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O-dministration, O-Kaying images, O-verview, O-ptimism - the Obama beginning

2009-01-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Many are the melancholy or indignant post-mortems emerging as Bush's days draw to a close. Oh, how glad are we all to see the back of Bush.
Obama, awaiting inauguration and setting up his administration, stands in stern contrast to the invocational charm of the campaign. Well may he be stern. He has much to put to rights and already the dissent and criticism festers from the Right. As Paul Krugman says in the NY Times, the GOP needs to stop whining and look at the mess it is in.

Meanwhile, we quietly shimmer in anticipation for the Obama takeover and to see a country with this impressive family in the White House. I gather it is called the White House simply because it is white, made of white marble. Somehow the name seems as inept as it is unimaginative now that it is to hold a black incumbent.

What we will have to understand is that the Obamas are going to be given not only the unprecedented physical protection that they require because of the disgrace of death threats they have been receiving from the racist underclass of America, but also they will be spin doctored and marketed with much greater care and caution than any of their White House predecessors. Michelle's caustic ad libs will have to go. She is a role model now who makes Oprah almost insignificant. The strategists are working out the balance between gravitas and glamour, puppies and politics, not to mention comparisons with Kennedys and Clintons.

Good luck to the lot of 'em. We and they are in for an interesting and, I hope, uplifting time.

Yes we can!

2008-11-06T14:01:00.000-08:00

If there is one thing I regret, it is not walking across that Nashua meeting room and shaking Barack Obama by the hand.
So near and yet so far.
I have my photos and my memory. There we were in that small room with Nashua's elderly. Barack was eight feet from us at most. It was very intimate and laid-back.

Barack Obama will never again be seen up close and personal like that - not now he is President-elect of the USA. He will evermore be flanked by Secret Service. He will evermore be mobbed.

I shook hands with candidates at almost every campaign event I attended. But, on this occasion we were in an awkward building, there was a throng around Barack and, frankly, I had been underwhelmed by his speech. Bruce had to get back to work. I simply gave it a miss.

I did not seek to hear him at other events. I threw myself in Hillary's direction where, I later found to my disdain, naive and zealous young campign workers considered it almost traitorous of me to have gone to an Obama event, let alone subscribed to the Obama email feeds or, as I did, buy his campaign buttons.

Barack Obama grew on that long campaign trail. His strategists and campaign staff were clearly powerful and wise - and he was receptive and progressive. That unstructured, casual speech I heard back in early 2007 was a far cry from the stump speeches he was delivering a year later. He had revved up the young from the outset - but there was some profound change in him which emerged through those last months, a star quality, an extraordinary calm within the storm. We all started to fall in love.

And now history has been made.

I shed a tear, there in the office which came to a standstill as Obama gave that splendid speech. I shed a tear for all the hopes now unleashed. I dared to hope that black Americans would start to feel good. That black rappers would call positive messages. That black kids would see a merit in education and ambition.
Other underclasses, too. Obama is the most powerful symbol of equality and hope ever. I mean ever.
"Yes we can," he says.

The breathless wait

2008-11-04T14:46:00.000-08:00

The day is here.
I've had my breath held for weeks, amassing lists of all the things that can and will go wrong in the voting processes. There are happening out there, all over the USA - but they are not enough, it seems, to impede this great current.
Obama was not my first choice - but, along with Hillary, I have swung around to support him and to watch him growing in statesmanlike proportions.
He is an elegant and erudite man and my hopes for him are high.

How wonderous it is that he should surmount the frightening power of the great Republican lower class fundamentalist hate machine.
As noted by US analysts, the "Walmart" vote is now Republican since it no longer relates to wealth or class but to the adherence to conservatism and religion-based home education which ensures that dangerous, enlightened ideas never cross the minds of the little home-grown right wingers.
The educated classes are the Democrats these days. And the coffee drinkers. Starbucks came out for Obama and give free coffess to voters and volunteers. How 'bout dat! Only in America.

For the African Americans, an Obama win could lay the foundations for a mass attitudinal change, to give a sense of positivity and hope to that huge American underclass. What a powerful and beautiful country the US could be if its black population took to the books and reached for the stars.

Why Obama can't win

2008-10-23T15:12:00.000-07:00

The polls show Obama in a significant lead.
The early voting is showing early voters are out in hordes - dominantly Democrat and Independent voters and many of them black.

I have no confidence that this will result in Obama getting what would seem to be a logical win. I have no confidence the voters will get their vote.

