He added to the hypocrisy by making his decision to eschew federal matching funds less than a year after he vowed to work with his Republican counterpart to “preserve a publicly financed general election.” Discussions were held among lawyers for both camps recently to try to work out such an agreement, but they fell through. 

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 Is Our Past Our Prologue?

     An increasingly ignorant America (well, maybe half of Americans if we’re lucky, or unlucky) will go to the polls Nov. 8 to choose its next president. As we are learning with the current gas crisis and as we appear to be learning too late from the foolish Iraq invasion, history and its mistakes are repeated because we are ignorant.
     Our ignorance keeps getting us into trouble that easily could have been avoided. As a small example, although this year’s floods in the Midwest are unusually extreme, they have occurred every year for dec- ades and we have heard or read the same heart-rending stories every year right on schedule. No one seem to learn that rivers do flood.
    The mantra of this site is the quote from the American philosopher of 100 years ago, George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is particularly a problem when you have an electorate that is ignorant of the past, much less unable to remember it.
     With all of the information at our fingertips these days, with access to minute-by- minute news from around the world, why do we fail to pay attention to what happened in the past and end up repeating its mistakes?
     The current gas crisis, which is driving up inflation and deepening a recession, twin ills afflicting millions, could easily have been avoided by paying attention to what happened in the 1970s. Up until that decade, except for interruptions by a couple of world wars, the price of fuel had remained constant since the stuff was first pulled from the ground.
     The crisis drove prices skyward, led to a shortage of gas and prompted our first serious consideration of alternative fuel sources. Pro- grams were put in place to conserve fuel. Congress imposed a 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit still in place today (although in a somewhat loosened form. The limit was imposed because 50 mph was determined to be the most fuel-efficient speed for a car to travel (It was set at 55 to satisfy the pleas of truckers).
     As Santayana had warned, Americans began to forget about the oil crisis of the 70s and began buying bigger and bigger cars, with pick- up trucks becoming the first fad and then sports utility vehicles, all of them gas-guzzlers with a design and designation that freed automakers from fleet-average mileage requirements. The automakers fought against increased mileage requirements as they changed small-car production lines over to producing more-profitable pickups and SUVs. Foreign auto-makers also produced the gas guzzler, but never abandoned their fuel- efficient lines.
     As the American time machine groaned on through the 90s and the turn of the century, we became complacent and all the concerns about conserving fuel, finding alternative sources, etc., became lost in the minds of the public.
     Look as us now—right back where we were in the 1970. Automakers, American ones almost on their mismanagement death bed, are scrambling to get back to small cars and we are looking once again at the long-forgotten issue of alternative fuel sources. Luckily, we got a bit of a head start on those alternatives, not because of high fuel prices, but because environmental concerns.
     In Vietnam, we learned our military’s reliance on superior weapons, particularly those that can be fired at an unseen enemy, were not be useful in a ground war against an enemy using guerrilla tactics. Ten years later we remembered that lesson and limited our brief war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait to air strikes. Taking over the country would have involved us in a ground war we learned from Vietnam we could not win.
     Then along came George W. Bush, playing the ever-faithful Mort- imer Snerd to Dick Cheney’s Edgar Bergen, apparently deciding his father’s administration was wrong and he would correct it. We are now repeating the Vietnam mistake and are mired in a conflict that likely will have the same ignominious end.
     Who knows what a still-ignorant American public will allow our next president to blunder into. Fortunately, although the primaries may not have given us the best people for the job, they have given us two candidates who will return intelligence to the White House. The question remains, will either of them remember the past and avoid repeating American mistakes?

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   McCain's Un-American Activities

