The only fair way to score the debates is to watch them without audio. That way one doesn’t get distracted by what the candidates say, which anyway has only a minor relationship with reality. The important thing is how they looked. Did McCain smirk? Did Obama get that pinched, schoolmarm-ish look? Did either man dip his shoulder prepatory to throwing that elusive rhetorical knockout punch? Judging by the visuals, McCain should be happy; he finished the evening on his feet, smirk intact but not entirely consuming his face. This is not a zero-sum contest, which allows us to judge that Obama should probably be happy as well; he finished the evening without taking an actual swing at McCain, which must be awfully difficult most of the time, and without looking at the end as though he were sucking a lemon. We’re calling it a draw, although in absolute terms McCain wins every debate just by showing up and not drooling.
On a more gratifying note, I want to offer my salutations to the UCLA medical school students who ran the smoking cessation group at my former residence and got me started down the path to good health and self-righteous criticism of smokers. “Filthy habit! Why don’t you quit! I quit! If I can quit, anyone can quit!” and so on. That’ll have to wait until I’m no longer fiendishly attracted to second-hand smoke, though; for now I can’t afford a mass cessation.
At any rate, the nicotine patches, the moral support, the promise of good conversation at least once each week and not least the MP3 player with the stop-smoking self-hypnosis track on it were all important elements in what I find to be an astonishingly successful effort to get that particular monkey off my face. Three weeks, and if one were to search for a measure of my limbic system’s commitment to quitting, one couldn’t do much better than to note that I was no more tempted to reach for a smoke when my computer was stolen than before or since, which is to say that the idea is attractive but the physical drive doesn’t exist, which isn’t always an ideal pairing but in this instance we’ll take it.
So: on the one hand we have Barack Obama and John McCain, who are awful to varying degrees, and on the other we have these second year med students, who don’t seem awful in any degree and who managed to help three people quit smoking, which I’m guessing is about three people more than many actual doctors ever achieve. I would run them, collectively, for president in a heartbeat, although I have to note that one of them has a sense of humor perfectly suited to spawn an unintentional war. The debates would be a scream. Thanks, fine young people.
I’m voting Nader. He may be a nut (and I don’t concede that at all) but at least he’s not an empty shell. I look at his platform and, well…it’s my politics.
And before anyone says he gave the 2000 election to Bush, consider this: millions of Democrats voted for Bush. Twice. And despite winning the popular vote, Gore fucking rolled over, surrendered without a fight. Gore and the Democrats, not Nader and his piddly vote total, handed the presidency to Bush and have only themselves to blame.
Nader is the only one, again, I can vote for with any degree of respect for my conscience. My true choice has not won a presidential election since I began voting, but I’m glad I’ve at least had several opportunities to vote my conscience instead of my pragmatism.
Instead of working toward actually forming a roots up political party, Nader egotistically has these “listen to me” campaigns every four years.
How useful for the common good.
Compare this to Greens who actually win some local elections. Some like Libertarians have real parties.
Maybe some true blue Dems realize such things when they don’t vote for Nader as some shining example of conscience in the realm of corruption.
BTW, what did Nader do after the election in 2000? Did he do much to defend the rights of Fl. blacks etc. At least Buchanan said he thought the ballots were f-ed up and he didn’t get so many votes in Fl.
The idea that Gore was so like Bush it was pointless to vote for him has been shown to be b.s. But, many Nader supporters promoted it as truth. BTW, when Naderites suggested there wasn’t a dime worth of difference, and given the problems of Clinton, is it such a wonder many Dems voted for Bush?
What is this “surrendered without a fight” stuff? Did Bush v. Gore not happen? In our system, also, popular vote (putting aside FL, where he did fight) is not the end all. We have a EC.
Bare platform doesn’t do it for me; and even if I wanted to vote on principle, I wouldn’t vote Nader.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere not being a Nader fan in part from what Joe mentioned, i.e., he’s a vanity candidate. I myself, personally, for one, will be voting for the first candidate who drops Gerrard Winstanley’s name in a favorable context. More on Gerrard soon! God, I hate exclamation/explanation points!
I’m listening to Steve Earle at the moment, which means I’m having a better time than I usually do.
Name a Green Party presidential nominee whom you really know a damn thing about – is there even one this year? Oh yeah – Cynthia McKinney, and her running mate Rosa Clemente, both of whom have spent many years building the Green Party from the roots up. Uh-huh.
Well, Nader was the Green nominee in 2000. Oops! The Green Party drafted him in 1996. The Greens in general have done a truly piss-poor job of founding, organizing and running a party – it isn’t a real political party as much as it is a movement, and they wasted many years running candidates for high office rather than concentrating on local elections.
Libertarians are worthless, and just as disorganized and hapless, and look who they nominated – Bob Barr, while Ron Paul took a lot of people’s money and wasted it. Tell me exactly what of substance McKinney, Barr and Paul have contributed to the common good, and then compare that to Nader’s contributions.
I realize that Nader is a candidate, not a party. But I would rather vote for someone who persists in calling attention to the emperor’s nudity rather than someone who thinks s/he can play the game the way it’s set up and have any impact at all without becoming corrupted.
It’s pointless to continue this argument about the 2000 election and what would have happened if Gore had won – if he had won his own state, if that good Democrat Clinton hadn’t been getting blow jobs in the White House from someone not Hillary, or if New Hampshire had gone Democratic – or if Democratic voters had had the brains to look skeptically at the media version of Gore or to read up on George Bush. And you cannot at all claim with certainty that Gore wouldn’t have created some other kind of fiasco.
The point is that the Democrats and Republicans indisputably feed at the same trough, and when it comes right down to it the only substantial difference – as we’ve seen during eight years of one disaster after another, from war to habeas corpus to banks – is in their table manners. Weldon is just one of many who have commented on that harsh fact over the years. The two-party system is a trap, the fix is permanently in.
Nader’s ego is no more inflated than any person’s who runs for president – I mean, consider the presumption of any person who thinks s/he is qualified to wield the greatest power on the planet. They’re all vanity candidates. And of them all, Nader stands head and shoulders above them when it comes to accomplishment and world view. And at least he seems to be doing this out of some sense of altruism – paltry media attention and sparse audiences are not exactly ego-stokers – since unlike Obama and McCain, he knows he cannot possibly win.
And who are you to mock “some shining example of conscience in the realm of corruption?” You should try voting on principle some time. You might like it.