2008 Election

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Pot and Gay Marriage

If you look at the referenda that passed in the various states, I’ve heard it said that you can smoke weed, but you can’t get married to someone of the same sex.  Homophobia is alive and well.

Particularly disturbing is the passage of Proposition 8 in California.  I wondered if it were legal given the ruling of the California Supreme Court and it seems that others are asking the same question.  Several lawsuits have already been filed saying it is a violation of the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.

Here in Massachusett same sex couples can both marry and smoke pot!

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President Barack Obama

It still sounds very strange.  President Obama.  I started writing this yesterday, the day after the election, but couldn’t really find the words.

I was sixteen when I sat with my feet in the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial listening to the speeches.  I’ve said before that I remember John Lewis a lot more clearly than I remember Martin Luther King, Jr.  Maybe that’s because Rep. Lewis was the young guy of the all the speakers, the one closest to my age and someone I identified with.  The other night when he was being interviewed on MSNBC was when I began to lose it. 

I also thought about the night Douglas Wilder was elected Governor of Virginia.  My family has known him for many years and I still remember him cruising around Richmond in his powder blue Mercedes convertible. I worked hard for his election and felt a similar anxiety until all the votes had been counted.  And now Virginia has, as I’ve been predicting, gone blue.

Eugene Robinson  said it this way in the Washington Post this morning:

Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans — white, black, Latino, Asian — entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency. I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there’s more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there’s more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.

…

For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say “it’s morning again in America.” The new sunshine feels warm on my face.

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Voting for Obama

Bob and I got up this morning and left the house earlier than we usually do.  There was a line at the voting place.  It was like a gathering of neighbors, 99% of whom were voting for Obama.  It was really a thrill.  I haven’t stood in a line like that to vote since the first Clinton election when my Republican precinct in Richmond went Democratic.

…In my gut, I know there’s a chance that the first African American to make a serious run for the presidency will lose. But that is precisely what’s new and, in a sense, unsettling: I’m talking about possibility, not inevitability.

For African Americans, at least those of us old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, this is nothing short of mind-blowing. It’s disorienting, and it makes me see this nation in a different light.

I’m with Eugene Robinson (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/03/AR2008110302660.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)

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Waiting for Tuesday

It is Sunday night.  I’ve dropped ‘get out the vote’ flyers at maybe 300 households yesterday and today and talked to a bunch of people while doing so.  Several said they were going to vote even though they were mad at Dianne Wilkerson (who was arrested by the Feds last week for taking bribes) because they wanted to vote for Obama.  I have to say that I also felt like I was punched in the gut by the news of Dianne’s arrest.  The photographs are disconcerting.  What ever was she thinking?!  At any rate, I still expect a huge turnout for Obama here in Boston.

The polls are up for Obama.  No they are up for McCain.  Makes me positively dizzy.  So here is a little amusing but serious video.

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Nine days and counting

There are all kinds of crazy things out there at this stage of the campaign including this video made by kids in a town in Japan named Obama.  According to my atlas, Obama is a town on the Western coast of Honshu.  The closest large city appears to be Kyoto.  If anyone else is more familar with Japanese geography, they should correct me.  At any rate, there is this video I found on Ben Smith’s blog on Politico.com of a bunch of kids singing the praises of Obama – both the town and the candidate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRB2wFhXIPs

And then there is a very scary Sarah Palin telling Brian Williams in their interview with John McCain that Bill Ayres is definitely a terrorists, but maybe people who bomb abortion clinics aren’t.  Video clip here.  John McCain is seen sitting next to her like an indulgent father with a daughter he can’t really control.  He has to be appalled. http://www.alternet.org/election08/104590/palin%3A_%27i_don%27t_know%27_if_abortion_clinic_bombers_are_terrorists/

The Guardian  has the English analysis of the election this morning.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/26/uselections2008-republicans    With the lead, Republicans Fear Long Exile, Paul Harris writes,

In America’s conservative heartland the talk now is not just of a win for Obama. With the Democrats poised for gains in the Senate and the House, moderate Republicans fear a wipeout that would leave their party in the grip of evangelicals increasingly out of touch with the public. Could the country be on the brink of change as deep as that ushered in by Reagan?

Barack Obama is holding on to his lead.  I haven’t seen the Sunday numbers, but yesterday no swing state polls were slipping to McCain.  I was watching the Nevada rallies on CNN late yesterday afternoon.  I noticed that the McCain shots seemed to to tight on the platform and candidate while the cameras pulled back at the Obama rally to show the huge crowd.  I’m not sure what to make of this.  Is this supposed to help McCain by making it appear that he has lots of people there?  Or help Obama by showing his crowds?

“I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here,” Obama told 35,000 people in Leesburg on Wednesday, a noteworthy crowd in a state that Democrats have not won since 1964. “But we’re going to have to work. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to fight” until the polls close.

The night before, Obama’s wife, Michelle, warned supporters in Miami to ignore all the predictions of an easy win.

“We can take nothing for granted,” she said. “My view is that Barack Obama is the underdog and will continue to be the underdog until he’s sitting in the Oval Office. We have to act like he’s 20 points behind.”   [quotes from the Boston Sunday Globe]

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Clothes, Terrorists, and being Muslim

Lots of stuff flying around the campaign the last day or so.  First, there is the Palin family makeover.  What was the RNC thinking about?  The Palins are from Alaska and so they need to dress more like the lower forty-eight?  They look too much like hicks?  Wasn’t the sales pitch that they are an ordinary working family?  I guess they didn’t have any clothes except from Wal Mart or Target.  http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/gop-consultant-reimbursed-for-palin-shopping-spree/?hp  According to the New York Times, the same Republican consultant, Jeff Larson, not only shops, but does robocalls.