The GOP has been screaming voter fraud from the Dems - which is its pre-empt of voter frauds they have up their sleeve. They have done it before and they are about to do it again.
I seem to live amid people who believe that honesty and ethics will prevail and that the results of the election will relate to the figures on the opinion polls. I simply cannot be as Pollyanna. I expect the on-the-day votes to deliver a "surprise" victory to McCain.
I am so sure of this that my heart is heavy from the futility of it all.

Voters have already been reporting that they can't get the voting machines to accept their Democrat votes, that the machines keep bouncing their votes in the other direction.
The voting machines are made by GOP supporters.

The GOP is discrediting the votes being made by blacks through ACORN registrations. These will disappear. Black votes generally are doomed - again. I do admire black Americans for continuing to come and and stand up against this crap.
The special facilities being laid on to get votes from the armed forces overseas are, by contrast, a complete scam to glean what are expected to be predominately Republican votes. They can vote online.

Just watch a repeat of Florida.

Meanwhile, forget Jackie Kennedy and her extravagant clothes in the White House. If Sarah Palin requires $US150,000 of high fashion hockey mum grooming in a couple of months, god knows what four years of primping would cost.

Don't forget Ron Paul

2008-10-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

If I had reservations about Michelle Obama, they are gone, blown away by the typhoon of Sarah Palin. Michelle Obama is an erudite woman and she would appear to do a good job of blending motherhood with politics. Not that she is running for anything. But she has been the subject of my criticism - as has Barack Obama.

I was underwhelmed by him when I sat in a Nashua, NH, room with him and listened to his platform. I could not find a "there" there.

That was over a year ago. Barack Obama has grown substantially while on the campaign trail. He also has aged - unlike McCain whose brow seems to have a weird Botoxy smoothness. But Obama has grown quite statesmanlike. He has kept his cool against the endless onslaughts of Fox and the GOP. He has stood tall. And he now has delivered substance to his platform. I am a hard sell, but I am won.

I've been avidly watching the evolving emotions on the campaign trails of the US and the desperate ploys of the Right to pre-empt voter fraud by going on and on about voter fraud. Bright red herrings are being dragged all over the media.

BUT...
There is another man still standing.

I note that Fox, while taking Huckabee onto staff as a personality and political commentator, has not mentioned Ron Paul - despite the fact that it is scratching for substance in its endless campaign against the wicked left and, hence, filling its airtime with talking heads talking to talking heads.

Ron Paul is still on the ballot in some places.

Wouldn't it be funny if the voters got to the the polls and discovered this surprise libertarian third option - and went for it?
As his supporters told me the first time I heard of him back in Manchester, NH when they were asserting a strong presence at a John McCain rally, Ron Paul is "the real maverick".
And now he has a running mate. Michael Peroutka
He seems to have a nice face - and he thinks the Iraq war is "ungodly".

They are no real threat - but they could provide a voting wedge to offset that monster saboteur of the Democrats, Ralph Nader.

And that is no bad thing! Onya, Ron!

Palin is an experience

2008-10-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it is better when the Republicans keep Sarah Palin out of the public spotlight for fear of having her embarrass them yet further with her ignorance or when they release her into it with mouthfuls of memorised gibberish.
She is obviously a quick swat - and seemed pretty adept with her cue cards. She had learned Ahmadinejad's name and said it over and over and over just to show us.
And she sure out-winked her hapless opponent, doggone it.

Reading and watching the fallout, I was surprised at how few commentators were prepared to give her the benefit of the low expectations. Only Fox, really. And Fox has made itself a farcical institution of flared nostril right wing excitement. Truly, it gets embarrassing watching the raw arousal of the anchors and commentators as they get on their Republican high horses. Move over Equus!

Elsewhere, however, there are responses of high anxiety at the cynical placement of Palin in this pivotal position. This good looking "down home" mom taps right into the comfort zone of the lowbrows. She ain't gonna answer nasty old questions from debate moderators. She's gonna talk right to the American people in her own special way.

I loved the way Fox defended her lack of experience by saying that she had had experiences. Sure. She has had experiences - shooting things, giving birth, entering beauty quests...

What a mockery this all makes of the very serious, nay dire, state of the world.
One can only be profoundly disappointed that America, once a loved and respected superpower, is taking its common denominators so very dangerously low.

Worth reading is Michelle Goldberg of the Guardian. The photo illustration - the Palin wink - is really telling.

Is the lustre Palin?

