Luck of Obama, but...

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The Luck of O'bama:

Is President Obama Secretly Irish?

This is basically a commentary on the election of 2012. I will explain why I think the outcome was mostly a matter of luck and why the entire thing (including most of the results) were just more symptoms of the ongoing sickness of democracy in modern America.

First I have to include a disclaimer to prevent neo-GOP authoritarians from claiming this proves liberals agree with their defense of their OWN incompetence and their OWN reality-divorced stupidity. They are projecting again. The rest of the world doesn't require monolithic thinking and conformance to the official party line. That was how the Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Maoists (among others) ran things, and for largely the same reason. When you actually represent an extremist minority position, you have to speak with a single voice and single opinion. If you try to cite my comments in defense of your propaganda, this disclaimer will emerge into the full context and I will be quite glad to say you are lying AGAIN. If there is ANY lesson you right-wing authoritarians should learn from this election, it is that there are limits to how far you can carry a lie. Even Romney reached his limits, and he is almost certainly the greatest liar I've over seen.

Here are my main points:

1. President Obama is an extremely lucky fellow, and though luck is quite important, luck alone can't cure what ails America. Actually I feel like the best we can hope for is that Obama's luck helps keep the patient alive until a real cure appears. Unfortunately, even as an amateur historian, I'm unable to feel a lot of optimism.
2. Superstorm Sandy was the primary factor that led to his reelection. Though it was bad fortune for a lot of people, the precise timing and location had a powerful and fortuitous effect on the election. I'm not saying it was the only factor, but it certainly mattered and in a narrow election, I tend to believe it was decisive. Extreme weather events are becoming almost routine as the climate changes, but the details are a matter of luck, uniformly bad in the case of Katrina (mostly due to poor preparations and responses), but relatively mixed in this case, especially considering how many more people could have died if the response had been weaker.
3. The presidential election should not have been a close contest from the day when Romney picked Paul Ryan as his V-P nominee. Romney's statements about his policies and positions are meaningless, but picking Ryan was his first binding presidential decision, and it clearly defined Romney as part and parcel of the lunatic fringe of American politics.
4. Even worse, the House of Representative, which is part of a Congress with a current approval rating around 10%, managed to reelect almost all of it's incumbents. The neo-GOP retained its House majority even though the neo-GOP candidates received substantially fewer votes than the Democratic Party candidates. The Founding Fathers intended that the House would be MORE responsive to the will of the voters, and this travesty is strong evidence that the system they created is on its last legs.
5. In conclusion, if the neo-GOP extremists and authoritarians continue to block smooth evolutionary change, then the problems they are unintentionally and foolishly nurturing will lead to the chaotic revolution they most fear. Since the speed of change is so rapid these days, their catastrophe may arrive quite soon.

Now let me expand a bit on some of these points.

The tradition of how to win in American elections has been for both candidates to claim the center and sell themselves to the moderate voters. Romney's campaign had realized (probably from the start) that they needed to make a play for the center to win, and apparently their market research convinced them they could delay that play until the last few weeks of the campaign.

In the closing days of the campaign, Romney was pivoting to the center around a claim that President Obama was weak, incompetent, and too partisan to govern American effectively. Then Superstorm Sandy struck. Essentially for an entire week Obama received nothing but favorable media coverage showing how strong, competent, and bipartisan he actually is. Romney's attack ads were also cut from the air. It certainly helps that this view of Obama is basically the truth, and it put the lie to Romney's sales pitch. The attack on Obama as partisan was especially offensive insofar as the documented reality was that the neo-GOP had resolved NOT to cooperate in ANY way from the day that President Obama took his oath of office--and in spite of their OWN oaths to the Constitution.

However, the truth was never relevant to Romney's campaign, which was an endless stream of lies from beginning to end. At that point in the campaign Romney need to hold on to that particular set of lies for another week. There was no time to create plausible new lies with the appropriate new ads, and the result was President Obama's victory. I don't know how to price the week of free publicity and the loss of Romney's advertising airtime, but I think Romney's (mostly secret) monetary advantage was at least a billion dollars, and that was obviously cancelled out by Superstorm Sandy.

Romney's entire campaign was like a kleptomaniac visiting the lie store. I want to call it "Adventures of a Kleptomaniac in the Field of Lies", but a real kleptomaniac is sick and acting compulsively. As I've noted elsewhere, I think Romney just lies because the truth has no intrinsic value to him. He's like Nixon, in that I think he is smart enough to know what is true and false, but like Nixon, his only concern in his statements is instrumental, in whether or not he can use a statement to his advantage, and truth or falsity is irrelevant.

