Basking in Obama’s Reflected Glory

Jared — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:02:29 +0000

Republicans will not be able to win this election. Obama will probably win the presidency. However, if McCain wins, many Democrats will automatically say that Republicans "once again" stole the election (although the only people trying to steal the election in 2000 were Democrats). This will start another 4-8 years of hatred between parties. Once again, everything bad from the economy to natural disasters will be blamed on Republicans (yes, there are quite a few people in the U.S. who honestly believe Pres. Bush was responsible for Hurricane Katrina - I'm not talking about the federal government's response to the hurricane, I'm talking about the actual hurricane itself).

For many people (and I hear and read this a lot), Republicans can do no right and Obama can do no wrong. What's funny is that fellow Democrats are basking in Obama's reflected glory. It's look like Democrats will have large majorities in the Senate and the House, turning our federal government into a single party system. Further, a number of Supreme Court Justices will be up for retirement soon and Obama, with the legislative branch on his side, could pack the court with whomever he wants. That could mean that all 3 branches of government roughly followed a single ideological system!

What I don't understand is why voters want to increase the power of the ruling party in Congress when Congress has very low approval ratings (roughly 15%) and very high disapproval ratings (roughly 75%). That's lower than Pres. Bush's approval ratings! The Democratic ad campaign was successful in convincing many Americans that all the country's problems are caused by Republicans. Yes, they are to blame for some of the problems, but certainly no more than Democrats are.

I've heard the argument that it would be good for the economy to have a Democratic president because if you look at the past 30 years, budget deficits and the national debt have gone up a lot when a Republican was in office (of course, we only have 12 years of those 30 where we had a Democrat president, so the sample is biased). However, Democrats often had the majority in the House and sometimes in the Senate while Republicans were in the White House. So maybe the problem was the Democratic legislative branch - after all, they make the laws and authorize the spending of the money.

However, most people don't really think through the ramifications of having a single-party federal government (it's pretty close anyway - Republicans and Democrats are more similar than different - but do we really want it to actually be one party in charge?). It's a good time to be a Democrat.

Seating Delegates at the Democratic National Convention

Jared — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:48:03 +0000

I'm resuming my posts now that we are building up to the general election in November. Today the DNC started in Colorado. It's receiving major press coverage on all of the major news sites. The media seem to think that we can't get enough of the convention or politicians. It's like it's the Academy Awards; I guess the politicians at least do something fairly useful.

The Democratic Party decided that both Florida and Michigan will get to seat all of their delegates. Does the party have no morals or convictions? They clearly stated that anyone who broke the rules by having the primary too early would lose all of their delegates. Both Florida and Michigan knew the rules but went ahead with their primaries. A few people raised a fuss but those states knew the rules. Once Sen. Clinton started losing to Sen. Obama, her campaign started making a big deal about the "lost" delegates. Clinton only would benefit from having them seated. Her name was on both ballots but Obama's wasn't. From the start, neither Primary was even close to fair; they were heavily biased towards Clinton. Many people didn't even vote because they knew their votes wouldn't count.

A big fuss was made ("We want our votes to count; it's not a Democracy if our votes don't count") and after much deliberation the Democratic Party decided to let Florida and Michigan seat half their delegates. What a farce! Just the other day they announced that both states would seat all their delegates. A double farce! States can break party rules and suffer no consequences. That's not the foundation for a democracy. I've lost what little respect I had for the Democratic Party. It's like having a law against murder but never pressing charges when someone murders someone else. There's no accountability. On second thought, that pretty much is the official platform of the Democratic Party - pass your responsibility on to someone else. There is now nothing to stop a state from holding primaries early and when threatened with the loss of their delegates, all they have to do is point to the 2008 primaries and say, "Well, you let Florida and Michigan have their delegates so why can't we have ours?" Where is their conviction? Where is their integrity? Apparently they don't have any.

US Political Scene » Democrats

Basking in Obama’s Reflected Glory

Seating Delegates at the Democratic National Convention