Minneapolis, Minnesota
CNN often promotes its team of pundits by airing a video clip of Lou Dobbs posing the question "Doesn't anybody deserve a government that works?" When it comes to conducting presidential elections, one wonders.
Early voting started in Florida today, as it has and will in many states. Already, there are problems. Not with the voting per se (at least, not yet – stay tuned). It seems that some of the machines into which voters insert their driver's licenses to verify identity and prevent fraud are not working. As a result, people are standing in line for up to three hours waiting to vote.
Surely, Kurt S. Browning, Florida's secretary of state and chief elections officer, knew that voting would start today. Why did he not have these machines tested and in working order? Cue the allegations of voter suppression and bring on the lawyers! Because Browning is a Republican, appointed to his post in 2006 by Florida's Republican governor-elect, Charlie Crist, you just know these snafus are only the beginning of a Republican plot to steal the election for John McCain.
Up in Ohio, the Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, already has been through the federal appeals process to the Supremes in Washington. In essence, the high court said that voter registration lists did not have to be verified against the database of driver's licenses. Hopefully, however, Brunner will have instructed her election judges to phone the cops and the media should Mickey Mouse or other suspect registrants actually show up to vote. Everyone will be watching because, you just know, the Democrats stand ready to fraudulently steal the election for Barack Obama.
You just know. Eight years after Bush v. Gore, the United States of America still cannot conduct a presidential election free from the taint of voting scandal or plain incompetence.
The whole mess is foreign to me. In Minnesota, where I vote, we fill in oval blanks on a paper ballot to indicate our voting preferences before we personally feed those ballots into a machine that counts them. Before the election judges give us a ballot, we sign our names next to our name and address on the computer printout of the registration list. Those of us who can produce sufficient identification – that proves we-are-who-we-are and live-where-we-do – can register and vote on election day. We have the highest rate of voter participation in the country, and we make it work every time.
In our primary election balloting in September, two candidates for the Minnesota Supreme Court were so close in vote totals that a statewide re-count was required for the first time since 1962. Election officials surprised even themselves by accomplishing the task in two days, rather than the several they had allotted. There were no partisan or non-partisan arguments about the process or the outcome.
Maybe in Minnesota we just understand the meaning of "Yes we can!"
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Monday, October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Obama for president
Minneapolis, Minnesota
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Barack Obama for president
By Editorial Board
Oct. 10, 2008
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Barack Obama for president
By Editorial Board
Oct. 10, 2008
Nine Days before the Feb. 5 presidential primaries in Missouri and Illinois, this editorial page endorsed Barack Obama and John McCain in their respective races.We did so enthusiastically. We wrote that either Mr. Obama’s message of hope or Mr. McCain’s independence and integrity offered America “the chance to turn the page on 28 years of contentious, greed-driven politics and move into a new era of possibility.”
Over the past nine months, Mr. Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, has emerged as the only truly transformative candidate in the race. In the crucible that is a presidential campaign, his intellect, his temperament and equanimity under pressure consistently have been impressive. He has surrounded himself with smart, capable advisers who have helped him refine thorough, nuanced policy positions.
In a word, Mr. Obama has been presidential.
Meanwhile, Mr. McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, became the incredible shrinking man. He shrank from his principled stands in favor of a humane immigration policy. He shrank from his universal condemnation of torture and his condemnation of the politics of smear.
He even shrank from his own campaign slogan, “County First,” by selecting the least qualified running mate since the Swedenborgian shipbuilder Arthur Sewall ran as William Jennings Bryan’s No. 2 in 1896.
In making political endorsements, this editorial page is guided first by the principles espoused by Joseph Pulitzer in The Post-Dispatch Platform printed daily at the top of this page. Then we consider questions of character, life experience and intellect, as well as specific policy and issue positions. Each member of the editorial board weighs in.
On all counts, the consensus was clear: Barack Obama of Illinois should be the next president of the United States.
We didn’t know nine months ago that before Election Day, America would face its greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression. The crisis on Wall Street is devastating, but it has offered voters a useful preview of how the two presidential candidates would respond to a crisis.
Very early on, Mr. Obama reached out to his impressive corps of economic advisers and developed a comprehensive set of recommendations for addressing the problems. He set them forth calmly and explained them carefully.