2008-09-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

The thick plottens, as they say in the classics.
Sarah Palin has been sequestered with the Bush spin team, carefully secluded from the dangerous questions of the wicked, bad, inquisitive media. They are letting her out now on carefully-supervised appearances - oh, so well managed.

Almost. She did slip up on "Bush doctrine" showing that even a know-it-all might have a bit to learn. I'd love it if she started with evolution.

She delivered a well-written speech which played skilfully on the public's current economic fears and promising that overpaid CEOs would not be grossly overpaid if she and McCain were in power. Hmm. Not many votes to lose in that economic solution - especially for one who is desperately trying to play to the working and lower middle class demographic. The idea is that she is one of them, a Down Home hick who comes from the sorta stock who never needed an educayshun to run their hard-working little businesses. Funny thing that. I thought her dad was a teacher.

The Palins love to kill things in their spare time. They eat a lot of moose and caribou. She loves killing wild animals, wolves especially. She does it from the air.

We keep reading that she is "resonating" among American women - a sort of Annie Oakley thing.

But one reads that she and her snowmobile vroom-vroom husband make four-figure incomes and that she has been claiming per diems while living at home. Tsk tsk.

I've not heard these things on Fox but I have heard Fox starting to snipe at Palin. The gushing love affair, the fawning she-can-do-no-wrong policy has lapsed and, perchance, the Republicans are just a wee bitty worried about this loose cannon killer hockeymum and anxious about what stories are yet to come out about her.

Perchance she is as clean as the blood-drenched Alaskan snow.

Sarah Seals the Hillary vote for Obama

2008-08-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

Comparisons between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are not just odious, they are downright dumb.
The only common factor between those two is gender.

Palin is one of those right wing wackos who is all for killing - huntin', shootin', fishin' and killin' things - but believes that termination of unwanted or mutation pregnancies is murder.
She is all for children being taught creationism and, predictably, is against same sex marriage.
If she has a gift, it would seem to be her massive ego. Before she discovered the joys of running for office, she was competing in beauty quests.

This is a vain and shallow Republican poster girl.

The Fox Republicans are creaming themselves.

Whatever they say, however, there is no comparison with Hillary - the intellect, the erudition, the political savvy, the compassion etc etc - and I am sure that she will make zip, zilch and nil impression on the potential vote of Hillary supporters of any kind.
The very idea is madness.

In fact, if anything, she will cement them into support for Obama.

Hillary - thoroughbred to the end

2008-08-27T22:11:00.000-07:00

Hillary's speech to the Democratic Convention in Denver was so absolutely champion that I felt tearful and heavy-hearted.
There she was, giving a solid, sane, constructive, forward-thinking, genuine policy speech in the midst of all that Obama ephemera. Obama is a sophist. Hillary is a politician and presidential material.
If ever it was glaringly evident, it was as she gave that speech. Strong, brilliant woman.
I knew from the outset, I could feel in my waters, that she was the right one.
That feeling simply won't go away.

The way the cards have fallen, I just have to let go, as does and did Hillary Clinton.

But not before showing the world stage what a classy candidate she was.

Onwards, Obama.

Sidin' with Biden

2008-08-25T04:35:00.000-07:00

Now, I know Biden has been around for decades and is a respectable Democratic senator from, uh, that corporate tax haven state of Delaware. I was keen to hear him speak when I was in New Hampshire, but his dates and whereabouts never quite worked out for me. He was on a slimmer campaign budget than some and did not tour as extensively. Not like Clinton or Obama.

So, not hearing him in the flesh, I could only join his newslist and keep an eye on him. He did not fire me up. Not like Bill Richardson.

But he seemed civilized, seasoned, intelligent enough... There is a long tradition of good Catholic men in liberal politics. I have time for them.

The main thing that impressed me about Biden and impresses me now is the silver hair and Hollywood features - he looks like someone who has come direct from Central Casting.

Perchance this makes him just right for the role.
White man for the white vote. Restrained and conventional for the middle-of-the-roaders. Photogentic for the media.
He is a fine piece of political window dressing.

Obama vividly ahead

2008-07-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

A month back in the USA has allowed daily studying of the primary status quo as it is represented in the varied media. The first big impression has been the disappearance of Michelle Obama from the campaign spotlight. She is gone, gone, gone.
Barack Obama's profile, however, has been growing in a very positive manner. The man has groomed himself into the biggest star in this country of stars and celebrities. Obama seems to have found the zeitgeist.

