I’m ready for this to be over. I’ve been talking about this election since Election Day 2004. Maybe even a little before that. (Post with Election Day Gift I compiled for Kevin is forthcoming)

In 2004 I was already expecting Bush to win, and when Missouri was called for him (There’s some useless trivia about whichever way Missouri goes predicts the outcome of the general election.) I stopped watching the results come in.

I’m still debating what I’ll do tomorrow. If I were in a swing state I’d definitely vote Obama, but I’m not. In 2004 I was happy to vote for Badnarick – it was a combination of thinking Kerry was a tool and actually liking Badnarick.

I feel like a hypocrite if I don’t vote Libertarian, but I’m not sure I want my vote to go to Bob Barr, even symbolically.

I’m surprised that I’m so nervous about this. In 2004 I really, really did not care who won. Now I’m totally anxious and the thought of seeing McCain win makes me sick.

 I also had someone giving me the “Democrats hate America, Republicans love this country, etc etc and that’s why I’m a Republican” spiel. Grrr…I promised myself I wouldn’t let myself get angry over politics!

There is some concern among the Libertarians that if Obama wins and the Dems have majority in both houses then it will lead to a full on liberal-Democrat mandates with all sorts of government expansion.

I’m not worried. I have complete faith in the inability of the Democrats to get anything done.

Edit: I am also still not counting on an Obama victory anyway. See previous posts.

This is truth. Obama’s domestic policies may not be ideal-they may in fact be awful-but the idea of another four years of imperial presidency and eternal war are too terrifying to contemplate.

Yes, there will be all sorts of bills proposed. But then the Senate Republicans will unearth a rule book that lets the minority party call all the shots and Harry Reid will acquiesce. And even if that doesn’t happen, count on Democrats to form circular firing squads.

On comparisons with the imperialness of the Bush presidency: I have mixed views here. It would be impossible for Obama to match Bush (or so I tell myself) but Bush has set precedents that will apply even to Obama. Compared with Bush, just about anything will seem good, and Obama will benefit from grading on that curve, unfortunately.

I fully expect the Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot in the midst of their exuberance.

Perhaps McCain is genuinely surprised that Obama is doing so well, and that’s why his own campaign has turned so bipolar and screwy. It just seems that he’s suffering from the same thing Hillary did during the primaries. He can’t believe that this new guy came through and is actually competition and his anger at the unfairness of it all is manifesting itself in his campaign.

I wouldn’t blame McCain for having that emotional reaction (or Hilary. This was supposed to be HER election and anyone in their position would be upset.) but maybe that’s what is making him act all crazy and screw up. I think he sees his time as being robbed from him.

In some ways, he was already a has-been, but then he won the nomination with no trouble, and he probably thought he could make a great campaign out of that. But  like Hilary with the getting robbed thing, it severely irks him, and that’s what makes him flighty and more reactive lately. Obama is still keeping his cool. I have to say, that has impressed me about him too. He’s even better than Bill C.

John McCain is outrageous, what with his putting women’s health IN QUOTES in regards to reasons under which abortion ‘might’ be allowable.

Are you kidding me? Do you think women (who may not even WANT an abortion and may very well want to continue with a pregnancy) are LYING about their life teetering on the brink of existence when they decide (along with their doctor) that an abortion is NECCESARY?

Pregnancy is always risky. So is childbirth. And women are not incubators.

I am so sick of the implication that abortion is somehow always an irresponsible or selfish choice. That, even if an individual is not at a point in their life when she can realistically raise a child, she should still carry it to term and give it up for adoption. Because there are so many families that want a baby, blah blah blah, as if the foster care system is not already overflowing with unwanted kids. There are no words for how much I hate the suggestion that even if you don’t want a baby it’s really not so much of a hardship to carry a parasite for 9 months, that you have the obligation to do so for the poor women who can’t get pregnant.