Romney never should have mounted a serious campaign because he didn't start with an albatross around his neck. It was more like several flocks of albatrosses, and President Obama's failure to use those albatrosses more effectively against Romney is the only reason I think the campaign was ever close. One flock could be tagged "Dubya", and even if you dismiss the junior Bush as irrelevant now, Romney had surrounded himself with many members of that disastrous administration. Another flock involved his business dealings and tax returns, and there was a third flock around his "severely conservative" performance as governor in Massachusetts. It wasn't until the end of the campaign that I learned how false were his claims of bipartisan leadership at that time, where the reality was large numbers of vetoes and many overrides of his vetoes by his legislature, sometimes even including the overriding votes of the members of his OWN party.

Early in the campaign I actually said this kind of outcome was worthless. We have already watched several years of the obstructionist Congress putting their neo-GOP partisan concerns ahead of the nation while loudly accusing their opponents of doing exactly that. I think President Obama should have almost turned his back on Romney in the campaign and focused great efforts on the worst of these political hacks. He should have made them into national figures and forced Romney to their defense, while also forcing the neo-GOP to pour money into those black holes such as Michele Bachmann, who barely managed to survive by outspending her opponent by $12 for every $1 (that we know of, but there was probably more money under her table). As it actually came out, only a few of these lunatics were defeated, and Romney was only caught in a couple of embarrassing endorsements. In one of those cases (the Senatorial race in Indiana), Obama's campaign advantageously exploited Romney's endorsement in a very powerful series of ads.

By the way, I only made two small donations in this campaign, and one of them was targeted at 11 of these extremists. Four or five of the 11 were defeated by relatively small leverage. Unfortunately Bachmann and the one Romney had endorsed were two of the survivors, but if the Democratic Party had gotten more heavily involved in these races, I think their defeats could have helped lead the way to the rout the neo-GOP Congress richly deserved. (My other donation was to Mother Jones for their part in publication of the 47% video, which quite probably hurt Romney's campaign as much as Superstorm Sandy.)

In spite of the pessimistic title of "Distant View of America's Fall", I want to end on an optimistic note. Maybe the neo-GOP will realize that there is no reason to be totally obstructive now. President Obama is done with his political career now, and he has nothing to do but run the country, more easily with their assistance (even if it is grudging), but it would suit me just as well if he did it on top of their political corpses. Most of them are going to have to run again in two years, and they could actually claim some credit if the country is in better shape at that time. So let me close with a few suggested issues that President Obama could use for seeking a more bipartisan working relationship with the same politicians who have tried to cut his hand off every time he's extended it towards them. Hope spring eternal, eh?

Here are some possible areas of bipartisan agreement:

1. Disaster relief for Superstorm Sandy. No reason for the neo-GOP to punish the victims, even though many of them are still angry at Chris Christie for his 'treasonous' bipartisan behavior when his state was drowning.
2. An agreement to defer to the states on marijuana. States' rights has been a favorite topic of many conservatives, and two states have just voted to decriminalize marijuana in spite of the federal laws.
3. Normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Hey, even many of the neo-GOP pundits realize that their relationships with Hispanic-Americans need to be improved, and I think everyone should be able to agree that Castro is no longer relevant.
4. Campaign finance reform. Unfortunately, there is already evidence that the neo-GOP extremists think the "real lesson" of this incredibly expensive campaign was that they didn't "invest" enough money in the campaigns, especially at the presidential and senatorial levels. Gamblers have a tendency to throw good money after bad.
5. Stopping the neo-GOP war on women and their rights. Oh wait, now I'm babbling.

There will be change

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There Will be Change

An open letter to President Obama:

America is dying, and it's my fault. I'm not a powerful person, so the degree of my fault is relatively small. However, insofar as America is a representative democracy and my vote is as good as yours, then I share that degree of blame with you.

Insofar as you are a MORE powerful and influential person than I am, it is MORE your fault. In particular, if you are a professional politician using gerrymandering, lies, and the bribes you've received to make my vote ineffective, worthless, and meaningless, then your fault is just that much greater.