Which leads to the robocalls that are being made in the battleground states including the terrorist accusation  and now Rudy Guiliani is making them in Virginia.  According to MSNBC’s First Read, there is a new

…Giuliani robo-call (audio here) that accuses Obama of not being for “mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers.” Readers told the blogs it is making the rounds in at least Minnesota and Colorado.  

There are a lot of judges and people in criminal justice that also think that mandatory sentencing doesn’t work.  They think there should be more ability to take the circumstances into account. I don’t think this is a partisan issue.  Like the Ayres accusation, it is full of half truths and not worthy of Mr. 911.

A few days also I wrote a post “First take on Colin Powell” in which I said I was particularly impressed about Powell’s comments on Muslims in America.  Today, Maureen Dowd has a wonderful column on the same subject.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22dowd.html?ref=opinion

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First take on Colin Powell

So just over two weeks to go.  Newpaper endorsements are going Obama’s way.  His campaign got $150 Million in contributions in September.  The polls are tightening.  If you are a Democrat or an Obama supporter from any party, it is as I wrote a few days ago, time to be anxious.

The big, big, endorsement was from Colin Powell.  Thoughtful and reasoned, General Powell made points about the Republican campaign, Bill Ayres, and accusations that Barak Obama is Muslim.  Powell is the first person I’ve heard say basically, “So what if he were Muslim?”  The story he told about the mother at her son’s grave with the Star and Crescent was very moving.  I also liked his comment on the 7 year old Muslim child who wants to grow up to be President.

Here, in case you haven’t seen it is the Meet the Press link. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27265369/

I know that some who are against the war will not think highly of this endorsement because of General Powell’s presentation at the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction.  To me the endorsement is almost as important for Powell as a war to rehabilitate his own reputation.

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Two Reasons to be Anxious

I’m feeling a little anxious this Saturday morning.  If you’ve visited before you may notice I’ve changed the look.  Surfing around the various themes is a little like what I should be doing – some house cleaning – keeps one occupied so you don’t have to think about the Red Sox and the election.  But now that I’ve finished fiddling, I’m back to worrying.

As Andrew Ryan writes in today’s Boston Globe

The same hopeless grief gripped viewers in couches across New England, where fans gave up on their Red Sox, turned off televisions in disgust, and tromped off to bed.

That was me turning off the radio in the 5th.  Then listening to the news before getting out of bed, I heard they had won.  So now instead of being resigned to not making the World Series this year,  Red Sox fans need to live though at least one more game.  Opinion among the sports fans I know is divided:  Some think the inevitable was just put off, while others think the young Rays will not react well to the improbable loss.

And then there is the election.  I was happy to see that the Obama campaign is actually fighting back on the voter suppression issue before the election.  I worry that the Republicans will manage to steal this election as they did in 2000 and 2004.  I keep my fingers crossed that the smears of the McCain campaign will not work.  How can he have enough nerve to say during the debate that he doesn’t care about Bill Ayres and tell people at his rallies that Obama is not a terrorist and then run the robo-calls implying that his is?

Mike Memoli wrote on MSNBC’s First Read  about Joe Biden’s speech in New Mexico yesterday,

“Folks, it doesn’t matter where you live, we all love this country,” he said. “One of the reasons why Barack and I are running is that we know how damaging the politics of division that continues to be practiced by the McCain campaign, how damaging this policy of division has been for Americans over the last decade or more.”

Raising his voice, Biden said Americans “are all patriotic, we all love our country.” He added, “And I’m tired. I’m tired, tired, tired, tired of the implications about patriotism.”

Biden was referring to Palin’s comments last night in North Carolina, where she celebrated campaigning in “pro-America” areas of the country. (That remark prompted the Obama campaign to ask: Which parts of the country aren’t pro-America?)

I’m looking forward to what the Obama campaign will do with the half hour on the 29th – and to Colin Powell’s possible endorsement tomorrow.

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Anger: Can it win the election?

I think John McCain was projecting his own anger at the debate when he kept saying that Americans are angry.  I don’t think we are angry but we are frightened and anxious.  Harold Meyerson writing in the Washington Post called McCain an angry white man.  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2008/10/the_final_debate_angry_white_m.html?

I thought for a while that McCain was going to trounce Obama with Joe the Plumber, but then he got angry and millions heard the names of the others that also served on the Community board with Barak and Bill Ayres.  And then when John McCain dismissed concern over the life of the mother and the protections that were being sought for her, I knew that he had lost the Clinton supporters who were still insisting they were voting for McCain.

I can’t really understand why McCain is behaving in what for him seems to be such an unnatural way.  If you look at his performanace on Letterman or clips of him at the Al Smith Dinner, he is quite funny.  But that’s not what you see on the campaign trail.  Obama, on the other hand, was self-deprecating and also funny at the dinner before moving into great remarks about the importance of service.  One gets the feeling that Obama knows who he is and is comfortable “in his own skin” as the saying goes.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/mccain-and-obama-palling-around-must-be-the-al-smith-dinner/#comment-642815

In the end, I don’t think the anger does anyone any good.

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Batman and Penguin Debate – my pre-debate comment

The Nation introducing this video writes

In preparation for this week’s debate The American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein put up a terrific debate night video clip on his blog. Striking similarities abound between McCain’s rhetoric about Obama’s “ties” to domestic terrorists, and the Penguin’s defamatory statements about Batman on the clip. As Klein put it in his blog, McCain could take a few pointers…

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081027/penguin_video

This is really funny.  And Obermann is now playing it on Countdown.  Saying it is the debate pre-recorded.