He is definitely better recognised than his opponent, McCain, and he is surrounded by a buzz - that little buzz of those early appearances and parades has grown exponentially.

The media, even the rabid right, has found that it has to be rational when covering his activities. The fact that he is black gives him a certain degree of protection - for Americans crave political correctness at all times. So the media must tread lightly with Obama.

And the fact is that he looks good and sounds good and he has good organisation behind him. The media acknowledges this and, to some extent, applauds it.

I have been wishing I could have gone back to New Hampshire to get into some of the action which continues to be most politially vigorous up there. Town Hall meetings and assorted intimate appearances. McCain is there just now.

But I have been in McCain's own state - staying in the town where he and Cindy and based - Sedona, Arizona. He is not as well known as one may have imagined, though. I was chatting with a couple of Starbucks workers from Phoenix and they had no idea that he was the Republican candidate for president. Their conclusion, when this Australian told them so, was: "Well, if he is from Arizona, I guess it's "go McCain'."

The New Hampshire polls show Obama ahead.
The media mood shows Obama ahead.

And, as for the streets of San Francisco - he is shown as a head of a different sort. A psychedelic head!

Here are the buttons on sale on the streets.

Unification in Unity - a top PR job

2008-06-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

Oh to have been back in New Hampshire for the extraordinary Unity unification of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I would have been there like a dart of shimmering lightning - to read the mood, the faces, the nuances of this alliance. Unity turns out to be not too far from Nashua - just up the road to Hanover, out of Concord...well placed, albeit a small place. But a canny choice. The Primary State with a primary move in the Primary. A perfect piece of PR play.

My respect for Hillary soared as I watched her there on TV, gracious, generous-spirited and positive beside Obama. Accepting defeat and standing up for the larger benefit of the country is what courage and integrity are all about.

Obama also has been gracious. Well, if the words "she rocks" are really a political plaudit.
Michelle has been conspicuous by her absence - certainly on the footage being shown here in Australia on Fox. She has not been sighted on that dais. I try to imagine her state of mind but can't seem to move past my feeling that her streak of racist bitterness is too powerful for her to be happy about this turn of events. Vindication might be nearest to her response.

The Fox commentators are going to town on what a drawback Hillary brings to the Obama campaign in the form of Bill Clinton. I am just over this American hatred for Bill. I am over the whole anti-Clinton agenda which is just so full of sureness. In fact it is old fashioned poppy-lopping.

No one is going to find the perfect politician. Everyone is flawed. No president has a perfect record. It's a tough business. We seek the best thinking-on-the-feet, best informed, best-advised person for the job. It may well have been Bill Richardson.

I think Hillary's failure lies somewhere in the realm of her strategists - and a blinkered sort of limiting paranoia I observed in NH. As much as I enjoyed my foray into the campaign, I did not like the fact that some of those Hillary team workers thought that my venturing into rival meetings was in some way disloyal - when, in fact it was plain intelligent research. What the hell is wrong with people who want to be blind to their opposition?
Then there were some Hillary workers, I was told, who thought I was dangerous to have around because I am a journalist. Yeah, a journalist offering services to them! For free! A highly experienced journalist and a political animal with a lot of knowledge to share. Not all of them, I hasten to add, were so Just a thread of them who never even bothered to speak to me. Those ambitious and territorial young people looked a gift horse in the mouth. Even when I subbed their amateurish writing on the Hillary website, they were unprepared to accept professional help - and preferring to leave their errors in place.
There is a risk in having passionate, youthful devotees with closed minds throwing their weight around behind the scenes. That worried me from the outset.

I am heading back to the US tomorrow and will be keen to immerse myself in the feelings of the people. I'll be in the Southern states - a far cry from my beloved New Hampshire.
Then again, who could not love the South, eh?

And now we move our support..

2008-06-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

And down she goes.
With elegance, eloquence and grace.

Behind her fine speech comes an unleashing of extraordinary anti-Clinton spite in the excited masses of online feedback. I have just been reading it on site after site after site. The non-Clinton supporters have no inch to give, no grace in their spirit and, as I have always maintained, they are more a product of the right wing marketing machine than they will ever know. But they are happy. For the moment. They are milking their venom glands and feeling some relief.

My heart goes out to Hillary and my concern goes out for the US and the world - for the race is just begun and, even though McCain ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, he will prove formidable against Obama.