Insofar as President Obama is a much more powerful and influential person than you or I, it is much more his fault. He's supposed to be the leader of America, and he is not leading to positive change.

While we are alive, we change. Only in death does change stop--but America is dying.

There will be change. Good or bad?

President Obama campaigned on promises of good changes. He has not delivered those good changes. Pick your favorite promise and cry. Now Romney is campaigning on promises of bad changes. Romney promises to change back to policies that are already proven failures. Weep some more.

The choice of this election is apparently between empty promises and bad promises. Once again it's apparently a choice between bad and not quite so bad.

Does President Obama have a good excuse? Sort of. I believe he sincerely tried to help America and he at least tried to put America's good ahead of politics while his opponents put their personal hatred of Obama ahead of EVERYTHING else. There was a time when patriotic political opponents could still hope the president could succeed insofar as that was part of the success of America. Kind of hard to believe now. John Wayne probably said it best when he said "I didn't vote for him, but he's my President, and I hope he does a good job," but...

Is there any hope for America? I really doubt it, but I think there is only one path that might lead towards good change.

If President Obama wins a narrow victory and continues to face an obstructionist Congress, we know there will be no change. If Romney wins, he will change America for the worse.

The only path for good change is with a massive defeat of the neo-GOP Congress. You'd think that would be easy given the low approval of Congress--but they've rigged the system in favor of the incumbents. That's the ONLY thing all of the professional politicians can agree on.

President Obama should mostly ignore Romney. That's just forces a choice between lesser evils.

President Obama should campaign DIRECTLY and primarily against the neo-GOP Congress. He should go to the districts of the worst neo-GOP Congressmen and try to flip them from 'safe neo-GOP incumbent' to 'probable Democratic challenger'. He should speak directly to the voters in those districts and tell them that they have the power of change. Not likely, but at least that would be a possibility.

Here are some of the things he could do in a target district: (1) Give a speech in the district focusing on the harms of Congress and the specific harms of that Congressman and personal attacks from that Congressman. (2) Appear with and strongly endorse the Democratic challenger. (3) Make short forms for advertising in that district. (4) Put videos of all of the above on the Internet addressed to the voters of that district. (Of course he should use similar tactics for the Senate, going for 61+ Democratic senators.)

Two helpful side effects of these tactics. First, he would provoke massive (and therefore relatively visible) expenditures of black SuperPAC money in those districts--and the natural and relatively inexpensive response is to ask those voters "Are you for sale?" How much money can the neo-GOP waste in such an uneven struggle against the bully pulpit? Second, he would provoke Romney into linking himself more closely to the most extreme elements of the neo-GOP. The American voters actually dislike extremists, no matter how much Romney lies about his own extremism. My own favorite target would be that West character in Florida. What about King in New York? Even my own district elected a progressive Democrat for many years until the gerrymandering--but maybe it could be flipped. Some of these targets are quite soft. At least some of those neo-GOP politicians are really soft in the head.

The Republican Party is no more. Abe Lincoln's original Republican Party was progressive and liberal, NOT conservative. The GOP of Teddy Roosevelt and Ike (Eisenhower for you children) was moderate and balanced, in favor of national parks and infrastructure such as roads, NOT extremely conservative, quite mindless and proudly ignorant, and against EVERYTHING that America needs for the future. Today's neo-GOP is something new, but a change for the MUCH worse. The only chance for positive change in America, the only hope for America's future, is if the neo-GOP is decisively defeated and crushed.

There will be change.

President Obama versus the neo-GOP Congress

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Is There Still a Path to the Survival of Democracy in America?

In the future, there will be change. If it is not change for the better, then it will be change for the worse.

If President Obama is going to help America change for the better, then his only hope is to campaign against the Republican Congress. EVERY Congressional race for a seat held by a neo-GOP politician must become a referendum on the performance of Congress.

If President Obama wins reelection, but Congress remains a gang of noisy neo-GOP obstructionists, then there will be no change for the better. The last four years have proven this. A narrow Obama victory is a defeat.

I strongly believe that a Romney victory with a staunchly conservative neo-GOP Congress will lead to a change back to Dubya's failed policies (which were actually the policies of Rove and Cheney and their associates). Those policies did not succeed when Bush was in the White House, and they will do no better on the second, third, or 10th attempt. This will NOT be a change for better.

The only hope is if the neo-GOP politicians are punished for blocking constructive change. There is only one path to progressive and constructive change. The first step on that path is that President Obama has to win and the neo-GOP Congress has to lose.

