Skip to main content

Some thoughts on Super Tuesday Eve

The jamming together of all the primaries and caucuses into a month-long period has created a media frenzy that has the virtue of unpredictability and the vice of trivializing real issues.

I'm coming around to the position that we need to move toward either a national primary or a series of regional primaries, even though I worry that this will forever eliminate the possibility of a viable national third party.

On the other hand, I love seeing the mainstream media having to admit--as James Carville did on CNN while I was waiting with my wife in the doctor's office (so I don't have a URL for it)--that nobody really knows what's going to happen.

I snicker at Huckabee bristling over the repeated "God questions" being asked of a candidate who pandered to the Christian right at every step of his campaign.

I'm still trying to decide if Ron Paul is or is not a clueless racist (or just clueless, or just racist), but it doesn't matter. The prevailing script was to trivialize him, and if it had not been the newsletters there would have been something else.

At first I thought John Edwards dropped out too early to benefit Obama, but then I reconsidered; his instincts were good, and he probably timed it just right.

My heart thrills at the thought of a joint Ann Coulter-Hillary Clinton campaign appearance.

I still think Hillary will out-organize Obama at the very end, and seize the nomination. Thereafter, even if Obama accepts the VP nod, I don't think more than a fraction of the people he's energized will still be there in November, which brings me to my least favorite prediction:

In a McCain-Clinton campaign everybody loses, because both are insider politicians who will actually change little or nothing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...