Mr. McCain, a longtime critic of government regulation, was late to recognize the threat. The chief economic adviser of his campaign initially was former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who had been one of the architects of banking deregulation. When the credit markets imploded, Mr. McCain lurched from one ineffectual grandstand play to another. He squandered the one clear advantage he had over Mr. Obama: experience.
Mr. McCain first was elected to Congress in 1982 when Mr. Obama was in his senior year at Columbia University. Yet the younger man’s intellectual curiosity and capacity — and, yes, also the skills he developed as a community organizer and his instincts as a political conciliator — more than compensate for his lack of more traditional Washington experience.
A presidency is defined less by what happens in the Oval Office than by what is done by the more than 3,000 men and women the president appoints to government office. Only 600 of them are subject to Senate approval. The rest serve at the pleasure of the president.
We have little doubt that Mr. Obama’s appointees would bring a level of competence, compassion and intellectual achievement to the executive branch that hasn’t been seen since the New Frontier. He has energized a new generation of Americans who would put the concept of service back in “public service.”
Consider that while Mr. McCain selected as his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a callow and shrill partisan, Mr. Obama selected Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. Mr. Biden’s 35-year Senate career has given him encyclopedic expertise on legislative and judicial issues, as well as foreign affairs.
The idea that 3,000 bright, dedicated and accomplished Americans would be joining the Obama administration to serve the public — as opposed to padding their resumés or shilling for the corporate interests they’re sworn to oversee — is reassuring. That they would be serving a president who actually would listen to them is staggering.
And the fact that Mr. Obama can explain his thoughts and policies in language that can instruct and inspire is exciting. Eloquence isn’t everything in a president, but it is not nothing, either.
Experience aside, the 25-year difference in the ages of Mr. McCain, 72, and Mr. Obama, 47, is important largely because Mr. Obama’s election would represent a generational shift. He would be the first chief executive in more than six decades whose worldview was not formed, at least in part, by the Cold War or Vietnam.
He sees the complicated world as it is today, not as a binary division between us and them, but as a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances and interests. As he often notes, he is the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, an internationalist who yet acknowledges that America is the only nation in the world in which someone of his distinctly modest background could rise as far as his talent, intellect and hard work would take him.
Given the damage that has been done to America’s moral standing in the world in the last eight years — by a preemptory war, a unilateralist foreign policy and by policies that have treated both the Geneva Conventions and our own Bill of Rights as optional — Mr. Obama’s election would help America reclaim the moral high ground.
It also must be said that Mr. Obama is right on the issues. He was right on the war in Iraq. He is right that all Americans deserve access to health care and right in his pragmatic approach to meeting that goal. He is right on tax policy, infrastructure investment, energy policy and environmental issues. He is right on American ideals.
He was right when he said in his remarkable speech in March in Philadelphia that “In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”
John McCain has served his country well, but in the end, he may have wanted the presidency a little too much, so much that he has sacrificed some of the principles that made him a heroic figure in war and in peace. In every way possible, he has earned the right to retire.
Finally, only at this late point do we note that Barack Obama is an African-American. Because of who he is and how he has run his campaign, that fact has become almost incidental to most Americans. Instead, his countrymen are weighing his talents, his values and his beliefs, judging him not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character.
That says something profound and good — about him as a candidate and about us as a nation.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Serendipitous summer
Minneapolis, Minnesota
After a late-winter and spring filled to over-flowing with attendance at dance performances, my summer diversions have shifted to various kinds of choral music – lots of it! – particularly in films.
One must not miss Meryl Streep's lead role of Donna in MAMMA MIA! The film, shot in London and Greece, also features Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Amanda Seyfried, and Dominic Cooper. A pure and entertaining delight!
I finally caught Young at Heart, a documentary of sorts about the Young@Heart Chorus. It is a thoroughly charming, poignant, and inspiring story of senior citizens in Northampton, Massachusetts, who perform contemporary and classic rock and pop songs in concerts around the world. A DVD will be issued in mid-September.
Then, there was The Singing Revolution, starring the people and music of Estonia in the story of their enduring work toward freedom.
Finally, of course, I attended nine days of awesome music in Miami performed by 5,000 members of GALA Choruses.
