“The Will of the People”

“The will of the people.”  Sen. John McCain said it yesterday talking about responding to the will of the people and their concerns about jobs, the economy and spending, based on the outcome of the 2010 election.  Of course immediately following that remark he was willing to ignore “the will of the people” and our concerns about two costly wars that were never paid for because “a continued presence in Afghanistan is necessary.”

It is perfectly clear to me that the oft used phrase “the will of the people” is simply Republican code for the will of my supporters and funders.  They are talking about their own people, their own like minded followers.  They have no more concern for the true will of the American people than I have concern for what happens to the contestants on, well, really any reality show on TV.

If the will of the American people was such a concern, why were Republicans so combative with President Barack Obama from 2008 to 2010?  Wasn’t it by the “will of the people” that he was elected?  A majority of Americans think we should stop spending 100-200 billion dollars a year to fight two unwise wars.  Where is the importance of “the will of the people” there?  A majority of the people think the tax should pay a little more in taxes.  Hello, “will of the people?”

This current crop of Republicans leaders doesn’t care about the will of the people.  I’m not even sure they care about the people.  They care about donors, pledges and interest groups.  On the other hand, when Democrats talk about working for the American people they are talking about everybody, including the unemployed factory worker who usually votes Republicans, that homeless guy on the corner who doesn’t vote, the small business owner struggling to get by and the older woman in the Senior high rise who is reminded weekly right now about why she became a Democrat in the 1930s.  It doesn’t matter who “the people” are, because generally Democrats have empathy, compassion and a desire to make life better and easier for all of us, not just some of us. 

Paul Wellstone often said “we all do better when we all do better.”  I want a Republican who thinks that “we all do better when the rich pay less in taxes” to look me in the eye, and honestly tell me that I will do better if the Walton family or the Koch family has another million dollars in their investment portfolio, and can explain to me how that helps me or any one of my neighbors.

A Democrat’s take on the 2012 GOP Presidential Field

 

Last week, the FOX network continued its push to replace President Obama with its first official piece of business, the first FOX Republican Presidential candidate debate.  While many of the top contenders decided not to attend, five middle and lower tier candidates showed up and excited national Republican political junkies.

Despite the low candidate turnout, and the absence of the most controversial candidates, this particular debate was a bit controversial.  Not just controversial in that 4 of the 5 candidates in attendance said they would support torture as a President… (pause for shake of head)… but it was controversial in that the Associated Press and Reuters chose not to attend because of restrictions placed by the FOX Network on other news gathering organizations.  I guess it just proves that Sirius/XM was correct in their recent reclassification moving FOX “News” from the News station category to the Political station category.

Anyway, it was the first event of the 2012 presidential race.  We will have a better picture of what to expect as we approach the summer and fall. There should be candidates beating down the door to take on President Obama the way Republicans talk about how bad a President he is. I think the reality is that potential candidates realize it would have been really hard to beat Barack Obama even before the recent political events.

Here is my uneducated take on the field of Obama’s potential challengers.

The Serious Presidential Challengers:
Mitt Romney
Former Governor of Massachusetts, dogged within the party for RomneyCare and past “liberal” stances. Most recent polls have him closely behind poll leader Mike Huckabee, second, just like he was to John McCain.  Romney lost to Ted Kennedy in a Senate race not long ago.  In that race Senator Kennedy joked that Romeny flipped and flopped so much that if the election lasted long enough, Mitt would vote for Kennedy instead of himself. Ted Kennedy also joked saying “I am pro choice, Mitt is multiple choice.” I think that flip-flop aspect of his history will keep him in second, regardless of who wins the nomination.  But, if he gets the nomination, he might have a better chance of winning than a lot of these candidates.

Jeb Bush
I included Jeb Bush in the serious challenger list, but not Mike Huckabee, go figure.  Huckabee is obviously a serious contender, I’m just unsure he will run.  I think Jeb will run.  He is obviously hurt by Bush 43 as well as Bush 41, by 43’s policies and result, and 41 along with 43 by the monarchal aspect of a third Bush as a President.  Those are the only reasons he wouldn’t run, but if he jumps in, especially at the last minute into a crowd of dull, lifeless contenders, he immediately becomes a star.  I don’t think he can win the presidency because of 41 and 43, but he could easily get the nomination. 

