In part one, I’d covered the pros and cons of the three major presidential candidates that the Democratic party has so far offered us.
As I’d begun part one, there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate and less such thing as a perfect incumbent. If Fox “News” had been around, they would’ve had a field day with the candidacies of JFK and Bill Clinton, two of the left’s biggest heroes. That’s not to say that both men didn’t have massive character flaws. But in the pitiless partisan scrutiny of the electronic media and its consumers, those same glaring defects would’ve been made virtually the entire campaign. But even in the absence of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity bloviating supremely about the evils of the liberals from a Big Tent Neocon network, the dinosaur networks were all too glad to oblige in torpedoing Kennedy for a second time and were certainly doing so to Clinton in 1992.
Under the microscope of the camera lens, Nixon’s unconquerable 5 o’clock shadow made him look sinisterly unelectable in 1960 (even though he was), Dukakis was too swarthy and hirsute and Barack Obama is not dark enough (or too dark, depending on one's proximity to the Mason/Dixon line).
Statements, too, can be taken completely out of context in the game of telephone as only television and the blogosphere can play it. So Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, Dan Quayle misspelled the word “potato” and how can we forget the scream heard ’round the world that possibly lost Howard Dean the presidency?
Not only were these three instances taken out of context, wasting ink and valuable air time in the process, it seemed to offer a revealing glimpse into each man’s fitness to lead or unfitness to do so. And of course, they did not in the slightest.
Yet, curiously, a candidate’s public record of service, when they have one, goes untouched. The most egregious example extant, moreso than Giuliani’s presumed sainthood that rose from that accident of fate known as September 11th and the near end of his incumbency as Mayor of New York City, moreso than George Bush’s record as Governor of Texas and as a rapacious yet incompetent business executive, was the complete lack of attention paid to the Senate campaign of his own grandfather, Prescott Bush in 1952.
It was never brought up that Bush was not only the chief American financier of Adolph Hitler (ironically, the very bogeyman whose toothbrush moustache right wingers gleefully superimpose over the faces of socialists, tyrants recently fallen out of favor and liberal bloggers), Bush also tried to engineer a fascist takeover of our democracy nearly two decades earlier. It’s a tragic blindness worthy of a Sophoclean or Shakespearean play, a blindness that renders impossible one seeing the forest for the campaign stumps.
I’d like to continue my appraisal of the Democratic presidential candidates with someone who’s probably the most high profile of the B listers, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE, the other RI). Back in 1987, Biden was running for President and a huge Fox-class scandal erupted over Biden “plagiarizing” a passage from British politician Neil Kinnock. When Biden set the record straight that it wasn’t plagiarizing but “heavy lifting”, as it’s known to speechwriters, Biden was able to save his candidacy for a little while longer before he finally fell to the wayside.
But to this day we hear about it and his valiant but ultimately failed adventure into hair plugs. How does this define Biden as a potential Chief Executive? Well, if you need me to answer that for you, then you ought to be barred from the polls by an act of Congress.
What troubles me about Biden, even though he has stronger foreign policy credentials than any of the other seven candidates, was him saying before a Republican crowd, before the 110th Congress even convened that Republicans need to get back on their feet, which is sort of like telling a mugger to get up so he can continue robbing and beating you and fucking your wife after you kicked him in the sack. Bipartisan outreach is one thing. We already have Joe Lieberman for that. That was just plain stupid.
All the same, Biden scored big points with when he’d recommended taking up the offer from other nations, in particular France, when they’d offered to train Iraqi security forces on their home soil to resist the temptations of corruption and sectarian warfare. When the White House unrolled its own Strategy for Victory months after Biden revealed his, it smelled suspiciously of plagiarism and hair plugs.
All the same, Biden is top-heavy with foreign policy and is a little light when it comes to health care and a workable solution to the Iraq war. Not to mention the fact that Biden didn’t find out until two years ago that he wasn’t allowed to be present when the flag-draped coffins of slain soldiers coming back from the Persian Gulf came off the transports at Dover or be allowed near the mortuary to console the families.
So how come it took until over two years after the invasion before Biden found out that Rumsfeld and his undersecretary barred senior senators from the transports? What else doesn’t Biden know?
If my only criteria for voting for a Presidential candidate was their ability to verbally body-slam rabid right wing blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, then I’d vote for Sen. Chris Dodd in a New York minute.
However, this is the beginning of a presidential election, not Wrestlemania or a multimillion dollar popularity contest (Mitt Romney notwithstanding). Dodd lost any vote that he could’ve possibly gotten out of me when he hemmed and hawed about abolishing earmark reform. That waffle fest alone, in my mind, qualified Dodd as just another well-oiled Washington, DC townie, yet another Goddamned good ole boy Beltway insider that can’t be trusted to be committed to the kind of real reform that our democracy desperately needs.
And, I’m sorry, but charisma counts for something and in the charm department, Dodd’s got all the charisma of a dead engineer.
Bill Richardson brings with him impressive credentials. He was one of Bill Clinton’s three Energy Secretaries and he’s the current Governor of New Mexico. He was also a Congressman and a UN ambassador. He stood eyeball to eyeball with Saddam Hussein himself and helped negotiate for the safe release of two aerospace contractors who’d been seized after they wandered across the border into Iraq. Eleven years later, he did it again by securing the freedom of journalist Paul Salopek when the Sudanese government had accused him of espionage.
His simultaneous tax cuts and more responsible spending make him look less like the stereotypical tax and spend Democrat and more like a New York Democrat like Mayor Lindsay (who switched parties in the final two years of his political career), who was fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
He also thinks homosexuality is a choice and is against gay marriage and, like his old boss Bill Clinton, is for the death penalty.
His astounding ignorance and refusal to let go of the rope tied to the elephant going over the cliff that is the fight against gay marriage, to me, undercuts everything he’s ever worked for regarding gay rights as Governor of New Mexico.
About the only thing that I like about Richardson’s health care plan, which is also short on details, is his idea of the “hero cards” that would enable a veteran to pick the doctor and hospital of their choice anywhere in the nation.
But, as Melissa Etheridge ably revealed for us, Richardson’s not a very adroit debater and it’s obvious that, like HW Bush in 1980, Richardson’s just angling for a running mate spot and ride on the coattails of a stronger candidate.
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