A chunk of me has long wished that, somehow, Bill Richardson could have stayed in the race.
Albeit he was Latino, he did not attract the media favour or the gushing cult enthusiasm of the handsome young Obama - but he was the more solid, talented, wise and able by a long shot. He was prime presidential material. He could have stood his ground against McCain.

We will have an interesting time watching how the GOP now changes its media slant on Obama. We will have an interesting time watching the ingenuous new political breed cope with it all. We will hope that, somewhere behind the sophistry, Obama has the true grit.
He certainly writes a nice book, albiet that he writes a great deal about the issue of being black. And, if he becomes president, the important factor will be that he is a black president. That fulfils his promise of "change". And, has he has just said, if perchance he wants to do something about health care, Hillary Clinton had a good policy and may be worth listening to.

As for Michelle Obama, I have yet to find hope. I can only see the most divisive woman yet to arrive in politics - protected by the racist card. The racist card says that blacks are rightful to have a hate agenda against whites but that whites are racist if they criticise blacks.
Interesting to see a book by Shelby Steele A Bound Man: Why We're Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can't Win, rushed through to cover this issue. Noel Pearson reviewed it for Online Monthly. This is really worth a read, dealing as it does with the phenomenon of white guilt and the moral high ground African Americans perceive therein.

We have the white hate church and the white hate preacher - who has refused to step down. The Obamas say, at the 11th hour, under immense pressure, that they have left that church and its militant ideology. Huh? Who is looking at the politics of that change of, um, policy? Um, is this consistent, loyal, honest...? Didn't Obama say that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was his "mentor"?
Oh, we won't look at it now. It is not an issue in the campaign. Let it flow through to the keeper. It was always more important to dislodge Hillary.

Nonetheless, they are raving ranting religious zealots from a hate church.

My reservations about Obama are not going to go away easily. He will have a lot of proving to do for me. Michelle Obama more so.

He was the one and only Democratic candidate with whom I did not make the effort to shake hands. He was the one and only Democratic candidate from whose appearance I chose going for a coffee over staying around afterwards. I left plain disappointed with him. Hence the consistency of my stance here in the blog.

I was there in the room with him. I listened. I watched. I arrived full of hope.
At that time I had not committed to Hillary. I could just as easily have been on his team - until I sat there and listened and felt the emptiness of his rhetoric.

Now, of course, I will now do the right Democratic thing - I will support him utterly against McCain.
And pray that all my misgivings are misplaced.

A sad note

2008-06-04T01:09:00.000-07:00

With good grace. I have dreaded the good grace.
If it were not for my reservations. If it were not for the fact that Michelle Obama's anti-white agenda worries me terribly, my good grace may be good. How ironic is it that the public has swallowed the Right's propaganda about Hillary being "divisive" and "ambitious". The Obamas are not?

The public is so malleable - which the Right knows.
It has some dirt up its sleeve about Michelle Obama. Or so the rumour mill goes.
But it needs Hillary out of the way before it destabilises the Obama camp with scuttlebut. If it came out with the dirt early, then it would throw favour back in Hillary's direction.

I don't like the Right, but I never underestimate their canny strategising. They are unpleasant but not stupid.
They have pushed Obama because, even without the dirt, he is an advantage for their McCain campaign.
And so it is all going to come to pass.

Ah, yet again, an interesting, if not cheering, time in history.

Meanwhile, my admiration for Hillary remains. She has true grit and true talent.

Shy McCain

2008-05-26T01:17:00.000-07:00

It is a bit offputting to read that John McCain's fundraising events are closed to the press.
Why, I wonder?
What don't they want us to know?

The big thing I wish the media would "out" McCain for is his dependence on teleprompters.
I was scandalised when I saw him speak in Manchester, NH, straight from a teleprompter which had been hauled out and set up in the middle of a public park for him. Gobsmacked is probably not an understatement for my shock. I was under the impression that, especially when it came to their own stump speeches, politicians knew the script.
Hillary certainly did. Obama did. Giuliani did. Bill Richardson did...
But there was old McCain, "Mr Experience", showing that he was not au fait with his own lines.
And, I gather, not a lot has changed.
I have watched the eye movement in the crowds as he gives his addresses and, yes, they seem to be moving from specific focal points...
No spontaneity.
Indeed, spontaneity seems to be his downfall.
The YouTube clips which are the big hit of the moment prove that to be so. He does, he does not know about the economy. He does not know what he knows, it seems.
Which is why he has to read it all nicely written down.

Oh, deary me.

