ClearTheRail

Politics

There seems to be some hope for this country yet. Most polls seem to have Kerry and Bush tied even after Bush’s $10 million in advertising promoting him as a strong leader in the face of 9/11. Maybe people see what a crock of shit that is after all. I mean yeah, the guy flew around and made speeches, but anyone who was the President would do that. Way to go there champ, great leadership.
I truly can’t fathom what anyone who isn’t very wealthy AND very selfish could see in President Bush. Yeah the tax breaks are nice, but sweeping a giant deficit under the rug is just going to come back and bite you later, with interest. The economy is better but still sucky and all the capital gains reductions in the world (the trickle down effect revisited) aren’t going to fix that. And yeah Saddam is captured but I have to agree with Howard Dean here when I say I don’t feel any safer. Saddam may have been a bastard but he was never any threat to us. Osama killed many more Americans than Saddam ever dreamed of and he is still alive and undoubtedly planning more.
So I am just curious as to whether there is some pro-Bush argument I haven’t heard yet, or are 44% of Americans just going to vote Republican by rote. I would have thought that much less than 44% would be in a position to receive any real benefit from his presidency, and even among the rich there are a significant number of Kerry supporters. But I guess it’s good to know that when Osama strikes again Bush will be there to fly around and give speeches full of awkward pauses and mispronunciations written by his aides. Because not just any President of The United States could do that, could they?

Vote For Dean

Most political commentators seem to think that the least likely Democratic candidate to win an election against George W. Bush is Howard Dean, and I would just like to go on record as saying they are all incorrect. If you examine the situation from a gambler’s perspective you come to the conclusion that he is the only candidate able to dethrone Bush, and therefore all Democrats should vote for him immediately. Let me explain.
Were any candidates other than Dean to win the Democratic Party nod they will finish a relatively close second to G W. I don’t mean Al Gore close but they would not get blown out as there are still a number of people like myself (a.k.a. anyone who cares about foreign policy, the environment, Medicare, the deficit, civil liberties, and many other things) who are going to vote for whoever is not G W. And there will be the normal straight ticket Democrats, plus any liberals, and any ACLU members, a sum total which I would guess may add up to somewhere around 40% of the voting public. Enough for a good showing but not near enough to dethrone the Bushmeister.
Howard Dean on the other hand is capable of 2 things, either squeaking in a small victory or getting blown out. He does have the disadvantage of being the guy who wants to raise taxes like crazy so he has definitely lost the vote of the wealthy but that is not that high of a percentage of the public, even the voting public. But what Dean has is the fact that he is the most diametrically opposed to a president who, for all intents and purposes, is going to have to do something to get himself unelected. Whereas I just don’t see any scenarios in which Kerry or Clark could find themselves president, a political groundswell could occur in Dean’s favor. His grassroots marketing is effective. The powerful moveon.org commercials (which will likely be aired during the Super Bowl and quite a bit thereafter) which point out all of Bush’s failures do not advocate any particular candidate but just by their grassroots nature scream “vote for Dean”.
The simple fact is that Dean is the only candidate who has the potential to start a political upheaval and that is the only way the Democrats are going to win the election. I just don’t see enough of the people sitting on the fence coming down on the side of anyone else.
So to sum it up here are the choices. Nominate anyone other than Dean and Bush is 100% reelected. Nominate Dean and Bush is probably reelected, but there is maybe a 20% chance of Dean taking the victory. So 20% or 0% are the only choices and the Republicans know this is true. That is why they are so quick to state publicly that the candidate they least fear is Dean, because he is least likely to beat Bush. Any poker player would tell you that if they really believed that they would not say it publicly, because it deters voters from voting for Dean in primaries. And if you could beat the man more easily than anyone else why would you want to discourage everyone from voting for him? What happened is the Republicans heard this rumor going around (started by the other candidates in an attempt to beat Dean in the primaries) and decided to make a few (off the record) assertions that it was true because they want people to believe it. Why? Because Dean is the ONLY candidate with a shot.