Yes, abortion is, and probably always will be my pet issue. I have been the scared 17 year old looking up what abortion laws are in her state. Lucky for me, it was a scare and nothing more, but that was one of the longest, scariest 10+ days of my life. If ANYONE had suggested that I have a responsibility or obligation to carry a hypothetical baby to term, just because I was biologically capable of it, I would have flipped out. I was SEVENTEEN, a few days before starting my senior year of high school. And yes, I come from a white, middle class family, and were I to CHOOSE to do so, I would have been healthy and well taken care of.

But incubating a baby for nine months would have screwed up my senior year of high school, a time when one is making choices about their future. If I had been pregnant, I would have had an abortion. No question about it. I would have had an abortion and gone on with my college applications and classes and I don’t think I would have regretted it for an instant. And the thought of having to do that was hard enough. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for women who ARE pregnant and do not want a baby and choose an abortion. And I certainly cannot imagine how difficult it must be for someone who actually wants to carry a baby to term, but for health reasons, cannot do it, and who MUST have an abortion to save her own life. I cannot imagine how heartbreaking that must be.

And John McCain certainly can’t either.

“We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down,” he said. “The national media has written us off…. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.”"

Yes being down 150 electoral votes is all part of the plan…. good luck with that one, maverick.

Do people actually listen to the words john mccain says?

he says stuff like “we need a fighter”

wtf does that even mean? you gonna punch the economy?

and yesterday he kept saying “we’ve got them [obama/dems] right where we want them”

you want them to be 10 points ahead?

and of course the classic “i know where bin laden is, but i wont announce how to find him”

you couldn’t have told bush 7 years ago?

PA is usually a battleground, but Obama is up by more than 10 points.

michelle was on the daily show last night being generally awesome, although not quite as awesome as usual. she looks a little tired, although who can blame her.

I don’t know if I pity or envy Kevin’s optimism since is claiming iowa, missouri, colorado, nm, florida, virginia, ohio will all flip. Of course, despite my outward doom and gloom, I hopehopehope for an Obama victory.

Of course, my Libertarian friends could come up with plenty of ways of how Obama is just as bad as McCain and in some ways worse. I don’t think this is true because of the foreign policy issues, and also, I have complete faith in the Democrats to get absolutely nothing done.

Given my libertarian lack of attraction to the politics and policy proposals of either candidate, this part of the New Yorker really does sum up for me why I prefer Obama, or more specifically, why I prefer his campaign. His character in the debates vs Hillary is actually what won me over.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two….Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

 

*From the movie The American President, which I shamelessly love.

i just remember watching the debate in 1992,(Bill C., Bush the First, AND Perot) and the phone ringing and my mom being all outraged that someone would dare to call during the debate.

Because you know, it was 1992. You couldn’t get it on YouTube the next day.

McCain wants to postpone the debate. I can only assume he has a hot date that night.

Obama campaign has rejected the delay. If McCain calls him out on this he better call him out on the stunt.

Also: Palin Trainwreck

She has the whole overconfident and uninformed thing going on. It almost sounds like McCain is campaigning for Palin (she’ll bring change to Washington!) and not the other way around.

McCain finds many ways to highlight Palin’s reputation for cracking down on business-as-usual. “I can’t wait to introduce her to Washington, D.C., I can’t wait,” he said Monday in Jacksonville, Florida. He said Palin would help him do away with wasteful spending projects championed by members of Congress.

(you know, those projects…that she fought for…)

Asked by the host to assess whether an ad attacking him on the economy [because McCain said "the economy is strong" was out of bounds, McCain replied:

“I’ll leave that for the American people to decide. I still say to you, and I know you are a supporter of Senator Obama, if you would urge him to come and do town all meetings with me as I have asked him to do time after time the whole tenor of the campaign would change.”

So his argument is that he wouldn’t have to lie if Obama would just do town hall meetings?

“What would have happened had the young couple in question engaged in youthful sexuality in Arizona? There the young man would become both a “father-to-be” and a felon at the same time. Any sexual act by an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old is a felony in Arizona, even if the girl’s mother is running for vice president of the United States”

-a “gotcha” on the Bristol Palin pregnancy scandal.