Michelle Obama in cottonwool

2008-05-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Michelle Obama should be "off limits"?
There should be no comment about her comments? That tough, outspoken, high-agenda woman out on the campaign trail beside him should attract no comment?
The fact that only once has she ever felt proud of her country should not be mentioned?

Come on Barack Obama.

You are running for the position of president of the United States.
You are playing in the big school.
Nothing is "off limits".

Unless it be puerile demands that the wife is off limits.

Obama, the un-sweetie

2008-05-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

And another little sign emerges from Obama.
Another danger sign.

In the latest incident he called a woman journalist "sweetie" - when also refusing to answer her question. He told her that "sweetie", he would answer questions later at what he calls a "media avail". In fact he did not answer the question at all. He did no "media avail" and, apparently, he shirks them whenever he can. I will not be surprised to hear somewhere along the line from Barack and Michelle that they deem the media one of the great white evils.

Meanwhile, clearly Obama has scant respect for journalists when he can disrespect a female journalist asking a legitimate question with the patronising term of "sweetie".

Thirty years ago, men would use such demeaning familiarities to keep the little inferior women in their place. Honey, dear, love...
After the feminist revolution, only the most crass of sexist men dares to diminish women with these words.

In 2008, a man aspiring to be a world leader should know better.

He has dismissed this insult with a light-hearted response that, well, he has a bit of a bad habit with these little endearments.

No, Obama, that is not a "habit", it is an "attitude".

Beneath Barack's lovely prose...

2008-05-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

"...another of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as your were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfie; they were relieved such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.''
This extract from Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father which I have just re-read, now finding things more significant than I did at the first reading when, frankly, I was simply seduced by the beautiful prose and the man's impressive eloquence.
This time round, it is a frightening story of racial anger.

I think my biggest cringe was at mention of a girl who took a job nannying for a family in Hawaii. Apparently the girl was black and the family was not. Hence, for the girl, the job was deeply degrading.
When her employers dared to love her and think of her as part of the family, apparently the insult was all the worse. Oh, my.

I don't want to, but I find myself harking on about racial anger.

Why does being black make a job more degrading than it does for a white or hispanic or Asian? Is a job not a job?

I tell ya, a man bringing these views to the Whitehouse is quite a worry.
What a bloody mess,
This is the last thing I expected when the primaries got up and running last year.

Divide and rule? No, rule and divide.

2008-05-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

She's not going to give up until someone "puts a stake through her heart", the pundits declare.
Well, there may be a snide Republican inference in this turn of phrase, but to hell with it, in a way they are right.
Hillary is not a quitter.
She knows the game too well.
Everything is stacked against her and the anti-Clinton school has done its work well, to fill an otherwise rational voting public with associations such as "ambitious", "divisive" and "Bill will be running things".
Speak to the people echoing these sentiments and they have no further reasoning. They are just parroting what their media long has parroted to them.
All of these are bits of marketed bigotry wich are not too far removed from the sort of hatred preached by Obama's terrible Reverend Wright.
It all works very well. The public is malleable and does not think too deeply. People love to hate.

Ironically, and nicely controlled by the spin doctors, is the hate agenda of the Obamas. Not Barack, perhaps. It is hard to tell, since he speaks many words but manages artfully to say almost nothing. But Michelle Obama has had orders to keep her mouth shut - which she has been doing. Michelle Obama is the scary one with the hate agenda. She, too, goes to Reverend Wright's church of racial hatred.

Racism is not a white phenomenon. Guilt and the compulsion for political correctness, not to mention some finger-pointing from non-whites, has whites thinking it is their own sin. Not so. It comes both ways.

Now check out the Michelle Obama bios. Here's a Wikipedia extract:

Michelle graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981[5] and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an Artium Baccalaureus in 1985.[2] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."[6] She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[7] While at Harvard, she participated in political demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who are minorities. [8]

I find this worrying.
I am afraid that, once in a position of power, Michelle Obama will show America what "divisiveness" really is.

Hooray for Hills

2008-04-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Pennsylvania! Oh, blessed relief.
The 10 per cent margin between Hillary and Barack keeps Hillary in the race and allows America the time it needs to clue up.

Not that Michael Moore has clued up.
What a shock to receive his newsletter urging his fans to vote against Hillary Clinton.
But Moore, while a brave agitator and man of causes, is no political Einstein. He is a big on the naive side, I think. And in this case, he is holding a grudge against Hillary's error of judgement in voting for Iraq. He is joining the Fox-revved mindless mob who refuse to hear Hillary's oft-reiterated words "if I knew then what I know now".
Moore has never failed in prescience?
Guess what?
He is lacking prescience right now!

