posted 2008/05/06 at 20:12
I had hoped that the NHL would schedule the start of the Red Wings-Stars series for tonight because it would give the Stars little time to recover from that grueling four-overtime game on Sunday. Now I'm wishing they'd scheduled any game for tonight so I wouldn't be stuck watching more primary coverage tonight. I know that I don't have to watch, but this is my normal news-listening time, and for the sake of being able to converse knowledgably with my students about this stuff, I still feel obliged to keep tabs on things. Still, this primary campaign got tiresome long ago, and as much as I'm not going to tell the Democrats how to run their campaigns (even if they tell we Greens to perform anatomical impossibilities in terms of us running for offices), on a personal level I wish we could just get this campaign over with.
I have to admit I'm starting to have doubts about where my vote will go, though. I had gotten behind Nader as soon as he entered the race, even when he decided not to pursue the Green Party nomination, in large part because I didn't feel comfortable voting for Cynthia McKinney. I've still got very strong reservations about McKinney, but the mailings I've been getting from Ralph Nader's campaign have been giving me cause for pause as well. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there is something about the way the Nader campaign is conducting itself that is making me question my loyalty to it. I think that over my break I'm going to be taking a closer look at McKinney and how she's conducting her campaign, and reevaulate just who I want to support.
What may be bothering me the most about this is the impending sense that this is not going to end well. Not only am I concerned that the protracted Democratic primary campaign is going to give McCain an easy path to the White House, but between the Democrats opposing Green Party ballot access at every turn and the progressive vote already being split between Nader and McKinney, I feel like we're going to be in for another night like we had in 2004, where it's close but the Republicans win, the Green Party loses even more of the gains it got in 2000, and we'll be no closer to reinventing democracy than we were four years ago. I hate to be a pessimist about these things, but I can't help but be a realist, and it's hard enough to be an optimist and a realist at the same time about anything, let alone American politics.
Labels: greenparty, politics
posted 2008/03/04 at 19:09
I was hoping for a distraction from the craziness of Ohio having such a hotly-contested Democratic primary, but this wasn't what I had in mind. Believe me, the last thing I needed after coming home from the hospital after Dad died was to walk by our mailbox and see a full-page flyer from Clinton's campaign sticking out of it. I had thought that the Republican and Democratic primaries were the only things on the ballot today, but there were a couple of funding issues on the ballot here, including funding for our firefighters. The firefighters already had my vote for life, especially after the house fire, but I saw them do everything they could to save Dad in our living room and they have my eternal appreciation for that as well. I was probably the only person at that precinct to come in as a declared Green (or at least as close to one as I can get given how Ohio's laws screw over third parties), but I'll get my chance to vote in the Green primary next month. I'd originally planned to go to the statewide convention in April to vote, but right now I don't want to make any plans like that until the situation here at home gets a lot more settled.
It would figure that immediately after Dad's death I'd get Darren McCarty back on the Red Wings, a snow day, and Ralph Nader in the presidential race. However, as much as I appreciate Nader running, I don't agree with his strategy of running independently and trying to run a campaign "alongside" the eventual Green Party nominee to get progressive issues out there. I think it does help to have more voices talking about the issues that aren't being talked about by the major party candidates, but it's possible to do that without having two progressive candidates out there. I don't think Nader and David Cobb running separate candidacies four years ago was a good thing for either progressives as a whole or the Green Party in particular, given how it split an already small vote and cost the Green Party several ballot lines it won with Nader's 2000 candidacy. Particularly if Clinton manages to win the Democratic nomination through superdelegates, there is a tremendous opportunity for the Green Party to make huge inroads in this next election and make the five percent popular threshold to qualify for federal funds in 2012. Nader running as an independent -- particularly with Matt Gonzales as his vice-presidential candidate (one of the biggest stars within the Green Party) -- doesn't strike me as the best strategy for this year.
As for my plans, I'm going to continue to push for Nader to get the Green Party nomination whether or not he wants it. He already has a huge delegate count, and I think he may actually win the nomination even if he isn't campaigning for it. (If he does win the nomination, I highly doubt he'd turn it down.) If he doesn't get the nomination then Cynthia McKinney will likely get it, and as much as I want to vote for the Green Party candidate no matter what, there's no way I can vote for McKinney over Nader. I guess I'm stuck with Nader now no matter what, and the moment he has volunteer opportunities posted on his Website that don't involve actually talking with other people, I'll probably volunteer to do something for him. At least that should give me another outlet for all the emotions I've been feeling since Dad's death.