In light of Citizens United and considering that so many Americans have been so well trained to obey the ads, the situation looks quite bleak. All good things must come to an end, and I fear that I am about to witness the end of America. I would much prefer to believe that I will not outlive my country.

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

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Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

This is actually based on a comment I added to an article about replacing Joe Biden as VP on Huffington Post. My own answer is yes, he should step aside, mainly for the reasons below, most of which were not addressed in the article.

This article raised the political considerat­ions and then ignored the most important factor--th­e neo-GOP nominee. The best V-P pick to balance the Democratic ticket will crucially depend on who President Obama is running against. I actually like Joe Biden and don't think he's done a bad job, but he is fundamenta­lly too old to represent the future of the Democratic Party. Actually, I'm sure it was another metric of Dubya's fundamenta­l incompeten­ce that he didn't dump the big dick Cheney in 2004.

I actually think the most powerful V-P pick would be a progressive or even liberal candidate--from the OLD Republican Party. Someone who switched to the Democratic Party precisely because the GOP is no more. The dominant rightwing clique of the neo-GOP is actually strongly controlled by the Reagan Republican­s who used to be Southern Democrats. Unfortunately, I can't think of any examples of a prominent Republican who has switched to the Democratic Party. The neo-GOP party discipline puts Lenin's Bolsheviks to shame.

By the way, I don't think Reagan deserves much of the credit (or blame) for remaking the GOP into the far rightwing neo-GOP. That was mostly a negative reaction to LBJ's civil rights legislation, and Reagan was just an excuse that the Southern Democrats were waiting for. Almost any excuse would have done, and it was more like a supersaturated gas that suddenly condensed from gaseous Southern Democrats into Reagan Republicans. When I arrived in Texas in the mid-70s, there hadn't been a Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, but since the cloudburst of Reagan Republicans, there are no prominent Democrats in any statewide office in Texas.

Unfortunat­ely, as much as I respect President Obama, I think he lacks Reagan's skills as a propagandist and figurehead, and that is apparently what it takes to motivate Americans these days. Or maybe it's just the superior power of negative motivations? The Southern Democrats REALLY hated LBJ's civil rights laws... Maybe Obama could motivate a large migration of old progressive GOP voters into the Democratic Party, but I haven't seen any hint of such a trend.

In conclusion, I repeat that I think it's time for Joe Biden to step down as V-P. Though the original article dismissed him as regards State, I think he could and probably would do a good job there. However, I think that Clinton has done quite well there and he would probably be overshadowed for just that reason, barring some massive success such as peace in Israel.

Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman: Part the Tiger Woods

Soccer Zen and Nice Guy Dennis Rodman:
Part the Tiger Woods

'Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman' is actually something of an ancient meme relative to my 20 years in Japan. It was surely something I thought of before Rodman retired in 2000 (courtesy of Wikipedia in my Internet lobe). Therefore I conceived it at least 10 years ago, and probably during my first 10 years in Japan. Though Rodman had joined the NFL even before I came to Japan, it took him some years to establish his reputation as a 'bad boy'.

The soccer zen part is related to my own very limited athletic experiences with soccer. Though I played for many years, I was never much good. However, there were a few flashes of zen moments when I was able to put all the pieces together, transcendent moments when I was really into the game. In my case, those moments were mostly when I was tackling the top striker of the enemy team, one Steve Martella. (I met Steve again at our 25th high school reunion in 1999, after he'd already retired from delivering mail.) Our confrontations were mostly back in the fifth grade, when I was in Mrs Clarke's class, and we basically played class on class against Stevie's class. I was too slow and too poor a ball handler to do much, so I was usually hanging around the goal waiting for Stevie to break out and came a rushing. I'm sure that he beat me most of the time, but I also and more vividly remember those times when I had the dream state and was able to strip the ball off him. It wasn't a matter of thinking or planning or trying, it was just a matter of doing. On those occasions, it was like my feet knew what was up and where to go, and I was just along for the ride. He was fast enough to go around me and skilled enough to take the ball through my legs, but there were those times when he couldn't do either. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, and my limited soccer skills actually got relatively worse over the years as the other players improved much faster than I did, but upon reflection, those were my moments of highest athletic involvement, what I would now call moments of soccer zen.

