Flutterby™! : Obama 2008-03-02 19:35:41.899719+00

Obama

2008-03-02 19:35:41.899719+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

I'm having incredible problems picking out the lesser of the evils in this election (and, yes, my "Cthulu for President: Don't settle for the lesser of the evils" bumper sticker is still on my car from the '96 elections), but I admit to a few giggles over watching the Hillary Clinton campaign implode with its childish sniping, so when this video was described as "Bill Clinton endorses Obama", I snorted my drink through my nose.

At NY Times, Jeffrey Rosen calls Obama a "Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian". I definitely wouldn't go that far, but between the likely contenders, McCain, Clinton and Obama, he's looking like the lesser evil.

Sigh.

dan, i feel the same way. are we ever going to get a president who was voted in other than because he/she was the lessor evil?

i've been talking to some friends...we think queen latifah would be a great president. she wouldn't take any shit from anyone! and would clean house!

Polly, I believe that it is the nature of the two party system, and human nature, that we'll always be picking the lesser of the evil. Politicians have to set up their platforms to appeal to as diverse a crowd as possible, which is why principled politicians can't win, and why we'll generally vote for someone who hits our primary issues but with whom we disagree on numerous other points.

And in the end it comes down to "I hate everything that candidate stands for except for this one important issue", because that candidate actually has a chance of getting elected.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-03-03 15:57:59.119241+00 by: jeff [edit history]

And that is precisely why I have been posting at Flutterby for the last several years indicating my opinion that our two-party system is ancient, outmoded, obsolete, and no longer effectively working for most of us.

I was thinking; for the last 100 years women have been buying shoes for fashion.

If I can estimate that there were 1 billion pairs of shoes bought inthe US and if they had simply been required to wear usable shoes we could have saved probably 900 million pairs of shoes at say $40 each which is around 3.6 Trillion dollars we would have saved and had to pay off our debts.

Can anyone say we would not be better off if the women had been limited in the number and type of shoes they bought all these years?

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll point to Marc Andreessen's assessment of Obama for the intellectual portion of the argument for. As far as the emotional part of the argument goes, he's the first politician I've seen who I've actually liked from the moment I heard him speak (the 2004 convention).

He's intelligent yes, but he also portrays a perspective that denies the "Us vs. Them" mindset that has so often characterized political thought throughout my lifetime (US vs. the USSR, US vs. Terrorism, Conservative vs. Liberal, etc.). He presents the exact sort of perspective that I look for in a political leader, and he's presentable enough to trot out in front of the world, as well (while Ron Paul might have made some decent points, the only times I saw him speak he came off as a whackjob. That's exactly the sort of thing that got the hemlock slipped into Socrates' morning cuppa.). Of course, all of that would be for naught if I didn't think he actually had the nation's best interests at heart, but I'm pretty sure that he does, else he'd be playing the "Us vs. Them" card as well.

Personally, Barack Obama has never represented the "lesser of two evils". Instead, he's the only president I've ever wanted.

Obama believes that government should be involved in a lot of things that I believe it shouldn't be involved in, but then again so does Ron Paul, so it's just about picking and choosing evils.

I do think that Obama's the only candidate who has the charisma to make an effective leader, but because I'm not sure I like the idea of an effective president, I don't necessarily want the government to do what it does any more effectively, well... you can see my quandary.

I was sitting in the barber shop getting my hair cut friday evening. Mind you, I live in a small and undereducated town in the mountains of California, which is somehow primarily republican. I've defended Obama a few times, and had fun with it. It seems the only thing people do in this town is listen to Rush and Colmes' radio shows and misquote the information repeatedly.

After the last time I was there, I had a rousing conversation between how god's candidate was McCain, and the liberal side was making you choose between a woman and a nigger. After shooting down repeated comments talking about how Obama was Muslim (he belongs to the church of god) and supported terrorism (related to how he didn't back the war when most of the senate did) and a few other random misquotes, I thought maybe I'd heard it all.

This time, they settled on making fun of his name. They said that they knew he was the wrong candidate because they didn't want him using his full name of Barak Mohammad Obama (his middle name is actually Hussein, which means "king") They said that every president uses middle names, like JFK! After asking What Bill Clinton's middle name was (jefferson) they couldn't respond. I prodded again by asking what Ronald Reagan's middle name was (I don't even know this one) and they couldn't reply to that one either.

It seems that most people I've spoken to could care less about issues. They either follow blindly what the radio tells them to do, even if they barely understand what's being said, or they're voting along party lines because they either support or disagree with a particular party. Our last major national election nearly made me insane because everyone was saying "don't vote republican" Not, vote for John Smith, he supports making America better. Not, vote for Jim Johnson, he supports the issues that are important to me. Not, don't vote for Harold Christoff, he eats babies. The only thing I heard was to vote Democrat and don't vote Republican. I think one of the biggest issues I'm having with this election is that any moron who can make an X is allowed to vote, although they don't know the issues and don't know the candidates. Quite a few people may end up voting for someone they don't know anything about simply because they don't want a woman or a nigger in the white house. That scares the crap out of me.

I like Obama, I actually enjoy his speeches and would like to see him take office. I've also been a lifelong republican who's recently changed to "independent" when registering to vote in my new state. But I fear the small-minded and willfully ignorant control the elections simply because of their numbers.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-03-04 14:55:15.732913+00 by: jeff [edit history]

We have a representative democracy, but not necessarily a "smart democracy." And that's rather sad. The two-party system is toast (for me at least).

The small-minded and willfully ignorant (American Sheeple) do control the elections, and the mass media and campaign managers are completely aware of this.

Part of my initial decision to vote for Obama in our primary was related to the likelihood that he could beat McCain, where Clinton could not.