The Dark Horses:
Paul Ryan
Like Bush, he isn’t necessarily an expected candidate, but neither was Barack Obama.  He is a Midwesterner liked by Tea Party and Republicans, and he has already established a fiscal campaign against Obama. He is technically a dark horse because he isn’t a candidate yet. If he jumped in, I think he would move to the serious challenger level and be labeled by some the second coming of Ronald Reagan (which would be completely inaccurate, don’t get me started.)

Tim Pawlenty
He seemed to be the winner in the recent FOX Network debate according to other’s accounts.  He could win by default because he is non-controversial nationally, yes, he did raise his hand in support of torture.  Of course, how he left the State of Minnesota could really hurt him in a national debate.  But if Mike Huckabee stays out of the race, and he wins Iowa.  He could run away with the nomination a la Bill Clinton. 

Mitch Daniels
Ditto on Tim Pawlenty, but he actually did the things Pawlenty didn’t, like solving a state budget deficit. He also is seen as a little more independent that would appeal to moderates with his decision to avoid controversial social wedge issues, which is a negative to hard core Republicans.  Maybe a good national pick, but might have a hard time getting the Republican nomination.

Michelle Bachmann
I know she got a zero in a recent Iowa poll, but ths is a very shrewd and hard working politician. I consider her a dark horse, not because I think she can win, but because she can get some serious attention and raise a lot of money.  The problem is she has a really good thing going where she is right now, so I question whether she would want to leave the House, especially if her district borders remain unchanged as they appear to be in the first redistricting attempt. On the other hand, if she does enter the race and doesn’t win the nomination, she is poised to fully concentrate on taking on Sen. Al Franken in 2014.  That makes me think she might not mind getting in.

The Not So Likely:
Newt Gingrich
He announced he is in today.  He is a fundraising powerhouse and he WAS a political powerhouse. I think the “was” aspect is weighing on his ego.  He can make a run, and if he loses, but does well, he gets the extra attention to sell books and continues to get calls from the FOX network to be an analyst.  If he happens to win, even better for Newt.

Herman Cain
Herman Cain was the fan favorite at the FOX Network debate, and to his credit, he was the only candidate who said he would not support torture.  He doesn’t have much of a chance.

Sarah Palin
Fierce loyalty among fans, but doesn’t seem to the have the skills or desire to seriously compete for the GOP nomination, let alone the Presidency. Plus, a bad loss would seriously diminish her ability to be taken seriously on the FOX network…

Ron Paul
Might have a better chance to win the presidency than some of these guys, but he can’t win the GOP nomination.  Plus, there is his son…

The Jokes:
Donald Trump
He was a registered Democrat, vied to run as the Reform Party candidate for president, toyed with running for New York Governor, and now is threatening to toss his hair in the ring this year for President. It is all a publicity stunt to increase his wealth. After all, is the country really going to elect a man who started life with $400 million that his father left him and has been bankrupt 3 times since, divorced twice, had an affair, and thinks he has the right to judge other’s moral and financial decisions?  Recent polls have put him in his place, close to last.

Rick Santorum
Just Google Rick Santorum quotes. No change. Nothing more to say.

Sarah Palin
Could be included here too.

The could haves, but have better things to do:
Mike Huckabee
He has a good gig going. If he gets in he is a “challenger” but I’ve read that he isn’t necessarily interested.  He leads in the current polls, and he might be the only current potential candidate (not including Bush or Ryan) at the top of the list who could unite the Republican base and challenge Obama. 

Haley Barbour
Already out. He is old and wants to spend the rest of his life enjoying it.  The funny thing is that I read he might be Mike Huckabee’s running mate if he runs.  His exit from the race adds to my feeling that Huckabee is out too.