The man is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So fie upon him.

Of course, Barack Obama is a fine candidate. The Democratic Party threw up a lineup of stunning candidates - Richardson, Biden, Edwards et al. Each of these men had outstanding merit. Obama does, too, although I am not so sure about his wife.

Hillary has an edge on all of the other candidates - and she has proved, with this long campaign, that she has guts and stamina on an Olympian scale.
One watches the relentlessness of the campaign and just boggles at how long and hard it is - a marathon to end all marathons. She has impressive self-discipine - which is the hard edge that the Right Wing pundits forever decry. Pity they don't have a bit more of it. Self-discipline involves self-sacrifice.

I continue to believe in Hillary Clinton and am delighted at this strong win.
I think the Democratic race needs to claw its way on simply so that the American public can overcome the Right Wing mantras about Clintons - and see this strong, courageous, well-informed and experienced woman is what the country really needs.

Fingers and toes crossed as the game moves on.

Get Hillary - its the only choice.

2008-04-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

It is all getting rather silly - and very worrying.
I watched what we were able to see on TV of the ABC Hillary/Barack debate, topping up content with online clips. Unless one is there, it is very hard these days to get any report which is not skewed with opinion.
The big loser of the debate according to all and sundry was the ABC for its pussyfooting and puny questioning.

Now, some of the commentators are saying that the ABC's biggest fault was that it was anti-Obama and therefore pro Clinton.

We have reached a stage of this nightmarish primary in which almost anything at all is deemed anti-Obama. While Hillary is a prime target for all the bile of the right with its entrenched Clinton hate agenda, Obama is protected by that exquisite American prerequisite for political correctness.

Since all criticism of Obama can be seen as racist, there can be no criticism. It backfoots Hillary badly - and puts a compromise on the open blather of the political pundits. So, if one is going to snipe and carp and criticise and keep that old media ball rolling with beat-up controversy, the middle class white woman with her sinful husband is the only way to go.

Oh, what a Catch 22.

Staying the course

2008-04-06T16:53:00.000-07:00

People keep asking me, in sombre tones, how I think Hillary is going. Does she still have a chance?

Heavens, yes!

Take nothing for granted in politics - or football or horseracing or, for that matter, ice skating. Let us not forget the Aussie ice skater who won gold because of the fact that he was coming last. When the whole pack of racers fell over, our boy at the back was the only one left standing and he glided in triumphant.

My thoughts on Hillary are that so long as Hillary believes in Hillary, I believe in Hillary.

From the outset, I have had an absolute certainty that she is the best possible candidate for America's next president. This strong feeling has not left me.

But, of course, one has to watch the white-anting, the endless Clinton-bashing from Fox and the virulent right wing.
There would seem to be a school for Clinton-bashing and the demeaning of liberals in the USA, so well-honed and consistent is it. I have described it as a "culture" and I see it growing in a petrie dish of snipes and sneers.
Someone should do a PhD on it - since it is a phenomenon as fascinating as it is repulsive. I goes hand-in-hand with the dumbing down of the people, I suspect.

Certainly, there is no more popular target than intelligent people - which bring Clinton and Obama right into the sightlines.

So here we are, with Fox as the only constant news source from the USA - having to endure the sneers from a clone pile of awful anchors. What a wonderful weapon they are for McCain - who can just sit back and let them do the dirty work, and even choose his Vice Presidential candidate for him. If they can make it Huckabee, they will.

As for Hillary - she has the grit, the spine, the wisdom and the sense of history to know that persistence is an essential key to achievement. Women have had to fight long and hard to get where they are today - and to get further, well, it was never going to be easy.

Hillary has said she is in there for the long haul.
Hillary has the goods. Sooner or later the delegates in all their power, will notice that tenacity, power and knowledge are highly desirable qualities in a president.

Perchance the voters will, too.

I wait in positive spirit.

Black and white

2008-03-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Geraldine Ferraro has resigned because of the disgrace of saying that Obama would not be where he is today in the primary if he was not black.

But, surely Obama is as white as he is black.

Obama is 50-50.

I am finding it hard to comprehend why he has forsaken white legacy - rejected that white blood line to brand himself "African American". Is this not courting the black vote?

Obama is African and American.

How would his poor mother feel, were she alive, to know that her role in his being has been discarded?

Good onto Hills!