Of course, McCain would spin it into a states rights issue, saying that each state should decide how to regulate relationships. However, the flip side of this is he would essentially be saying that we shouldn’t care about crimes committed in other states.

And of course the wider question behind that, (that would not get asked): Why should such behavior be legal in one state but illegal in another? What is the underlying rationale for the inconsistency? I think the knee jerk answer to this is “state’s rights” or “federalism!” but of course this is never actually discussed because that would require the American public to have a working knowledge of civics.

Of course, the fact that an 18 year old boy could be prosecuted for sleeping with his 17 year old girlfriend is another level of ridiculousity but it can and does happen.

And not that I think Bristol Palin’s pregnancy should be National news in the first place, but her stupid mother opened the door for that. Poor girl. (People will of course say she was stupid/irresponsible in getting pregnant but…these things happen. Of course, her mother also carried about a campaign of abstinence only education, so who knows if they were using protection, but even if they were, These Things Happen. And you’re not going to stop teenagers from having sex. And this isn’t my business anyway, and yet I can devote paragraphs to it.)

And I feel REALLY sorry for the guy who knocked her up. I am sure that Palin’s people got to him and were like “Ok. This is what you’re going to do. This is what you are going say.” Kid is trapped. Again, not that he doesn’t need to take responsibility for his actions, but there are ways to take responsibility that do not involve marriage.

Is the press beginning to exact revenge for mccain campaigns attacks?

McCain seems close to forming an unstoppable media narrative…which happened with Kerry (flip flopper) and Gore (exaggerator/liar).

(So says Kevin)

He also maintains that people will start to realize just how outrageous Palin is within the next couple weeks and that all Obama has to do is ignore her and run his own campaign. I agree with that, but I feel like for most of the campaign, Obama has been on the defensive….which he shouldn’t have to be. Plus his campaign managers are probably not as smart as us. (naturally)

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.

I just have no words anymore. Do you think if we ignored her she would go away? I just don’t even know how Obama campaign can even possibly respond. I mean the lies and hypocrisy are just…it’s not even…I can’t even put into words how screwed up the whole thing is.

If I had started this blog 10 days earlier, you would have been treated to me getting all swoony about Barack Obama. Although I am a jaded former political junkie, the DNC did it’s job: it made me actually want to vote for Barack Obama.

This is strange, I suppose, when you consider that I am a Libertarian. 

I attribute this lapse to the fact that I was raised “Democrat good, Republican bad.” What I mean by the DNC “worked’ is that I was able to get swept up in the exciting rhetoric in the speeches of Michelle Obama, Bill & Hillary, and Obama himself. And I watched this FULLY AWARE that I was being maniuplated. The 2004 DNC has a similar effect on me: it made me believe (albeit briefly…maybe an hour) that if John Kerry was elected change was possible, even though the well-informed, political junkie knew this was a fabrication. But even as a rational Libertarian woman, Bill Clinton’s speech in 2004 made me swoon, just as Obama’s did this year. It’s polish and PR, but it works, even though the type of change Obama wants me to believe in is not the kind of change I want.

So no, I’m not going to vote for Obama.

The RNC has the opposite affect. It makes me vehermently despise McCain and co. even more. (And Sarah Palin. It was either Julian Sanchez or Dave Weigel who said in their facebook status 

I am fully capable of coming to my own political opinons. (Trust me. My parents were not thrilled when I discovered a name for my latent libertarian leanings, and even less thrilled when I joined the young republican club just to find people I had SOMETHING politically in common with on my ultra liberal college campus.

All of this is a long way of saying what everyone even the least bit politcally savvy already knows: the conventions won’t change anyone’s mind; they’re just there to make you feel better about voting for the party you’ve already choosen, and maybe, making you believe. If only for a minute.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

In addition to being a mayor and raising four children, Sarah Palin found time for another venture in her Wasilla years — she was part-owner of an Anchorage car wash.

…

On April 3, 2007, the state went further and issued a “certificate of involuntary dissolution” because of the car wash’s failure to file its report and pay state licensing fees.