Labels: dad, greenparty, politics
posted 2008/02/09 at 15:32
It says something about this election campaign that the candidate I'm most appreciative of right now is Mitt Romney, as his withdrawl from the Republican nomination means I'll only have about half as many candidate spots on my television to deal with leading up to Ohio's primary next month. Ohio doesn't look to be in play for Huckabee, and by the time Ohio rolls around I think Huckabee's momentum will be completely drained so McCain won't have any real need to buy more but a sprinkling of ad time locally. The Democratic nomination will still definitely be in play by the time of the primary, though, and although part of me feels like I should be excited that there's finally an Ohio primary that might matter, I am not looking forward to a month of dueling Clinton and Obama spots on every show on the dial. I got sick enough of those spots leading up to the Michigan primary (even though only Republicans bought ad time on Fox Sports Net Detroit), and I'm tired of watching the Obama and McCain spots that air on Countdown. Given how tight the Democratic race is right now, and given how close Ohio was in the 2004 election, I'm guessing that any moment now I won't be able to watch a half-hour of any commercial network on cable without seeing a Clinton or Obama ad buy.
I'll be skipping the primary vote, because there won't be anything else on the ballot that day and because I can't vote in the "official" state primaries because doing so automatically registers me as a member of whatever party's primary I vote in. I would much rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee than Clinton, but I'm probably not going to vote for him in the general election anyway. More to the point, I still remember several registered Democrats in my first-semester MA classes who got hassled by Ohio Republicans that year as the Republican Party challenged the voter registration of several people I knew, holding off on submitting the challenges until the legal deadline so that the students couldn't call off of work on such short notice to attend the hearings about their registrations. I can't help but wonder if Ohio Democrats might not try something similar with we Greens this year, given how ridiculous they were last time around in making sure that not even Nader's write-in votes would get counted. (Seriously, if they'd put that kind of effort into promoting their own candidate then Kerry might be in the White House now.)
Ohio's Green Party will handle its primary at their convention in April, although people who won't be attending can mail or e-mail a ballot before then. I think I may actually go to the convention, though, even though it's all the way across the state and there's no way I could reasonably make a daytrip of it. I'm still hoping that Nader gets in the race again, because I don't like the prospect of Cynthia McKinney winning the nomination; I'm still not getting a good vibe off of her. If Nader doesn't come in then I'll probably vote in the primary for Kent Mesplay, but I think the Greens need Nader more than ever now. Particularly if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, people are going to need an alternative to the spectre of four or eight years of DLC neoliberalism, and even if there isn't a realistic chance of winning the presidency, at the very least we might stand a chance of getting that magical 5% of the popular vote that would give the Greens tens of millions of dollars of federal matching funds in 2012. I haven't been too directly involved with the Green Party itself since I first registered to vote, but more than ever now I feel compelled to do what I can to help the party along.
Labels: commercials, greenparty, politics, television
posted 2008/01/24 at 19:49
Democrat Kucinich quits White House race (AP via Yahoo! News)
I had heard that one Democrat was mounting a challenge to Kucinich's House seat a while back. Now there's four, and as much as I wanted Kucinich to repeat his performance from 2004 (staying in the race until it was mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination), I can't blame him for pulling out like this. The mainstream media silencing him at every turn (pulling him from debates being only the latest example of this) was making it impossible for him to gain any real momentum, and it wasn't like he had much of a chance of winning the nomination from the onset anyway. Yes, I wanted him to stay in as long as possible, but the man has to put food on his table, and I can't fault him for focusing his energies on retaining his House seat in this climate. Still, the fact that all of these challengers would suddenly pop up strikes me as dirty politics, and I'm fairly convinced that someone in the Democratic Party is likely behind this.
As if this isn't bad enough, Kucinich saying that he won't endorse another candidate, when he'd previously given a tacit endorsement to Obama by telling his Iowa caucusers to pick Obama as a second choice, is rather chilling. The only reason I can see for Kucinich to do this is that he believes, as so many others do at this point, that Clinton is going to win the nomination for the Democrats. I still can't say that I believe Obama to be the true progressive that so many say he is -- I think that's the same kind of wishful thinking that made Howard "balanced budget hawk and lifetime A ranking from the NRA" Dean the so-called big name progressive of 2004 -- but I'd rather have him as the Democratic candidate by a long shot. I know the old saying goes "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," but in the case of the Clintons I'd just rather they disappear entirely from the face of American politics.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that a couple of weeks ago, knowing full well that Kucinich stood next to no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, I signed the Draft Nader petition to try to get Nader into the Green Party primaries. It's looking more and more like the Green nomination is Cynthia McKinney's to lose if Nader doesn't enter, and even though I'd vote for McKinney in a heartbeat if the next best alternative out there is Clinton, I still have a lingering distrust for McKinney, and I don't think she's the person who the Green Party should be putting out there as the face of its principles. This whole campaign just seems to be headed straight down the crapper, and it's making it all the more painful for me to realize that this is the last presidential campaign I'll be too young to run in. Do I have to fix everything around here?
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics
posted 2008/01/03 at 20:09
As much as I've written in the past about how the media puts way too much focus on the Iowa caucuses, sure enough I've pretty much braced myself to watch MSNBC from right now until whenever I go to bed. (I'm getting too old to try to outlast the coverage, especially since the results will likely be nebulous into daybreak.) I guess I just like to fixate on the mechanics of things like this. I don't watch college football, and I'm fairly uninterested in the NFL (at least until the Bengals get their act together again), but I absolutely love watching the NFL Draft in the spring even when I hardly know what is going on. I've always compared the NFL Draft to a giant 32-person game of chess, and I guess that I'm getting a similar vibe right now off of the Iowa caucuses. This is about as close to the machinations of Big Two politics as I care to get -- I dislike all the spinning and such intensely -- but watching them unfold is strangely intriguing. At least I know a lot more about the candidates here than I do about the players in the football drafts.