Overall, at this point in the race it seems like a pretty weak pack. If I were betting, and Huckabee stays out, I would put my money on Pawlenty.  But if Bush or Ryan get in, Pawlenty is toast.  They are probably all toast if Huckabee gets in.

Fill me with soma and let the corporations decide what to do with me.

Where are all the cries coming from right-wingers about activist judges?  Our politicians are already overly influenced by corporations, now they are going to be selected by corporations too.  Great!  And it isn’t just GE, Exxon, Citibank, Wal-Mart or UnitedHealth we need to worry about.  There is nothing to stop a Saudi or Chinese corporation from buying ads to influence our elections now.  Thanks Supreme Court. 

Thanks for setting the course for all those sci-fi movies and futuristic books with mega-corporations running the world.   When do they start determining who costs too much to live – oh wait, insurance companies already do!  Pfizer can start feeding us soma to keep us happy, Wal-Mart can instruct us in what is OK to buy, and UnitedHealth can start eliminating the surplus population that costs us a little too much as a society.

Do you think I am overreacting?  Think about a local election.  The total campaign expenditures in 2008 for both candidates in my house district 36B was under $50,000.  What is stopping a company from spending $50,000 or $100,000 on one candidate to send their own henchman to the State House?  How much do they spend on lobbyists?  Who needs a lobbyist when a company can have their own Joe Leiberman.

And what about the cost of ads now?  With the influx of spending, the cost will go up.  It’s called supply and demand.  That will make it harder for a local candidate to afford to advertise.  It will make running a campaign even more expensive, thus more beholden to big money.

Let’s be honest.  Republicans have got to be most happy about this decision.  Not because they will likely benefit from more corporate spending than Democrats, but because the onslaught of commercials will just turn more people off to politics.  The fewer people engaged the better Republicans do.  Suppressing the number of voters is good news for the GOP.

Republican leadership is spewing first amendment talking point trash, but the only ‘persons” who will soon have first amendment rights will be “persons” with money.  John McCain has every right to be “disappointed” Mitch McConnell.

Smilin’ John Kline

While John McCain found this Lakeville woman to be so wrong that he took the microphone from her and defended Barack Obama from her comments, John Kline (sitting right next to her, looking up admiringly) really seemed to like her.

It doesn’t surprise me. John Kline is the epitome of what is wrong with the Republican party over the last 10 years. He doesn’t think he needs to represent anybody that does not support him. He, well, really I should say Kline’s staff, because I have never talked to him, disregard comments that don’t align with Republican positions as un-American, leftist or simply wrong.

I think he agrees with the Lakeville rally woman 100%, and he and Michelle Bachmann (see her Chris Matthews interview 10/17) would love to join together and expose all of the anti-American, leftists in the US in a Joe McCarthy style hearing.

I think John Kline loves sleazy election tactics. I already know his staff loves name calling, and I’m sure bat-crazy, uninformed, Lakeville rally lady is a big supporter of his, and he loves it, look at that smile on his face.

John McCain’s Ability to Multitask In Question

Should we be worried about John McCain’s ability to multitask? Or should we be worried that he is so inept when it comes to economic issues, that he can’t think of anything else because it is too much for his brain? Either one is a little worrisome.

John McCain said that he is going to suspend his campaign to deal with the financial crisis, and he wants to postpone the debate scheduled for Friday night because of it. McCain stated that he has to concentrate on the economic crisis, despite the fact that he admitted a few months ago that he does not know much about economics.

I was skeptical about the whole delaying the Republican convention for the first day because of hurricane Gustave, and my skepticism was well founded, as neither he nor his VP candidate suspended their campaign when a stronger hurricane (Ike) was bearing down on Texas a couple weeks later.

So which is it, is it a political ploy in an attempt to avoid the debates, or is it that he can’t handle two things at once?

I am going to assume that he is unable to handle two things at once. This economic crisis is not going to go away, and for at least the next year, if McCain is elected president, he is going to have to deal with the economy and North Korea, or the economy and a natural disasters, or the economy and terrorism. If he can’t do both as a candidate, how is he going to do it as a president when he has even more responsibilities?

