Musing's musings

Wouldn't it be loverly?

I woke up this morning to a story on the news about a couple of Clinton delegates (one male, one female) who were planning to cast their votes at the convention for Hillary, on the grounds that that's what they were pledged to do and that's what the voters in Colorado, which they represented, had sent them to Denver to do. One of them wasn't sure whom she'd be voting for in November; the other said very clearly that he was voting for Obama, given that there really wasn't any other choice.

That's a dichotomy that the Very Serious People in the media have been playing up as we've been running up to the Democratic National Convention--the dissatisfaction they claim many of those who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries feel with Barack Obama. John McCain even tried to capitalize on that with an ad (part of which NPR played for the two Clinton delegates), in which a woman who claims to be a Democrat and a Hillary supporter says that she's going to be voting for McCain this fall and that "It's OK."

It pleased me that NPR (for once) played a clip of Hillary Clinton's response to that bit of electioneering bullshit: "I'm Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve of that message." It would please me even further if tomorrow, in headlines and nut grafs across the dead-tree media, and sound bytes everywhere else, I heard some of the following excerpts from Hillary's address to the convention in Denver tonight:

We are on the same team, and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines.

No way, no how, no McCain.

Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.

Most of all, I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years. Those are the reasons I ran for president, and those are the reasons I support Barack Obama for president.

It makes a lot of sense that next week John McCain and George Bush will be together in the Twin Cities, because these days they're awfully hard to tell apart.

I think her speech tonight should put an end to any doubts that the Democratic Party is united behind its candidate. It should put an end to this "PUMA" nonsense--which seems, increasingly, more and more likely to have been a Republican disinformation program all along. It should absolutely put an end to any more defections by people claiming to be Democrats, thinking that it would be OK to vote for McCain in this election.

Let's try this one more time

I wrote this post (or one similar to it) last night. However, the new posting interface on TypePad is proving a little tricky to navigate. I finished the post, hit "Preview," read through it, corrected a couple of typos and changed a couple of words, hit "Preview" again, and then hit "Save"--just like I've done hundreds of times. But then the post disappeared into the ether. If that sounds a little too much like "The dog ate my homework" to you, perhaps the fact that it also happened to Wil Wheaton might incline you to be a little less cynical.

Anyway, I started to write about what a day of endings and beginnings yesterday was. I was at the end of a very long day, in which I'd gotten up at the usual time, gone to the office, slogged through a morning's work (and then some), gotten on a train, gone to Chicago to audition for Jeopardy!, come home, watched what turned out to be the last game of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs (Go Red Wings!), and was looking forward to schlepping off to bed for a well-deserved rest when I stopped in to check e-mail one last time and decided to grab a quick look around the blogosphere, when I learned that Senator Clinton had announced her intention of conceding the primary election to Senator Obama this Saturday, and throwing her support behind his candidacy for president. A great way to end the day--until TypePad ate my post.

I do think it's a good thing that Senator Clinton is getting behind Senator Obama's candidacy. John McCain may be running for George W. Bush's third term, but that doesn't mean he's just going to roll over and play dead. The more ammunition we have against him, the less likely it is that we're going to wake up in McSame's World in two hundred thirty-odd days. Moreover, despite what I'm sure will be howls of anguished protest from Very Serious People all over the blogosphere and the punditocracy, I'm in agreement with the Metra employees I heard quite animatedly discussing the reasons why it would be a good idea for Obama to seriously consider Clinton as his number two.

What are some of those reasons, you ask? Well, as one of the conductors said yesterday, Clinton has a lot more foreign policy experience than Obama does--and given the way the Hedgemony has flushed our diplomatic standing down the toilet for the last eight years, we absolutely cannot afford to be falling down on that front any longer. Just remember what happened to the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer the last two times he went to Saudi Arabia to ask the oil sheikhs pretty please with a cherry on top could we have some more oil if you doubt me on that front. An argument the train men didn't make, but one which makes sense to me, is that Clinton and Obama are each strong in places, and with constituencies, where the other is not--or at least is not as strong. Again, the Republicans may be sliding down the razor blade of life (to borrow a phrase from Tom Lehrer), but they're not out of the game yet. The more votes we can bring, the more money we can collect, the more voters we can excite and energize, the harder the other side has to fight. And we don't want to give them even half an inch--or they'll steal this election, too.

αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ' εὖ νικάτω

We're not even four complete months in to 2008 and already I'm ready either to start all over again or else skip to the end of this crappy year in the hopes that something better lies at the end of it than anything I've encountered thus far at the starting end.

Tragedy struck the NIU community again today, when the glassblower for the chemistry department (where I worked for twelve years before starting my current job) was killed, and his wife seriously injured, in an accident on their way to work this morning. She had to be airlifted to the regional trauma center in Rockford and undergo major surgery, but is expected to survive. He, on the other hand, was in such bad shape that they didn't dare try to airlift him out. He was due to retire in another couple of months, and was so looking forward to building his retirement home in Wisconsin, and enjoying the fishing on his property in the Ozarks. I literally spoke to him yesterday morning, when he told me how hard he was finding it to get motivated to come in to work in the mornings, knowing that his time was short and retirement was beckoning. Now he won't get the chance to enjoy any of that.

We've had two bomb scares in as many weeks, and there's all the usual end-of-semester stress to contend with as well. Small wonder many of us are wandering around in a quasi-daze, wishing the world would stop moving quite so erratically so we could figure out the pattern, account for it, and get back to doing whatever it was we were doing before all this mess got started.

The news in the wider world isn't much better. Food riots and shortages around the world, the dollar plunging to all-time lows against major world currencies, the price of oil and the price of gold are at or near record highs, and the world seems well and truly hellbound in a handbasket. The Democratic presidential candidates are engaging in an inter-gender pissing match, neither one willing to compromise with the other. Meanwhile, John McSame is consolidating his base and pulling even with both Democratic contenders in recent national polling. There was apparently some kerfuffle last week about the latest in the seemingly endless series of presidential "debates" between Obama and not-quite-Obama--as if such events hadn't been little more than televised campaign advertisements for lo! these many years.

Speaking personally, I couldn't possibly care less about what Clinton said about Obama, or what Obama said about Clinton, or about who either one of them is friends with. All I want is for one or the other of them to get the nod, and then to get on with the business of beating the pants off of McSame: preferably out of my sight and/or hearing, since voting for either Clinton or Obama will require a huge amount of nose-holding and gnashing of teeth on my part, and voting for McSame is absolutely not an option. I'm sick to death of hearing endless repetitions of the same horse-race stories where the only thing that changes is who happens to be ahead at any given moment. I'm also sick to death of the presidential campaign season, which has been dragging on for the last two years at least: clearly, we need to move in the direction of the European model, where candidates have weeks, rather than months or years, to make their case to the voters.

Fortunately for my sanity (and quite possibly for my health as well), by this time next week I'll be ensconced in the deep silence of a secluded monastery, making a four-day retreat. I'll be away from the phone, away from the computer, away from the radio, away from all the political and other bullshit. Just me, a lot of silence, a lot of seclusion, and plenty of time for prayer and thought and reflection. Maybe, please God, that will get my batteries enough of a charge back that I can make it through the rest of the year without going completely 'round the bend.

Oh, yeah. The post title. It's a line from an early chorus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon. It translates to "Sorrow, sing sorrow; but let the good prevail." That's going to be one of my prayer mantras next week, I think.

Let's get this settled, boys and girls

It takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. As of today, according to the paper of record, Obama has 1,620 delegates to Clinton's 1,471.5 (I'd love to know more about that half-delegate!). Respectively, that amounts to 80% and 73% of the total needed to win. Only ten states and territories have yet to hold their primaries, caucuses, or other nominating contests, and those states and territories control 689 additional delegates between them.

If either Obama or Clinton can manage to sew up most of those delegates (Obama would need roughly 60% of the remaining delegates; Clinton, 80%) s/he would have enough to win the nomination outright and avoid a brokered convention. Neither candidate seems likely to achieve the necessary level of success. Even if either candidate could do so, the primary calendar doesn't run out until June 3--or four full months after Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Tuesday, whose whole purpose was supposed to be avoiding exactly this kind of protracted nominating contest. The actual nominating convention isn't until the end of the summer (August 25-28).