Keith Olbermann's been talking a lot these past couple of nights about Dennis Kucinich asking his Iowa caucus-goers to go for Barack Obama as a second choice, just as Kucinich asked them to go for John Edwards in 2004. I remember when that happened in 2004, though, and there are a couple of important things that Olbermann hasn't mentioned about 2004. First of all, in 2004 Kucinich was campaigning a lot more in Iowa than he did in this campaign; I don't think Kucinich is even in Iowa right now. I think his campaign is putting much more emphasis on New Hampshire, which is kind of logical given that the "15% threshold" rule in Iowa really works against the second-tier candidates. Secondly, Kucinich's agreement with Edwards was reciprocal, and really helped both candidates out a lot; Kucinich placed way better in Iowa than anyone thought he would, and Kucinich's support may have helped Edwards leap above Howard Dean to second place. I haven't heard of a reciprocal agreement between Kucinich and Obama this year, but then again I doubt there will be any precincts where Obama will drop below threshold. I kind of wonder if Kucinich may be angling for the vice-presidential nomination, since he's closer to Obama ideologically than the other candidates.
This brings up an interesting point, because one of the things I need to do over the next couple of weeks is to research the current crop of candidates for the Green Party nomination. From a glance, though, it looks like Cynthia McKinney may be the frontrunner at this point, and, well, I don't get a good vibe off of her. Between some of the things she did while a member of Congress and her strange switch to the Green Party just before announcing her candidacy, I just don't feel like she's the person the Greens should be nominating. I've still got an uneasy feeling about Obama as well, but if I were forced to choose between Obama/Kucinich and McKinney/someone else, I think I would vote for Obama. I'm hoping that this doesn't happen, though, and that someone I feel easier about voting for captures the Green Party nomination. Where's Ralph Nader when you need him?
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics
posted 2007/11/25 at 21:53
Giuliani's "Kucinich-Size" Crowds Disappoint In New Hampshire (NBC News via huffingtonpost.com)
The Huffington Post, as usual, chose their own headline for the story, and much like the Drudge Report before them, they picked a headline that targeted the HuffPo base and framed the meat of the story in the best terms possible for their goals, mainly to assist the mainstream Democratic candidates towards next year's Presidential elections. (Also note the unflattering photo of Giuliani they use in the story; as much as I dislike Giuliani, I don't think it's fair of HuffPo to do that.) Mind you, in just the short excerpt of the story featured in the link above, HuffPo had another way to frame the story, comparing the size of Giuliani's crowd to the size of the crowd Ron Paul garnered. That comparison would have worked just as well to slam Giuliani, plus it would have stuck it to another Republican, but instead HuffPo went with the Kucinich slam.
I've written before about how upset I am that HuffPo has made itself a shout box for the centrists who continue to stink up the Democratic Party, paying a small amount of lip service to Obama but otherwise playing the same "Clinton doesn't represent us but don't you dare vote Green" game that the Democrats played last time with John Kerry. It simply boggles the mind that there are so many on the so-called left here in America who are pushing hard to make Ron Paul an alternative to Clinton simply because he opposes the war, given that he also opposes pretty much everything the Democratic Party has traditionally stood for. I'm not saying that the war isn't an important issue, but it's almost as if Democrats are willing to throw away their very identity in order to try to spite Clinton in some sick, twisted way.
What has made this situation all the more maddening for me in recent weeks has been the sudden surge of Mike Huckabee in polls, both in the early primary/caucus states and in the nation as a whole. Huckabee's rise in the polls doesn't particularly surprise me, because he represents the values that the religious right so desperately want to keep in the White House. We can argue Huckabee's electability later -- I think he's far more electable than anyone in the mainstream media has argued -- but the point I am trying to make is that Mike Huckabee is living proof that a party can play to its traditional values instead of running to the centre and create a viable candidate. Huckabee's example should have all true Democrats rushing to put their money into the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and yet both of them continue to be treated as "joke" candidates, not only by the mainstream media but by the Democratic Party establishment itself.
I'm pretty much resigned to voting for the Green Party candidate next year and taking whatever abuse people want to give me for it. That's not my primary concern right now, though. Right now I want nothing more than to take Dennis Kucinich softly by the shoulders, give him a warm smile, and then shake the heck out of him and yell "Why on earth are you still a Democrat?" I understand Kucinich's historical ties to the party and his desire to work within the party to try to transform it, but I don't think at this point that any reasonable person can expect that the big money centrists that have so thoroughly ruined the Democratic Party will be taking off any time soon. More than ever, 2008 needs to be the year that the Green Party establishes itself as a viable alternative for true progressives, and we start to chip away at the two-party hegemony that is so clearly leading this nation right down the crapper.
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics, rhetoric
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