Barack Obama has made it clear that with about six weeks left until the election, there is no better time to let the people decide who will be the leader to deal with this crisis, and this is a prime example of who is better able to make leadership decisions come January 20th.

Teddy, Taft and Trust-Busting

I haven’t studied the monopoly era or the gilded age in depth. However, I know enough about them to understand why Roosevelt and Taft pushed to eliminate trusts and monopolies: to prevent a handful of companies from overly influencing the economy.

It seems, with the deregulation started by Reagan and continued through Clinton, that we have forgotten Roosevelt’s and Taft’s warnings about too much corporate control of the market.

If a company is too big for the government to allow it to fail, if it is so important for the economy to keep a company afloat, despite bad management, maybe we need to go back to Roosevelt and Taft thinking and begin forcing these companies to break up.

We can’t go five years without a crisis. We’ve had the savings and loan crisis, the technology stock bubble bursting, the accounting crisis with Enron, etc., the mortgage crisis, and now that is leading into a banking/investment crisis. What’s next? Do we repeat the cycle and replace the technology bubble with a renewable energy bubble and do the whole thing over again?

I’m no expert on regulation, I guess both McCain and Obama are talking about more regulation, although I don’t know what they mean, I am getting bored of this election cycle already. You hear people say all the time that the government doesn’t work. They cite examples of ways private businesses can do things better and cheaper, that private businesses are more efficient, or less bureaucratic. But what you don’t hear is that it doesn’t take very many unscrupulous company CEOs more interested in their bonus than doing the right thing to ruin an economy.

Do we really want those people running the country more than they already do now? You don’t hear how important to us on a daily basis government can be, look at police departments and fire departments, social security benefits, sewage treatment centers, the roads, the air we breath, the water we drink, the lakes we fish on, or the bald eagle I saw in Eagan last week. The most important aspect of government is not efficiency, maximizing profit or minimizing expenses.

The whole reason we need a government is for protection. I don’t just mean the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, or the police or fire department, I mean protection from forces the common person can’t protect themselves from. Protection from giant conglomerates with resources beyond the possibilities of the common man to fight, protection from CEOs who are more concerned with their bottom line than the safety of the public or well being of the American economy, protection for those among us who can’t protect themselves.

Regulation may be a bureaucratic nightmare, but it is a bureaucratic necessity. I cannot comprehend why “we” as nation always needs to wait until something bad happens before we react.

Who Are We Going To Trust? The Maverick or the New McCain?

After more than a year of running as a Bush-Cheney Republican and courting groups of the electorate he has never wanted the support of before, and after more than three days of a convention full of negative, derisive speeches with more punch lines than policy, John McCain took the stage and was his old self again, at least for part of the speech.

McCain criticized the Republican party, talked about how the party has lost the respect of many Americans and called for an end to our nation’s growing partisanship, which has been fueled by Bush, Cheney, Rove and Delay.

There were periods of the speech that I felt like the crowd was unsure of whether they should cheer or not. For part of the speech he was the maverick again. But he tried to have it both ways, he never mentioned global warming or immigration, two issues that used to be his major concerns outside of the war. He questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism, and lied about Obama’s positions. He criticized congress as if he wasn’t a part of it.

Who are we going to trust? The maverick or the man who changes to please others? Do we trust a man who derides Barack Obama as an elitist, despite the fact that he worked his tail off to get were he is, or the elitist whose wife wears a $250,000 outfit to the convention, and who has to decide whether to spend his time at the Ranch in Hidden Valley, the 7000 sq. ft. condo in Phoenix, the beach-front property in California or the other beach-front property in California.

Do we trust the man who used to call for political contribution reforms, but gets millions of dollars from a few donors, or Barack Obama who get a few dollars from a million donors.

