2008 presidential election candidates

ok, so people are announcing bids for president in 2008 right about now. i’d like to say that as an ardent democrat, i will support the democratic party nominee, whoever it is. i have not decided on who to support/endorse/whatever. but here are my thoughts on the candidates in both parties:

democrats:

hillary clinton: please somebody make this woman go away, she has caused enough embarrassment for the democratic party already, what with being the wife of bill clinton and all the many personal attacks and all, and her politics and positions on the issues are far too centrist. the left-wing activist base will never support her, even though the right-wing activists in the republican party believe her to be a far-left chameleon who is only pretending to be centrist. but mainly the problem is, nobody trusts her at all, since she is always too scripted and focus-grouped and cautious to ever take any political risk by expressing a point of view that might be unpopular. and it is presumptuous of her to expect women/feminists/open-minded men to all support her just because of her gender. bill clinton was not that great, and she would be a return of the old guard, the second act in the clinton dynasty, and we have all seen how badly that worked out with the bushes.

barack obama: who is this guy anyway? ok, so he was elected to the u.s. senate in 2004 and took office in 2005. the only reason he is a candidate at all is because he is black, and people for some reason feel that it is necessary to make up for hundreds of years of oppression by electing a light-skinned black man like him who is not some pimped-out playa in the hip-hop culture. what i am saying is, white voters certainly wouldn’t vote for a black man who talks the way most famous black men talk; he has to be much more refined and well-spoken than some rapper or basketball star. and even black politicians sometimes have a problem with how they talk, such as the mayor of new orleans, ray nagin, who speaks the colloquial language instead of the polished language. now if he were white, at this stage in his career in politics, he might be running for president, yes it is true, but he certainly would not be anywhere near being front-runner or even in that league. only 2 years in the senate (yes he is charismatic but so are many other politicians, it is pretty much standard). so the fact that we are making him a major candidate really shows how racist our country is, more than it says anything about him. it shows how we are going out of our way to pretend to show how non-racist we are, but it is just an act, and really we are still a racist society. al sharpton had hardly any support when he ran in 2004, even though i found his speeches to be excellent, always hard-hitting and telling it like it is. barack obama is just getting mainstream support because the powers that be have analyzed him and found that he is not a threat to the white establishment, that he is like a democratic version of condoleezza rice or colin powell. he is not a left-wing radical; he would just put a new face on the same old politics. he wants to unite people of both parties, and this means centrism.

john edwards: well this guy certainly is a well-spoken southern gentleman, a former senator who decided not to run for re-election because he knew he could not carry his own state a second time, a multimillionaire trial lawyer who talks about helping poor people all the time. it is hard to know if he is for real or if he is just putting on an act. he has done nothing since losing in 2004 but campaign for 2008. he still looks youthful despite his age, which is in the mid-50s, i think. i like him, but there is a strange “i’m just a simple country lawyer” quality to him. it is just a little too hard to swallow that he is such a big advocate for the poor and helping get rid of poverty when he is so wealthy and recently bought a very nice $6 million mansion. i mean, he seems honest to me. but, then again, i used to think hugo chavez was a good guy, a few years ago, and now i think hugo chavez is exactly like bush. still, we ought to give john edwards a shot at the presidency, since he seems nice enough.

al gore: nobody is sure if he is even running yet, but he might. who knows? i liked his movie, the one about global warming, although it scared me shitless. if he runs he had better do better than in 2000. that means winning the popular vote and the electoral vote, by overwhelming majorities. he seems to have really found his voice in these last few years out of office, and i have enjoyed watching the show futurama on cartoon network and hearing his voice acting in several of the episodes. it is incredible, though, the transformation he has had over the years. when he first ran for the senate, he was conservative, and anti-abortion, and he strongly supported the first gulf war. he has gradually morphed into a diehard liberal, over all these years, especially after the 2000 election was stolen from him after he rightfully won it (both the popular vote and the majority of voters in florida). he really proved ralph nader wrong and showed the idiocy of nader’s political philosophy that democrats and republicans are the same thing, tweedledum and tweedledee. al gore would not have invaded iraq, especially after hans blix and the other u.n. inspectors reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction. even if gore had done the same stuff as bush up to that point, which would have been highly unlikely, at that point, their paths would have diverged, gore would have accepted the conclusions of the u.n. inspectors, and not invaded. al gore gave impassioned speeches against the war, even when that point of view was unpopular, for crissakes! so we know where he stands nowadays.