... Baseball: The consistent inconsistency of this year's Minnesota Twins baseball team remains a subject of some puzzlement. Given the opportunity, they simply cannot dislodge the Chicago White Sox from first place in the American League Central! The Twins took the first two games in this week's homestand against the Sox, pulling within a half-game of first before losing last night. Regardless of the outcome of tonight's game at the Metrodome, Chicago will leave town with its lead intact.
... Politics: Who cares if Obama has a rock star persona? McCain's latest ad attacking Barack for being a celebrity is a fabulous waste of money and a strong argument against financing campaigns with tax dollars. It is great that the U.S. is regaining a positive image in the world. For the next 90+ days, I want to see and hear both candidates in their best ground game mixing it up with voters – up close and personal – about real issues. Throw in a convention and a few mass rallies on both sides, and keep the airwaves free of paid insults to voters's intelligence.
... Arts and culture: While catching up with ArtsJournal.com, I came across The Arts and a Generation of Whiners, a blog entry. This post reports on a survey by the Pew Research Center that says the 76 million baby boomers are the most pessimistic, disappointed, and self-entitled generation of the 20th century. That survey would seem to echo a report on social trends from the University of Chicago, also cited in the blog. That report says boomers have never been happy. Overall, we don't collaborate but we confront with an attitude of conflict not compromise, and we do it from a position of ideology and not pragmatism. My musing: We did not necessarily need surveys to tell us this. Could this explain the ascendance of talking heads on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and talk radio as our generational spokespeople? Are they the priests and priestesses who intercede with the gods of our discontent?
After a late-winter and spring filled to over-flowing with attendance at dance performances, my summer diversions have shifted to various kinds of choral music – lots of it! – particularly in films.
One must not miss Meryl Streep's lead role of Donna in MAMMA MIA! The film, shot in London and Greece, also features Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Amanda Seyfried, and Dominic Cooper. A pure and entertaining delight!
I finally caught Young at Heart, a documentary of sorts about the Young@Heart Chorus. It is a thoroughly charming, poignant, and inspiring story of senior citizens in Northampton, Massachusetts, who perform contemporary and classic rock and pop songs in concerts around the world. A DVD will be issued in mid-September.
Then, there was The Singing Revolution, starring the people and music of Estonia in the story of their enduring work toward freedom.
Finally, of course, I attended nine days of awesome music in Miami performed by 5,000 members of GALA Choruses.
... Baseball: The consistent inconsistency of this year's Minnesota Twins baseball team remains a subject of some puzzlement. Given the opportunity, they simply cannot dislodge the Chicago White Sox from first place in the American League Central! The Twins took the first two games in this week's homestand against the Sox, pulling within a half-game of first before losing last night. Regardless of the outcome of tonight's game at the Metrodome, Chicago will leave town with its lead intact.
... Politics: Who cares if Obama has a rock star persona? McCain's latest ad attacking Barack for being a celebrity is a fabulous waste of money and a strong argument against financing campaigns with tax dollars. It is great that the U.S. is regaining a positive image in the world. For the next 90+ days, I want to see and hear both candidates in their best ground game mixing it up with voters – up close and personal – about real issues. Throw in a convention and a few mass rallies on both sides, and keep the airwaves free of paid insults to voters's intelligence.
... Arts and culture: While catching up with ArtsJournal.com, I came across The Arts and a Generation of Whiners, a blog entry. This post reports on a survey by the Pew Research Center that says the 76 million baby boomers are the most pessimistic, disappointed, and self-entitled generation of the 20th century. That survey would seem to echo a report on social trends from the University of Chicago, also cited in the blog. That report says boomers have never been happy. Overall, we don't collaborate but we confront with an attitude of conflict not compromise, and we do it from a position of ideology and not pragmatism. My musing: We did not necessarily need surveys to tell us this. Could this explain the ascendance of talking heads on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and talk radio as our generational spokespeople? Are they the priests and priestesses who intercede with the gods of our discontent?
Friday, July 4, 2008
Power?
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Those partisans who are disaffected with one or more aspects of the McCain or Obama candidacies and vow to vote for Bob Barr, Ron Paul, Hillary, or Ralph Nader are a puzzle to me. They suggest that votes for alternative candidates will "demonstrate our voting power." What kind of power is that? When, oh when, did losing an election become "empowering"?