John McCain is no longer a maverick, he showed glimpses of it last night to appeal to independent voters. They would have voted for him in 2000, but there are too many voters like me who were moderates in 2000, but are now strong Democrats because of the last 8-12 years, and we want a change in Washington. There is hope.

Sarah (Sarcastic) Smile

If you watched the RNC last night, you saw a couple of cynical and sarcastic politicians speak.

After hearing all last week that the DNC was just a bunch of good speeches about hope and change without real policy ideas, last night’s display by Giuliani and Palin was insulting. Palin is a great speaker (I could barely watch Rudy) but it was full of negative and sarcastic jabs at Barack Obama, and even at the people like me that support him.

Palin may call herself an outsider, but she showed she is going to fit right in as a typical negative, attacking Republican politician. As John McCain said, that is not change we can believe in folks.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Obama’s experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

Karl Rove on Sarah Palin, I mean Tim Kaine

I heard a Karl Rove quote on the radio this morning. It is hilarious when you compare what Karl Rove said about the possibility of Barack Obama choosing Tim Kaine compared to John McCain’s choice of Sara Palin.

Rove was talking on Meet the Press a few weeks ago about the possibility that popular Virginia governor Tim Kaine might be Obama’s VP pick.

“With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished,”

Rove also said: “I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America.”

He added, “If he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with — is this person capable of being president of the United States?’”

For those that don’t know, Palin has been governor for less than two years, she was mayor of a city of 5500, Richmond has a population of over 200,000 by the way, and finally is she ready to be president? She is supposedly being tutored on foreign policy as I write, something Joe Biden doesn’t need help with.

I realize the Vice President plays a minor part in this whole election extravaganza, but Barack Obama has leadership abilities, a careful decision making process and a resolve to make America a better place, and his VP selection proves that.

John McCain’s choice proves he makes decisions without considering all of the facts or repercussions. Do we really want another impulsive off the cuff leader creating more world conflict or forming a bigger chasm between the right and left in this country?

The Great Hurrican Gustave – RNC Debate

There is this debate going on about why President Bush is so concerned about New Orleans this time when a hurricane is going to hit. I read one comment that said it was the Democrats who screwed up last time, another who blamed the residents, and third that said only Republicans know how to handle a crisis.

Those commentators are forgetting that despite the faults in the pre-hurricane preparedness, when the state failed, the federal government needed to step up but it didn’t. I don’t expect President Bush to get in a helicopter and pick people up off of roofs himself, but when he cancels a speech at the RNC out of concern for a city, which before he had told “Brownie” he was doing a great job of letting people die in chaos, it seems a little disingenuous and political.

One person who claimed he was a Republican said Bush and Cheney would only hurt McCain’s election chances if they were part of the convention, so he was glad they were not going to be there. I think he is right. The media might be making Hurricane Gustav bigger than it should be because as 21st century Americans, the best thing we seem to do is react after an event. Katrina wasn’t the first, you can include everything form 9/11 and terrorism, to how we deal with drugs, our education system, or our response to the 35W bridge collapse. We spend too many resources trying to rebuild something once it is broken, rather than reform, repair, or reorganize.

I do believe this is political. The RNC is “scaling things back” out of respect for those affected by the hurricane, however, with President Bush’s approval rating still in the twenties, and Cheney’s even lower, it really only helps McCain to shorten the convention. Add that to the fact that the DNC was a smash hit for those on the left and for independents. It would be really hard for RNC to compete against that electric event with headline speakers like Bush, Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Rudy Guiliani, Norm Coleman and Fred Thompson, wait let me rest, I’m getting bored just writing their names.

Despite my criticism, I think McCain is doing the right thing from a political standpoint. The Obama acceptance speech is fresh in the minds of independent voters, and responses were very high among that group. McCain’s speaking style and message will not resonate as much, so instead, he can demonstrate his leadership abilities compared to President Bush by taking charge of an event that the media is driving so hard.

By the way, I have to think George Bush’s approval rating has to be going up, I loved the fact that he hung out at the Olympics and relaxed and enjoyed himself, of course I guess that is what he does best.