I no longer have a horse in this race: it really doesn't matter all that much to me who wins the nod to be the Democrats' nominee for president, because I will be holding my nose and fighting down the bile rising in the back of my throat when I have to step into the voting booth in November and cast a ballot for either Clinton or Obama. The punditocracy and the blogosphere notwithstanding, the American people seem to think that either candidate would do at least an OK job as president. They certainly don't seem eager to choose one over the other, given that the race is effectively in a statistical dead heat.

It may be due in part to the peculiar circumstances of my life (and the lives of a lot of the people I talk to on a regular basis), but I'm thoroughly sick of this never-ending snarking and sniping--and even more thoroughly sick of the way the media fawns over all the candidates in the race (when they are not attempting to anoint one or the other of them as the "frontrunner," the better to serve their preferred horse-race model of story)--and wastes virtually all of its time analyzing the mind-numbingly boring minutiae of whose surrogate said what allegedly nasty thing about which candidate today. It is true that the media's focus on the ongoing Democratic contest makes it harder for John McCain, the Republican nominee, to get much attention. But it is not clear to me that lack of attention is necessarily a bad thing for McCain, who has to do an awful lot of fence-mending with conservative voters who are, to say the least, highly skeptical about his candidacy and his ability to represent them and their concerns. It may well be to McCain's advantage to be able to do some of the necessary ass-kissing out of the glare of the cameras. It also makes it easier for him to focus on raising more money and building up his support (and doing what he can for down-ticket Republicans, most of whom are likely quaking in their boots at the thought of what is likely to happen to them on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November).

Consequently, I would like very much to see our two remaining contenders (or at least their staffers) sit down together and have some serious conversations about finding a way of accelerating the process of selecting our nominee--so that we will not be limping into the general after having had to fight a bruising primary all the way through the summer (and possibly waiting for the result of a brokered convention). Because while it seems fairly clear that Democratic voters like both Obama and Clinton roughly equally, both the Obama and the Clinton camps contain quite a few, shall we say, hyper-partisan supporters who have sworn upon veritable stacks of Bibles that they will never, ever, ever vote for that candidate. And that's definitely to McCain's advantage and the Republicans'. We've got to get behind whichever one of our two candidates winds up being the nominee--and we're going to need to allow some time for that to happen, given the passions that have characterized this election season.

So let's start the healing process sooner rather than later, eh? Bury the hatchet now, pick a slate of candidates, and let's get people used to thinking about them as "our" nominees--not as "my guy/gal and that candidate." We could use some time to fund-raise ourselves, and I'm quite sure that down-ticket Democrats would be quite happy at the prospects of having our presidential slate with some time to help them raise funds and raise their profiles in their respective districts.

I don't much care who gets which slot. But I would very much like to be able to stop worrying about when we're going to come to a decision on that question. And even more so having to wake up virtually every morning to yet another edition of "Inside Politics." Kiss and make up already, would'ja?

Barack and Hillary: Two peas in a pod

This posting is sorta-kinda in response to this comment on a recent posting. In that comment, Scott alleges (without ever saying it in as many words) that I have no good reasons for being disenchanted with either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as potential Democratic nominees for president. I of course, am calling that comment pure bullshit.

I'm fully cognizant that if, as seems quite likely from current polling numbers, trends, and other indicators, either Barack or Hillary wins the 2008 presidential election, he or she will make history as either our first black president or our first woman president. I would have to characterize voting for either one of these candidates solely or primarily on the basis that s/he will make history if elected as being among the more fundamentally galactically stupid ideas I've ever heard. And believe me, I've heard some pretty stupid ideas in my time.

Obama's supporters routinely allege that he is far and away the most liberal/progressive candidate the Democratic Party has entertained in recent memory. I call bullshit on that claim, too. There is no way to put Barack Obama in a group with people like Mike Gravel, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich and have Obama come out looking more liberal than anybody else in the crowd. I think one could even make a reasonable claim that Obama is less liberal than notable figures of the not-too-distant political past such as Pat Schroeder, Sargent Shriver, Christopher Dodd, or Howard Dean. Even Republican "Fighting Bob" La Follette looks more liberal than Obama in numerous ways.

Follow me below the fold and we'll dig into the specifics.