Wake Up

Now that the overly-emphasized Iowa caucuses take place on the ridiculously early date of January 3rd, I suppose it’s about time for me to offer up my opinions on the 2008 primary candidates.

Let’s start with the Democrats, since that’s the primary I’ll be voting in here in Connecticut. My top three picks are:

1. John Edwards

   He is the only one of the major candidates who consistently says things like:

   I think that if we’re going to have serious change in this country, universal health care, attacking global warming, a tax policy that works for most Americans instead of just a few, a trade policy that creates jobs instead of costing jobs, I mean, all those things are going to require us to have a president of the United States who’s tough and willing to fight these powerful corporate interests that stand between us and the change that we need.

   And I think the notion that you can sit at the table and negotiate and compromise, and these powerful interests will give away their power, I think is a fantasy. If it were true, it would have been working over the last few decades. And it does not.

   That’s a sentiment that matches up well with part of one of my favorite Frederick Douglass quotes, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” John Edwards appears to be the candidate most willing to fight for change, which is sort of disturbing considering how moderate many of his proposals actually are.

2. Chris Dodd

   He’s my Senator, and he’s one of the few Democrats in the Senate to have shown any actual leadership during this past year, especially on issues like restoring habeas corpus and fighting against retroactive immunity for the telecom companies. I think he’d make a great President. Having said that, I think that right now he’d do even more good as the new majority leader in the Senate.

3. Barack Obama

   He’s not Hillary Clinton. I wish I had more reason than that to like him, but his talk of using compromise and bipartisanship to bring about change rings alarm bells in my head, because he’s talking about working with a Republican party which has consistently shown that it doesn’t want to compromise on anything, ever. Plus he’s relatively inexperienced, and he hasn’t done a damned thing to demonstrate leadership on any issue during his short time in the Senate.

The Democrat I will definitely not be voting for, either in the primary or the general election, is Hillary Clinton. She’s done and said nothing to make me believe she wants to be President for any reason other than she wants to be President. She takes money from lobbyists as fast as they offer it up, and supports the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council. She’s never really repudiated her vote authorizing the war on Iraq, and in September she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment in support of military actions against Iran. She is exactly the sort of Democrat we don’t need as President.

As for the Republicans, I think they’re a frightening bunch of loons and liars, but I’m enjoying watching them tie themselves in knots trying to explain why Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are completely unacceptable candidates (the short answer is “because they’re not complete corporate whores”). If forced at gunpoint to pick one of them, I’d try to wrestle the gun away, and, if that failed and I was still alive, I guess I’d pick John McCain as the least offensive of the bunch, despite his being a warmonger and someone who has misrepresented himself time and time again.