My belief is that a good athlete must feel like that for much of a game. A professional athlete probably has to be in that state for entire games at a time, competing against other professionals who are functioning in very much the same zen state. Then you have to think about the very top athletes, people such as Dennis Rodman in his prime, who are able to go even farther. Upon my poor foundation, I can only imagine levels upon levels until you reach those skills.

Of course there is a physical aspect to sports, but in the end, all of the top professional players are pretty much similar in their bodies. There are lots and lots big, strong people who can't become professional athletes at all, and there is always fierce competition from many healthy youngsters trying to become professionals and star athletes. If the body was all that mattered, you'd expect professional players to be lucky to last a season or two before they got beaten out by a youngster. It wouldn't matter what the peak age was, there would always be a large number of potential professionals reaching their physical peaks every year, whereas the reality is that the best players tend to last many years.

The important differences are clearly mental. There has to be something special about the mental condition of someone who can excel over and over again while playing against the best opponents, and for years at a time. In the case of Dennis Rodman, my fuzzy recollection is that he was especially strong on the boards. That means that he possessed outstanding abilities to figure out where the ball was likely to go in the future, to get there first, and then to fight off other athletes who were also experts with very similar skills and very similar bodies. My recollection is that he also got a lot of fouls, including some technical fouls, but he was obviously able to keep the fouls controlled to the degree that he was able to stay in the games and make important contributions. Lots more details in that Wikipedia article.

Dennis Rodman worked hard to earn a reputation for non-nice behavior, but my contention is that the wrong scale is being applied. It is completely unrealistic to expect above-average performance from average personalities. I'm being a bit hyperbolic to call him a "nice guy", and I still wouldn't want anyone like that as a neighbor, but if I was a basketball fan (which I'm not) and if I was buying a ticket to see the best possible game of basketball played by the best professional basketball players, then a great competitor is a "nice guy" of sorts, regardless of the peripheral considerations, and especially regardless of that player's antics away from the court.

Of course you should be able to see where I'm going with this as regards Tiger Woods. However, over the years I've noticed many professional athletes who have been criticized for mental aberrations of more or less sincerity. If I had a separate "Part the " for each of those stories, I'm sure I'd have more sequels than the worst of those recidivist movie franchises.

Still, we have to admit that the Tiger Woods episode is especially interesting in several ways. His game, golf, is especially mental compared to most sports, but most of his income was actually peripheral to the game, in the form of product endorsements. In addition, much of the value of his endorsements was based on a carefully cultivated reputation for really being a "nice guy", an image of Tiger Woods as a polite gentleman of the nicest sort. The reality turned out to be very different, that he was a rather wild philanderer, dallying with many women at the same time as he was pretending to be a faithful husband and a good family man and role model.

I actually don't feel like he should be criticized so much on moral grounds. I suppose a lot of it would depend on how much he lied to his wife BEFORE they got married. In retrospect, it now seems very likely that he was playing the field--the non-golf field--for some years, and probably going back before they got married. If he fooled her, too, and pretended that he was not seeing many women, then that's quite a different thing than if he told her that he was already playing around quite a bit. My own feeling is that she doesn't seem dull-witted, so she probably knew about his past before they got married, and in that case the big question is whether or not he promised to reform and be faithful. It sounds pretty sordid if you put it that way, but I have to regard her as pretty foolish if she actually expected a leopard to change its spots.

On the other hand, there's certainly plenty of foolishness to go around here, and I think the lion's share is clearly the Tiger's. Apparently there were at least a dozen other women involved here. How long did he imagine this could remain a secret? It's hard enough to trust one mistress, but a dozen? Even if all of them were sincerely discrete, he was just scattering too much evidence around too widely. Someone was going to figure it out sooner or later. It also appears that he had developed an adversarial relationship with his wife, which kind of boggles my mind. Before he got married was the time to check for jealous tendencies, and he certainly had a buyer's market to shop for a reliably tolerant spouse.

Maybe it just comes back to the mental aspect again? Maybe he needed the extra tension of the illicit sex to give him the extra tension on the golf course?

Where we are now, Tiger Woods is apparently regarded as financially the most successful professional athlete in history, the first athlete to gross over $1 billion, of which about $600 million has been converted into his personal worth. Not being a golf fan, I have to recycle the old joke about 'Not bad for chasing a little ball around with a stick.' Tiger has announced that he is taking a break from the game, but that was predicated upon becoming a better husband and father and rebuilding or somehow saving his marriage, and that seems to be a rather forlorn hope at this point. So far he hasn't missed any major tournaments, and if his marriage is really toast, it might be best for him to agree to a quickie divorce, and get back to his games of quickie lovers and golf.

