Letters to the Editor
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Bayh Bye
As a former resident of the State of Indiana, and now a 20+ year Californian, I can see why Mr. Bayh took a pass (on the 2008 election cycle). The Clinton/Obama tango is seductive and sleek and sexy. That kind of star power plays well in Southern California and, increasingly, in the heartland states, too, especially among the crowd that came of age when Clinton blew sax into sex appeal. Now, with Obama searching for his instrument, and Hilary assembling what now resembles a (paid for) orchestra, anyone else considering a run at the presidency will struggle to be heard above the din that those two create. I hope I am wrong. I want to hear myself think out loud again in America.
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I'd go exactly opposite: Obama / Edwards
I'd vote for Obama precisly because he hasn't been around long enough to whore himself out to the kinds of people that chew a president up with payback on favors. Both have interesting things to say on paper, but Obama has juice that Edwards just doesn't have. Obmama / Edwards!
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I too
will get behind any combination of Obama/Edwards- Edwards/Obama!
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imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
In 1999, long before the primary season, the GOP put all its chips on George Bush, radically changing the perception of Bush from feckless village idiot to irresistible village idiot. It was all marketing, hawking the notions of unanimity and inevitability. There was nothing special about Bush; just about any empty suit would have worked. (McCain was a gadfly, what the English call window-dressing; if he didn't exist he would have had to be invented.) The press bought in, and that was that.
I have my misgivings about both Hillary and Barack (I'm for Gore, otherwise Edwards), but maybe the same dynamic would work for us. Get behind somebody, anybody, unanimously and early, and let the drumbeat begin.
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Inspiration
Delphine is right. Hillary Clinton is not inspiring. Though friends who have heard Hillary speak at banquets, etc. tell me she's amazing and personable, that never comes across in her public speeches. She seems cold, flat, careful, and there's too litttle expression in her face and voice. She often seems robotic, a technocrat. So while she may inspire people for nothing more than being a woman, or for giving the country a chance to strike back at all the Clinton-haters, that's not enough. Even with all the baggage of the Clinton years, if she could give a speech as rousing as Obama or Edwards or Mario Cuomo, or show as much feeling as her husband, she'd have a chance. She can't, and she doesn't. As the coach said in "Chariots of Fire": "You can't put in what God left out."
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Clinton power
Word on the political street down here in Virginia after Mark Warner, a highly effective businessman-politician who turned the state around after years of Republican mismanagement, unexpectedly withdrew before even starting to run, was that "Hillary's people" (the Clinton Rolodex folks) "persuaded" him not to run. Whether they used a carrot or a stick is unknown, but it seems clear that the field isn't clearing itself, it's being cleared by some invisible machinery. Howard Dean, meanwhile, has accumulated a lot of political capital after the 2006 midterm win, which is why, I'll bet, we're seeing Gore's name more than we used to. And probably why other violets are starting to shrink.
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A Lock on the Pity Vote
Shapiro notes that Obama drew unprecedented crowds at his visit to New Hampshire last week. What he didn't note was that Bayh was there all weekend. And no one cared. If Bayh is too fragile to deal with last weekend's embarrassment, then he wasn't thick-skinned enough to run for POTUS in the first place. Running for President is not for those with a fragile ego. So good riddance.
On a different note, I'd like to address what I perceive is facism among the letter writers today:
1) drlimerick - (a) Bush did not enjoy unanimous backing, unless by "unanimous", you mean big oil and christian fundamentalists, and (b) no lets not unamimously back one democrat early on; debate is healthy, and this country is starving for it - meaningful debate, that is.
2) nerdnam - "protest vociferously" sensationalist media coverage, fraught with those pesky over-simplifications??? LMAO! you have fun with that. Hope you don't have a day job! You might try what I do - change the channel.
3) Every other letter writer who is using the letter writing forum to annoint their favorite - can you guys see the irony in this? Nevermind. Carry on.
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Gore/Obama '08
I wish the focus wasn't on who has the best shot at raising campaign funds securing primaries but rather who could make the biggest impact in '08 and beyond. I think for what the nation needs, and what the public at large will be ready to act upon, is to undo the past six years' damage by giving Gore, who has acted selflessly in the public's interest of late, the chance he earned then. Put Obama in the Vice President's seat to gain experience and be poised for a later bid. How can you lose?
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Kucinich: The Democrats' answer to Harold Stassen?
While I found Walter Shapiro's comparison of Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich to perennial Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen amusing, I take exception to Shapiro's observation that "after his woeful performance in the 2004 primaries and caucuses" he's not what the press would deem "a plausible contender."
It smacks of the assertion that Kucinich never took the campaign seriously, something that simply is not true. The man never got a fair hearing because most of the petrified participants in the Democratic process were convinced he couldn't win (which is why the Dems stupidly nominated John Kerry, a man who could only have won if he had managed to convince voters of his anti-war bona fides despite his voting for the Senate resolution), and the press blew him off as some sort of kook with an axe to grind.
When Shapiro writes: "But it is also possible that Lynch and the press bards of old-fashioned presidential campaigns (myself very much included) are longing for a tradition and an era that is inevitably vanishing in the face of the politics of celebrity"; he is admitting complicity in new paradigm that judges candidates not on their ideas but on their celebrity status. Look at the photo that accompanies the story--you've got "x's" on the faces of Warner, Feingold and Bayh; "?'s" on Dodd, Biden and Richardson; and "checks" on Edwards and Vilsack. Kucinich has announced that he's running--doesn't he rate a check mark as well?
Sure, I may be a bit overly partisan because of a speech I didn't give while not serving in the U.S. Senate: "When Dennis Kucinich ran for president, I voted for him. I'm proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed my lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."