It’s Harriet Miers redux. I still think its hilarious that she owed a car wash. Has anyone ever changed VPs in the middle of a campaign?

This doesn’t even make any sense:

“I can do my part in working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline, about a $30 billion project that’s going to create a lot of jobs for Alaska. … [but] I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said. “I can do my job there in developing our natural resources, in doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded. But really that stuff doesn’t do any good if the people of Alaska’s hearts aren’t right with God.”

The Bridge to Nowhere

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26486063/

-she’s a flip flopper. Just like John Kerry!

-Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin, is pregnant and will keep the baby and marry the father, a senior aide to Sen. John McCain confirmed to CNN Tuesday.

(I’m not sure that’s actually scandalous. I mean, perhaps there is a portion of the country that still find teen pregnancy scandalous, but they are probably also the same people who will laud her decision to keep the baby instead of having an abortion. McCain campaign claims that he knew, but I’m not sure about that. Actually, it’s a pretty horrible thing for a mother to do – she accepted an extremely public position, knowing that her daughter was pregnant and that a lot of attention would be focused on her. Can that count as child abuse? Yes, girl (well, girl and her boyfriend) have to take responsibility, teen pregnancy is pretty much a bad idea and such, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to have it plastered all over the news.)

-Palin’s name is listed on 2003 incorporation papers of the “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.,” a 527 group that could raise unlimited funds from corporate donors.

My initial reaction to the McCain VP pick was outrage, followed by more outrage, followed by “WTF?” followed by “did he just seal his victory?”

Because I tend to have doomsday reactions to any and all political news, since the last time I attempted to be optimistic (2000) we got Bush.

Anyway, Kevin pointed out that it kind of undercuts the whole argument McCain has been making about Obama’s inexperience.

Additionally, she’s really very conservative, which undercuts his “maverick” act.

Apparently he only met her face to face once before picking her, but that could be rumors. She did say in an interview a few weeks ago that she really doesn’t know what the VP does.

So I don’t know. On the surface this looks like a stunningly stupid move by McCain – since already the media has dug up 50+ things on her. Most of them are little, but if the media decides it doesn’t like her they will fixate on this.

But on the other hand, I can’t help thinking that there’s NO WAY the McCain campaign could be this stupid, and that this is some brilliant, manipulative political move.

I hate her already.

I have a bunch of other things to say about the DNC, especially since my hero, Bill C, spoke last night. (No. I am not giving in my Libertarian decoder ring.) But it was requested by Ellie that I post this.

[insert some nonsense about Hugh Laurie and his hotness]

Me: The DNC is making me want to have Barack Obama’s babies. And i HATE babies.
Ellie: But you like baby kittens, right?
Me: Obama holding a kitten would be adorable. A stray kitten. That he rescued from the South side.
Ellie: And it would have soft paws and little pointy ears! And would teach him about the joys of limited government. Yes.
Me: And the kitten will grow to be an adorable and intelligent cat, that will photogenically prance around the White House, and lounge on that big table they use for important meetings where they decide issues of national security and stuff. And it will be vocal and meow and demand attention. And he will indulge the cat’s demand.
Ellie: And Obama will shred the Patriot Act and put it in the litter box. And the cat will be friendly-pushy, and when heads of state come to visit, it will get up in their laps and purr and knead and require petting and stroking. And the heads of state will be so overwhelmed with its cuteness that they will agree to friendship and huge trade agreements with the US.

We are NOT obama girls. We are not.

For the record, I am stating here that I don’t think Obama will win.

I was raised “Republicans BAD, Democrats GOOD” some part of my subconscious still buys into that, and thus I’m suseptible to the emotional manipulation of the convention. I don’t know what it is about Obama, but when he and his people speak, I want to believe what they’re saying, even though much of it is ideologically repulsive. So I guess I have a better understanding of why stupid polls like “would you rather have a beer with Bush or Kerry?” are telling. I watch this knowing I’m being manipulated, and it’s still almost working on me.