The frequently repeated theme has been that his continued success on the golf course would salvage as much of the situation as can be salvaged. After all, the primary basis of his reputation is that he has the potential to be the greatest golfer in history, and the nice guy stuff was just frosting on the endorsement contracts...

Now it's time to elevate the analysis to a higher level, to the relationship of these professional athletes to the main theme of this blog, the "Distant View of America's Fall". My focus here is on the breakdown between the hard reality of these imperfect humans and the faith-based desire for perfect role models. This has actually become part of the national delusion that is destroying America. There is no Superman coming to the rescue, not on the athletic field and not in politics. This is actually a theme that I've addressed from a number of perspectives, but right now President Obama is becoming increasingly handicapped by the widening realization that he, too, isn't Superman flying to our rescue.

The dynamics of contemporary American politics are such that many of the supporters of any candidate regard their candidate as some sort of divine savior. In Obama's case, the themes of hope and change are now coming to haunt him. I want to believe that they are only bluffing and that they will think carefully in future elections, but disillusionment is a powerful negative emotion, just as many people feel disillusioned when professional athletes turn out not to be the role models they were marketed as. From that perspective, at least Dennis Rodman didn't market himself as a nice guy in the way that Tiger Woods did--and I think the result of that disillusionment may well manifest itself in the future in disruptive shouts on the golf course when Woods is competing, unwelcome distractions which may well prevent him from focusing in the way he needs to win.

It's very different when much of your base is completely faith-based on every issue. I'm talking about the hard core of religiously-motivated Busheviks that continued to support Dubya to the bitter end, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of Dubya Bush's miserable failures. Now that constituency has evidently transferred itself to Sarah Palin, while many of Obama's more rational supporters have simply become quite disaffected by his stubborn wrestling with harsh realities and neo-GOP obstructionism. My own feeling is that Obama is well qualified, intelligent, and skilled and is probably doing as good a job as is possible under the circumstances he inherited--but we seem to be in a situation where the best hope for the nation is for the GOP to be imploded by its dominant neo-GOP far-right wing, thus giving the Democratic Party the overwhelming leverage needed to fix the divisive problems that threaten to consume the nation.

I can actually imagine the situation getting worse--but not that much worse before it collapses completely. I think we dodged a major bullet in 2008 when the financial markets, again last year when Dubai was bailed out, and the Chinese might be about to throw another spanner into the works...

Comments on the Election of 2008

Secondary Subject: I hope you have hope

That's the great thing about voting. It gives me a hope I can make the world a bit better. It isn't like owning the government, but it's better than nothing, and even if my guy didn't win last time, maybe I can pick a winner this time.

Short version of my story: The neo-GOP of Texas tried to prevent me from voting this year, but Senator Obama's supporters saved my vote. I am grateful and want to share my gratitude.

Introduction to the long version: All things are linked, and pulling out a key thread is hard. What do you already know? Where are the gaps I must bridge? Why are you interested? What bores you? There is no Zen, but this is a Zen tale...

So does voting matter? Perhaps it's a kind of religious thing for me, but I've always regarded voting as a sacred right and a civic duty. I'm big on doing my duty. Often it seems that my vote will have no effect, but I do my duty and I rarely skip an election. I always hope to vote.

The hope of Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn was to prevent me from voting this year. She works in the office of the Secretary of State of Texas and sent me a long and complicated email message that was intended to convince me I could not vote. It fooled me, and it was even good enough to fool a retired lawyer friend, too. Maybe it was just the legal code hidden between the lines? Seemed really complicated to me, but probably it's easy stuff for lawyers. Focus on legality and lawyers agree on the law. From her legalese, I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a lawyer, too. McCain says he hopes to make budgetary evildoers famous--though he means infamous, but I think Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn deserves to be infamous, too. Have you have been disenfranchised by her? If so, please tell your story, too. But why did Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn try so hard to prevent me from voting? That thread leads to general political motivations, and the specific situation in Texas.