     Presidential candidates often paint themselves in shades of gray so they can attract the lowest common denominator eligible to vote. Often, this means obfuscating their positions on controversial subjects.
     Barack Obama, by being a freshman senator who has campaigned for president for most of his time in the U.S. Senate, has laid down little national record on which he can be judged.
     John McCain has done and said a lot, and much of it already is being closely examined. Obama has the luxury of pointing fingers at the opposition for taking positions he never had to take. John McCain does not. That situation is somewhat unbalanced, but those are the kinds of conflicts candidates have to face.
     One of these issues already has come home to haunt McCain. He paints a different picture, but the Supreme Court, the majority members of which were appointed by his own Republican Party, has rejected one of his major positions.
     McCain’s campaign site strangely uses only generalities about his efforts to combat terrorism. This immodesty is uncharacteristic of a presidential candidate, and an examination of the issue and the Supreme Court’s take on it suggests why that is.
     Three years after the loony U.S. invasion of Iraq, McCain helped author the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which established procedures for denying “terrorist” detainees access to federal courts, i.e, the habeas corpus guarantee of the U.S. Constitution, the only right included in the body of the document (the rest were added as the Bill of Rights amendments). McCain and his Senate colleagues demonstrated no interest in another American standard, that a person is presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law.
     The usual argument in this case was the United States cannot afford to turn loose a terrorist and give him a chance to act again, so it had to take drastic actions. Under our legal system, judges quite often have been able to either deny bail or set bail so high it cannot be met by those charged with abominable crimes, so that is no argument.
     Despite the fact the deciding vote among 5-4 justices who struck down that law was cast by a justice appointed by Republicans, McCain denounced the decision as one of the worst in history.
     As McCain justifies the law, those being detained in Quantanamo are “enemy combatants,” even before they have been adjudicated by the U.S. court system to be so.
     One of the worst sins of the Bush administration has been the way it has chosen to combat terrorism, by abrogating the privacy rights of ordinary citizens and denying the guarantees of our U.S. Constitution, the finest example of democracy in the world, to citizens and aliens alike.
     If McCain wishes to paint himself as a presidential candidate who would not be a carbon copy of the one still in office, his failure to express a mea culpa for his role in Boumediene v Bush smeared that tint.
     And there is lots more fallout to come in correcting the Bush mess. How McCain responds to those corrections will be telling enough about how he would serve as president.

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 Third of Electoral College Majority Might Say No

     Few pundits we know of are talking about it yet, and we'd prefer not to either, but even when he is leading in the polls, Barack Obama is facing a daunting task in this election.
     The United States has come a long way in giving women and blacks something approaching equality with the ruling white males, but anyone with a realistic bone in his or her body has to acknowledge sex- ism and racism are still present in our society.
     Women may be able to surmount the prejudice against a woman in the White House by their sheer numbers--a slight majority of the U.S. population, a large majority of the voters.
     But can blacks and a man of their race win a national election today? 
     Remember that map of the United States with states colored blue if they voted Democratic and red if they voted Republican? In 1964, the southern states would have been painted a solid blue (except Arizona, home state of the GOP candidate). Now the same states are quadrenni- ally painted a solid red. What happened? Racism.
     That's right. More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act that singlehandedly changed the South from a swatch of blue to one of red, racism still abounds in the country. Racists and people with biases in that direction tend to vote Republican. And southern states vote Republican these days. All of the southern states voted for George W. Bush in the extremely tight 2000 election and have done so since the Democratic party and President Lyndon Johnson, an ironic Democratic son of the South, engineered the rights act.
     Yes, Obama won six primaries in southern states--Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. But those were Democrats voting, giving a large number of delegates, enough to give him the edge over Hillary Clinton and thus the nomination.
     Twelve states considered southern or that usually vote with southern states next door, plus Utah, have 171 electoral college votes. That number is just two-thirds of the 270 total needed to elected a president. In a close race in the fall, automatically losing a third of the majority of electoral votes could be disastrous for the Democrats.
     Yes, many Republican women strangely retain a hatred for Clinton, but since there are far more women voters than men voters in the United States, that hatred is not likely to be able to swing a sexist bias to an entire state.
     (Utah is important in the calculation because while several southern states split away from red to vote for Jimmy Carter of Georgia and/or for Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Utah has been consistently red. The state is overwhelmingly Mormon, a religion that discriminated officially against blacks until 1978. Many members subscribe to the founders' strange idea that brother-killer Cain was black, even though, according to the same Bible that discusses the slaying, only two other people existed on Earth when Cain was born--Adam and Eve.