Those partisans who are disaffected with one or more aspects of the McCain or Obama candidacies and vow to vote for Bob Barr, Ron Paul, Hillary, or Ralph Nader are a puzzle to me. They suggest that votes for alternative candidates will "demonstrate our voting power." What kind of power is that? When, oh when, did losing an election become "empowering"?
Monday, February 11, 2008
Fascinating Times
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The more I look at this presidential race, the more I am led to conclude that there is no real "establishment" on the right or the left. Certainly not one that is centrally organized and controlled by a few elites of whatever persuasion. There do seem to be clumps of people who share mindsets of conventional wisdom. I do not think people are lambs led astray, but perhaps we have the partially-blind leading the partially-blind, if you will.
Given that keeping a GOP contest in the public eye is good for the presumptive nominee, and given that the purpose of a series of contests is to have a contest up-and-down the line, I find it fascinating that so many want Huckabee to drop out because of math possibilities or impossibilities. Economic conservatives and national security conservatives would scream loudly (and many of them are) if they felt their voices were being short-circuited and discounted; yet, they don't mind suggesting that social, values-based conservatives should be shut down. I ran, and won -- barely -- a city primary against a values-based conservative. These are good honest folks (who may or may not be wrong about a lot of things) with whom I may or may not agree about a lot of things. While it may not be possible to make political alliance with them either within or across party lines, it is possible to garner their respect, but not if their voices are shut down and not heard. Where mutual respect is lacking, there is no hope for consensus about much of anything.
On the Democratic side, there was enthusiasm for this contest from an early date, but the clumps of conventional mindset assumed, sub-rosa I think, that Clinton would prevail at the end. All of that wisdom is being challenged, and very possibly will be replaced. If, as expected, Obama carried MD, VA, DC, and WI in the next eight days -- primary elections all -- I don't believe even the Clinton machine can reverse the momentum and maintain a firewall in Texas and Ohio on March 5.
Newspapers in Dallas, El Paso, Austin, and San Antonio -- and Cleveland -- have endorsed Obama. The juggernaut will continue to pick up steam. But we can't know the scores until the games are played.
We may not like the process. We may not appreciate the viewpoints that prevail. Nonetheless, the collective of the body politic, more-right or more-left, prevails at any given time in the tides of history.
The more I look at this presidential race, the more I am led to conclude that there is no real "establishment" on the right or the left. Certainly not one that is centrally organized and controlled by a few elites of whatever persuasion. There do seem to be clumps of people who share mindsets of conventional wisdom. I do not think people are lambs led astray, but perhaps we have the partially-blind leading the partially-blind, if you will.
Given that keeping a GOP contest in the public eye is good for the presumptive nominee, and given that the purpose of a series of contests is to have a contest up-and-down the line, I find it fascinating that so many want Huckabee to drop out because of math possibilities or impossibilities. Economic conservatives and national security conservatives would scream loudly (and many of them are) if they felt their voices were being short-circuited and discounted; yet, they don't mind suggesting that social, values-based conservatives should be shut down. I ran, and won -- barely -- a city primary against a values-based conservative. These are good honest folks (who may or may not be wrong about a lot of things) with whom I may or may not agree about a lot of things. While it may not be possible to make political alliance with them either within or across party lines, it is possible to garner their respect, but not if their voices are shut down and not heard. Where mutual respect is lacking, there is no hope for consensus about much of anything.
On the Democratic side, there was enthusiasm for this contest from an early date, but the clumps of conventional mindset assumed, sub-rosa I think, that Clinton would prevail at the end. All of that wisdom is being challenged, and very possibly will be replaced. If, as expected, Obama carried MD, VA, DC, and WI in the next eight days -- primary elections all -- I don't believe even the Clinton machine can reverse the momentum and maintain a firewall in Texas and Ohio on March 5.
Newspapers in Dallas, El Paso, Austin, and San Antonio -- and Cleveland -- have endorsed Obama. The juggernaut will continue to pick up steam. But we can't know the scores until the games are played.
We may not like the process. We may not appreciate the viewpoints that prevail. Nonetheless, the collective of the body politic, more-right or more-left, prevails at any given time in the tides of history.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