Remember that *ALL* of the politicians say they approve of voting, but I think most of them are lying. Yes, a few of them really love voting and are sincere about democracy, but most politicians see votes as bus tokens that they need to collect, and collecting tokens is just a tactical game. Stealing a bus token is even better--it's like getting two tokens at once. But if you can't collect the token and you can't steal it from your opponent, then the next best thing is to make sure it gets thrown away before your opponent collects it.

So how do most politicians play the game? Mostly by claiming to agree with the voters, even when they don't. But the voters often disagree with each other, so it's logically impossible to agree with all of them. Is it hopeless? Any disagreement with the politician could lose that token. One tactic of some politicians is to agree with both sides of every issue--which is why most politicians are known liars. It's just getting too hard to avoid getting caught, and it's much better to say meaningless gibberish while attacking anything the other guy said. Ergo, Karl Rove tried to perfect the art of politics as lying about your political opponents. (But maybe that mudslinging machine has finally run out of steam?)

That's actually a relatively 'good' side of the political game. An ugly side is the selective disenfranchisement. For example, gerrymandering during redistricting can concentrate the other side's votes so many of those votes are effectively wasted. Details would be too far afield here, but it's worth noting that many Americans don't vote simply because they know that their so-called secret ballots have already been precounted and gerrymandered, and thus rendered meaningless. Another vicious variation is when the neo-GOP targets 'hostile' voter registrations.

Perhaps my case isn't so bad, though I'm sure I was targeted because I was a likely Democratic voter when I mentioned wanting to vote in the Democratic primary. I don't know for certain if Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a Republican, but Texas politics is now dominated by the Republicans, so either she's a Republican appointed to her position for that reason or she's working for a Republican. In any case I'm firmly convinced the real motivation of her persuasive but misleading email was to block a probable Democratic voter. Voting while Democratic is almost a crime in Texas now.

These years the Republicans run Texas and control all of the top statewide offices--just as Texas used to be dominated by the Democrats for many decades. It's worth noting that the switch was due to a shift of old Southern Democrats who became new Reagan Republicans. That's a long history going back to the "War between the States" (AKA the American Civil War), but the best short summary was LBJ's statement that the Civil Rights Act was ceding the South to the Republicans for a generation--but I also hope that generation is over... Actually. when the Democrats ran Texas, the real state election was the Democratic primary, and now the real election in Texas is the Republican primary--and therefore, by blocking me from voting in the primary Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn had already succeeded in taking away my vote in Texas (but mostly if I switched to the primary that counts).

However, buried in the fine print in a lower paragraph of her email she actually admitted that I still had a residual right to vote--and that's what the Obama people told me about after the primary was past. They told me what steps to follow, and eventually I was rewarded with a ballot. Now I can hope it will be counted--unless Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn has some new tactic to kill it. Maybe I used the wrong kind of ink?

That's pretty much my story, but I want to close by trying to persuade you that you should vote, too, because there are real differences between the candidates in this race. If you don't choose, someone else will--and I confess I was *VERY* mistaken in 2000 to think it didn't matter much. I'm going to focus on one positive and one negative reason why I think this election matters.

What do you think about the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I think the life thing has to come first, or you aren't going to care about anything else. But do you think your right to life should depend on whether or not some insurance company thinks it's profitable to insure you? If you haven't needed medical treatment to save your life, just wait a bit. I think Obama understands this much better than McCain. I think Obama hopes to provide more medical care to help us live, while McCain just hopes to help some insurance companies. America pays more and gets less--because the insurance companies are too greedy in the middle. I think better medical care is a positive hope.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin hopes to meet Jesus, and soon. She's said she expects to meet Him within her lifetime. According to her church, that means she is hoping for and dreaming of Armageddon--and I *REALLY* don't want her in the White House working to make her dream come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies can be dangerous--hoping for the end of the world is a negative hope.

A summary? Politicians have various motivations. I think most politicians are in it for money, some for the power, and only a small number are really into the idea of public service for its own sake--even though all of them claim to put public service first. These differences cross party lines, but there is a bias. The Republicans have always been the party of business, and proportionately more of them are motivated by the money. That's why they normally treat elections the same way, working out the most cost-effective ways to get the required 51% of the votes. The power-crazed politicians seem roughly evenly split--but it's very clear that McCain has become one of them. However, the true public servants now seem to be disproportionately in the Democratic Party. Of course it's hard to be certain in advance, since they all say the same things... So far Obama has been walking the walk.

I started by hoping to pick a winner this time around. I'm picking Obama. This time is *NOW*. We need some hope for a better future.