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  Oprah, Jesus and Joe

     It is about time the two leading political parties consider the silliness of allowing a couple of states such as Iowa and New Hampshire to have so much influence over the selection of presidential candidates.
     If either is representative of the rest of the nation, we are a far different country than what we have been led to believe by common knowledge, backed by statistics. And it may be the early influence of these two states that is largely responsible for some of the bad choices for president American voters have been making.
     The Iowa partisan caucuses illustrated how silly, even dangerous it is to rely on a state whose population is nowhere near reflective of the United States at large. And it is time commentators began to focus on what really was behind the vote.
     It is absolutely insane to choose a president based on the endorsement of a celebrity who knows little or nothing about poli- tics, the public issues, even the problems or needs of the common weal. Or of any celebrity, for that matter.
     After Oprah Winfrey endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama, his poll numbers in Iowa went from 20 points behind HIllary Clinton to at least six points ahead of her, and his circus tour of the state with Win-frey drew record crowds.
     Winfrey's Web site highlights its contents with "The perfect haircut for your face," "Kirstie's bikini body" and "Oprah's debt diet." Her biography says she became a local TV news anchor (the British call anchors "news reader," which is what they are) at the age of 19, did the same for a while in another city and moved from there to hosting talk shows, which she has done since. She's no more qualified to endorse a presidential candidate than a pig in that sty that sits on the highest point in Iowa. She is nothing more than a talk show host.
     This issue is nothing about a black woman endorsing a black man or about anything else but how silly it is to allow a bunch of sycophants in one abnormal state to influence a presidential nomination.
     And it's not just sycophancy, although that should be enough to bury this setup for good. It's also about the fact Iowans are nowhere near reflective of the rest of the country in religious views, or at least we hope not, yet a nobody like Mike Huckabee is finding his star rising in a state heavy with evangelicals, those people who insist on converting everyone to Christianity.
     Huckabee is a Southern Baptist minister who said the only explanation for his star rising in the state "is not a human one." In Iowa, he is battling for the lead Mormon Mitt Romney who thinks you can't have freedom without religion or vice versa. How can you trust either man not to consider his religious beliefs when making presidential decisions?
     Finally, you have John McCain, a Republican, getting a boost in Iowa because Joe Lieberman, a Democrat without a party, endorsed McCain because no other candidate asked Lieberman for an endorsement. How nutty is that?
     And this state is allowed to have such a lopsided influence on the course of the presidential nominations of the two major parties? C'mon people, get a life. Or at least get some sophistication.
     Sycophants, evangelicals and worshipers of losers are about to have a major say on our choices for president next November and yet the two parties allow it to happen every four years. And the Democratic Party does so while boycotting a more representative state such as Michigan.
     Next after Iowa? The first real primary, in New Hampshire, a state that may be just as out of sync as Iowa.
     What next? Tom Cruise shows up in New Hampshire to plug a member of a dead sci-fi novelist's cult for president? Where does this insanity end?

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 This is a Family Value?

          Michelle Obama's husband is not yet officially the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, but she already is facing a lot of the hate e-mail, blogs and other diatribes spread by the crazy fringe of the Republican right-wing as Hillary Clinton has faced for more than a decade.
          We saw the ultimate use of this hatred in the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, but it continues in the hate e-mail flying around without anyone stepping in to set the record straight.
          One of the Hillary-Hate messages lifts selective quotes, labeled as "Marxist," that she cited in speeches and writings. They are simply presented out of context to make it look as though they expressed her beliefs. Fortunately there is Snopes.

          So what is behind this hate spread by people who identify with the party of "family values?"
          One explanation could be that both Clintons are highly intelligent and well-read people, whether you agree with their opinions or not. The anti-Hillary e-mails that go round and round with little correction are spread by far less-learned people and perhaps that is why they support someone of the opposite mien, e.g., the current President Bush.
          Even though women appear to be as well-represented among the haters as men, it could be they view a woman who appears to have a real shot at the presidency as "uppity," that her place is in the kitchen. And many of them appear to harbor racist ideas, as well, meaning that here in the 21st century they have not evolved along with most of the rest of the country.
          Or their problem could be something else entirely. It is a puzzle. Until they are able to explain it themselves in a literate manner and without relying on cliches, Fox channel screaming and other unresearched statements passed around, how can we know.
          People of this persuasion form the basis of the idea Clinton is a divisive candidate and might be least likely among the Democratic candidates to draw the votes of the undecided she needs to win the election, a feeling that could end up denying her the nomination.
          Sen. Clinton is vulnerable for her stances on many issues, to a lesser extent because of her iceberg personality and lack of hands-on experience, but she should not be vulnerable to attacks based solely on deep-seated hatred practiced by these strange people. 

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