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| Resolving Super Tuesday |
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| Obama and Clinton Neck and Neck |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, February 06, 2008. Exciting day, yesterday, and the caucuses were hugely attended and the energy level was high. Or, so I�m led to believe. I could not attend because I have doctor's orders to stay still with an elevated leg. That went out the window when my computer started a long dying process, and after running around a bunch to get it looked at, because it had to be fixed before today and this commentary. But my attendance, I console myself, would not have mattered, except for some lesser offices, perhaps. Obama swept the state by a lot, and if anyone should get credit for this national surge of enthusiasm for the election, I have no problem crediting the Illinois Senator. He's a magic man, generates lots of positive energy for purposes not yet expressed in any detail. It's long been true that Presidential candidates campaign on Legislative issues to show their compassion and closeness to the people which bare small reality to their actual powers of office. Legislators always campaign on foreign issues and law and order about which their branch has little direct control. Anymore, anyway. There was a day when Congress declared wars. Quaint, it seems now. Senator Clinton won the night in actual delegates and, in aggregate with his Super Delegates, she has a pleasant if far from commanding lead. She won California with over half the vote. She also handily won Massachusetts, where Obama had hoped to capitalize upon the Kennedy mystique and supposed power. Kiss the Kennedy Dynasty goodbye. They have no more power than any other long term legislator with grateful constituents. In Massachusetts, both Senators and the Governor - all part of the Kennedy machine - came out to support Obama. Meant little if anything. In California, Maria Shriver, a Kennedy member, along with John Kennedy's sole immediate surviving family member also came out for Obama. Nada. Didn't move the knobs at all. Change, long overdue change, has come, and those of us Boomers who recall have to bury the actually non-existent Kennedy mystique. Good. On the Republican side, the conservative southern Evangelicals showed scant enthusiasm for anyone but voted for Huckabee, and I'm convinced more out of bigotry against the Mormon Mitt Romney than any constructive belief that the folksy idiot and Creationist enthusiast would improve much in the Babylon by the Potomac. Mitt Romney has spent about a million dollars for every delegate he has, much of it his own money. That isn't showing a lot of support among Americans in general, and the states he wins, like Colorado, either have Mormons in bulk or, like Massachusetts, he once lived there as an adult. There is a feel good movement afloat to merge Obama and Clinton into one ticket, and amidst all the sighs there is little thought. Both are currently, especially Clinton, powerful Senators and it would be a step down to take the Vice-Presidency. Secondly, we need to rethink the vice Presidency again. Having a dull, capable page holder like Gerald Ford till the next election, or even grooming a young rising star as Nixon was once, is okay. Having a VP with a popular draw nearly the same as the President is dangerous. And this brings us to the real reason for the outburst of political activity this election cycle. As someone on the WEB remarked last year, America has just finished a period where it was thought it made no major difference who was President. George W. Bush removed that idiocy from our eyes, his sole constructive legacy. It's the complete collapse of America's image around the world, our sudden inability to do anything right, our declining morale in our armed forces - which is a real danger given the propensity of conservatives to use our own religious militias like Blackwater - that I suspect has unnerved us and presented the actuality of our civilization's collapse. It isn't just an amusing coffee house, cocktail hour topic. Our dearth of home manufacturing, our food and water sources, our protection of our own citizens, our own citizens' physical inability to do actual constructive work or find their nation on a map is now more real that a Today Show segment. We're paying for our schools now. We need modest change in procedures but huge upgrades in minimal competence by our elected officials, from the top down. I sincerely hope we elect the person, either Obama or Clinton, who'll bring the most of that sadly neglected commodity to the market. There are those that think McCain, who is hard not to admire, will beat either of them. McCain has shown his age and his confusions of late, and he's old, and he's wrapped himself in Bush's war. And the conservatives do not like him. I'm pretty sure it's the Democrats for the next eight years, and we'll be justly damned if we fail the nation this election. |
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