other candidates: chris dodd is an old liberal senator from connecticut and nobody ever heard of him and his best friend is the other senator from that state, joe lieberman, which means hardly anyone will support senator dodd in his presidential campaign. wesley clark is a former military commander who never held elected office and whose ties to the democratic party only began in 2003, quite recently. dennis kucinich is still just an ohio congressman and is farther to the left than almost anyone in congress, and probably any of the other candidates for president. joe biden is a senator from delaware who is always trying to fix things in iraq, since he is chairman of the foreign relations committee, and he actually has a plan for iraq at planforiraq.com. (neil cavuto at fox news lied when he said none of the democrats had plans for iraq, and that website is proof fox news is nothing but right-wing propaganda!) but biden voted for the war, and we saw what happened to john kerry, another senator who voted for the war. bill richardson is the hispanic candidate who has talked to north korean dictator kim jong il on multiple occassions, with a lot of diplomatic experience as well as being a former cabinet secretary and current governor; he has a lot of solid experience and substance to him but it might not be good to have a candidate who has been seen meeting with the north koreans. tom vilsack is a former governor and a dlc stooge who wants to dumb down the party with centrist policies. and mike gravel is someone nobody has ever heard of, who wants to bring the troops home now, and he is very old; he might be the only real adult in the room at the upcoming debates.

republicans:

john mccain: this guy is so weird, he is like hanoi john, except he really was in hanoi, as a prisoner. he spoke out against people like jerry falwell and pat robertson back in the day but now wants to cozy up to them. he led his “straight talk express” and campaigned for campaign finance reform, but lately i have heard a lot of doublespeak from this guy, who helped bush get re-elected in 2004, even though bush did a very low blow to mccain in 2000 in south carolina. what is with this guy? why is he such a strong supporter of increasing troop levels in iraq, such a neoconservative on foreign policy? and yet he has often done things to alienate his party’s right-wing base. i think he is some sort of chimera, like joe lieberman. i can’t imagine the republican party choosing him as their candidate, after his refusal to tow the party line on so many occasions. plus, he is getting quite old.

rudy giuliani: if it were not for 9/11, he would have gone down in history as one of new york city’s most unpopular mayors, because that is all he was until terrorists attacked us on september 11, 2001. sure he reduced crime a whole lot, but that was also due to other factors besides what he did, and his policing tactics were a bit harsh and brutal at times, like the shooting of the immigrant amadou diallo. i remember at that time he was estranged from his wife, and i think there was a gay couple living in the same building as him, paying him rent, or something like that. so, on things like gay rights, he is totally out of step with his party’s conservative base. he simply does not agree with them on a lot of the issues, or at least he didn’t back when he was mayor, so if he does now, it is out of political expediency. now this guy is going to try to milk 9/11 for all it’s worth, because that has been his career ever since retiring from being mayor, but i am not sure if that sort of one-trick pony will be able to win.

other candidates: mitt romney is a fricken mormon from massachusetts... yeah right, like he has a chance... a lot of churches have pamphlets about how mormons are not christian, so good luck with that. sam brownback is an actual right-wing conservative republican, the real deal, and he is a senator from kansas, so maybe the true believers might unite behind someone like him instead of someone who is less right-wing socially. mike huckabee is a former arkansas governor who used to be fat and lost a lot of weight, and that is his main and only claim to fame. chuck hagel is a senator from nebraska who has been defiant of bush foreign policy for quite some time, so he has little chance of winning a primary in a party run by bush acolytes. and newt gingrich is a well-known hypocrite who cheated on his wife and left her when she was sick in the hospital, but still managed to impeach bill clinton for a little fellatio.

so... right now i am thinking barack obama, just for the hell of it, because we might as well have a black president, and he is better than hillary or the other bozos running. apparently barack obama has a perfect attendence record so far in the u.s. senate, so he is actually doing his job. and he has many years of legislative experience in illonois, having served as majority leader of its state senate. he might not be as far to the left as i want, but maybe he can win more votes than, say, someone like dennis kucinich, who i ended up voting for in the 2004 democratic primary after howard dean dropped out of the race. i was going to vote for howard dean before he announced he was dropping out of the race. but after he dropped out... sorry, i don’t vote for losers, or people who have already announced that they lost. barack obama has a much better chance of winning the final election than hillary clinton, for sure. i think the only candidate with more negatives than hillary clinton might be newt gingrich, but he is a long shot. i hope giuliani is not the republican candidate, because i have heard enough about 9/11 and i wish politicians would stop exploiting it already. but really, i have not made up my mind on who to support yet, i am just thinking about it tentatively.