Voters Boost Obama Into Serious Contention
Since Super Tuesday, Barack Obama has swept a lot of
low turnout, geographically dispersed caucuses and primary contests. Voters are doing a good job of performing due
diligence on the candidates. The
political parties, the media and even the candidates themselves like to depict
election contests as sport. Who wins,
who loses, who’s ahead, who’s behind. The voters, however, care more about the
policies and programs of the government and how they are personally affected,
regardless of who wins.
Before becoming
president, it is important for the voters to see how the candidates behave,
both when they are up and when they are down.
Hillary Clinton has been the frontrunner for more than a year. By boosting Obama,
the voters are getting a chance to look at Hillary as she suffers her own
adversity, not just the vicarious hits of her husband. By nudging the Illinois Senator into the
lead, voters have to take him seriously and really ask themselves if they want
this person to be president. It is one
thing to be a successful insurgent candidate against a frontrunner, it is quite
another to be that frontrunner. Now
voters will pay far more careful attention to Obama
and his positions than they have in the past.
Now, he has to seal the deal.
Letting Everyone Choose
There is another reason the race is
still neck and neck. Voters know the
nation is in a difficult position: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have
bankrupted the country. Returning to
peace and prosperity will not be easy.
All hands are needed on deck. Voters
are working together to make this decision.
By keeping the race open, the voters are giving themselves time to make
a decision while simultaneously giving all the voters a chance to be
heard. It is not in the interest of the
voters of New Hampshire, nor the voters in the 22 Super Tuesday states, to foreclose
the options of the later voters in Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio. The media should be trumpeting this cohesion,
the fact that the voters are working together to let everyone in on making this
decision. But because their power stems from manipulating
and disenfranchising the voters, this obvious positive development is absent
from news analysis.
Changing the Vice-President
Both
Obama and Clinton are promising change, but neither
seems to want to change the method of choosing the Vice-President. After the disaster of having Dick Cheney as
Vice-President, the voters are no longer willing to leave the filling of this
important post to the back room deals and political consideration of the
past. By keeping the race neck in neck,
the tens of millions of voters are trying to give Hillary and Obama a simple message.
This is the ticket. Whether it is
Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama
is yet to be determined; but if you want to win, this is the ticket. Similarly, the Republican ticket is going to
be McCain – Romney. It fulfills all the
standard considerations, east-west, senator-governor. That is the only weakness of an Obama-Clinton ticket, both have
strong roots in Illinois; but Bill Clinton, by choosing Tennessean Al Gore as
his running mate showed that in an age of television and internet, geographical
distribution is no longer so significant.
And Bush and Cheney were both from Texas, in fact, a clear violation of
the Constitutional prohibition, but Cheney “moved” back to Wyoming so he could
be Bush’s running mate. Of course,
neither Obama nor Hillary want
to be Vice-President. Guess what? Too bad.
Changing the
Inauguration
One
reason Hillary and Obama have failed to seal the deal
is that although they both talk about change, neither talks seriously about
changing the structures of politics and government, and neither conveys the
sense of urgency that is felt by the voters.
The United States is at war, barely keeping even in Iraq and sliding
backwards in Afghanistan. The government
and individuals are broke: people are losing their jobs and their homes. Yet, Hillary Clinton talks about being ready
on Day One, as if Day One was January 20, 2009.
No. Day One is today. It is today she needs to demonstrate, in the
absence of having been a Governor like her husband, that she is an
executive. She and Obama
need to announce their prospective cabinets now. They need to call for the transition of power
to the new administration to take place, not on January 20, 2009; but on
November 5, 2008. Just as Franklin D.
Roosevelt, in the midst of a national crisis, moved the Inauguration up from
March to January, in the age of nuclear missiles, suicide attacks, and internet
communication, the voters can not leave George W. Bush, who lost the 2000
election, as Commander-in-Chief for ten weeks to get the nation into a war with
Iran.
The transition to a new
administration needs to take place before the election in November, with the
advice and consent of the tens of millions of voters who are killing themselves
contributing time, money and effort in choosing the new president. Then, the country will be ready to move on
Day One, the day after the election, November 5, 2008. Given the appointment power that was put in
place in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination and that has only been used for
political purposes, to force Nixon from office, all that would be necessary is
for Cheney to resign, on Election Night.
The next day, the existing congress would come back into session, the
winner of the election, whether McCain, Clinton or Obama,
would be sworn in as Vice-President and then Bush would resign.
The truth is that the race is still wide open because the
two party system and the candidates it has produced are not up to the needs of
the moment. On this 199th
anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, it is well to contemplate, not only the
outrage of the President’s Day Holiday that subsumes celebration of Washington’s
and Lincoln’s birthdays into that of Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk, Rutherford
B. Hayes, James Garfield Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. Lincoln demonstrated that in times of crisis,
inspirational leadership tackles difficult issues head on with innovative
solutions. The system is broken, but
none of the leading presidential candidates are willing to admit it, although
it is obvious to all the voters. That is
the fundamental problem in this election.
And the commercial media, that should be pushing them,
are in on the dirty deal because they are getting the tens of millions of
advertising dollars the desperate voters are contributing. Ninety-five percent of the media in the
United States is owned by six profit-making corporations.
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