2008-03-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

Hillary had more faith in Hillary than the rest of us. Fie upon us.
Look at these uplifting wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island today. Let's hope Pennsylvania is on its way.
This will make it pretty even as it goes off to the convention. A cliffhanger to the end.

I am so happy about Hillary's wins today.

Annoyingly, I have to watch coverage of it on Fox news. The Fox election coverage has been nauseating me for some time. Well, ever since I have had to watch it.
It is a disservice that Rupert Murdoch does to the USA, allowing Australia only to see 24-hour US news from Fox. CNN is shown on cable but it is a special Pacific version which is tediously dominated by business and finance. Sky is dominated by sport.
So, if one is interested in general US news, Fox is it.

Hence, we have those ugly, smug Fox anchors unctuously faking objectivity in Democratic coverage.

Beggars can't be choosers. So I watch avidly deep into the Australian night.
It is stressful.

But at least there are signs that not all of the USA is brainwashed by Fox.
The people are recognising that Hillary has the goods that the country really needs.

Did we say racist?

2008-02-22T16:14:00.000-08:00

Once the racism can is opened, everything gets nasty.
None nastier than Bill O'Reilly from Fox. "O'Racist" Bob Cesca has called him in the Huffington Post.

Cesca has written on O'Reilly's reaction to that self-same Michelle Obama quote - how, for the first time, she feels reason to be proud of her country. He thinks O'Reilly should apologise and resign.
Fat chance.

But Cesca is on the ball in pinning O'Reilly on the White Supremacist line.

O'Reilly said:

And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.

Cesca comments:

Lynching? Party? Unless there's evidence? So we're to understand from Bill O'Reilly that if someone might be relating a certain level of dissatisfaction with America's present status and chief executive, that they deserve to be tracked down by Bill O'Reilly's Lynch Mob?

It doesn't even matter what Michelle Obama said. We do know that FOX News repeatedly misquoted Mrs. Obama's statement and regardless of what she said, nothing -- no words, intentions or deeds justify the unhinged spike in Bill O'Reilly's bigoted, splotchy blood pressure to the point of wanting to "track it down" with his "lynching party." She could've said something like, "Bill O'Reilly is a splotchy dillweed who enjoys savory, soapy shower falafels," and it still wouldn't justify this flagrantly racist "lynching" analogy.

Indeed, this is where racism sinks to its worst depths. And where we cringe and, hand-in-hand with Michelle Obama, feel ashamed that the USA gives such broad approval to this terrible man and his vociferous ilk.

Michelle Obama means change all right

2008-02-20T03:32:00.000-08:00

Michelle Obama is showing her colours. If the American public sat up and took notice rather than gushed at the idea that "change" is a political policy, they might restrain their enthusiasm for the Obama push - and perhaps save the day and turn towards Hillary Clinton.
Michelle Obama has announced that having her husband running for president has provided the first thing IN HER LIFE to make her proud of her country!
All these years she has felt no pride in her homeland?
Apparently not.
Reading biographical material about here reveals that she has operated for most of her career on a heavy black agenda. She appears to be an angry black woman, a black activist, a racist - and, indeed, if she is American's First Lady, there sure will be some "change".

Of course, if Obama goes on to keep winning, if he is the 2008 Democrat presidential candidate, one is going to see another swing in the voting. It is just what the Republicans want. The American public, given the option of a black president or a war hero president will go for the war hero.

And this is what I now predict.

Obama on the rise and rise and rise

2008-02-09T19:08:00.000-08:00

Hillary already has been begging the country just to remember that the important thing for November is to vote Democratic. There must be change of Government. She is a wise woman and, I fear, she can see the writing on the wall.
It is not looking too good for her. She will have to pull a rabbit out of the hat - as the media keeps gnawing at her image, carrying on about botox, making ugly kerfuffles over Chelsea, sniping about Bill... making up whatever it can get away with.
It's rough.

Of course, many of the Obama simpletons who are bouncing around, high as kites on the novelty of a political experience, think that "change" is something Obama has invented.

They think that "change" is a policy!

I am very sad watching the latest Caucus figures emerging, still boggling at how utterly stupid the very essence of caucuses are. Only 2 per cent of the registered Republicans turned up at their Washington caucuses? The weather was bad? They did not bother with their political responsibility. I just hope those Republicans stay indoors again in November when the big election is on. Their political apathy will be useful then.

Meanwhile, Obama is going from strength to strength in these evolving primaries - and I see Teddy Kennedy rubbing his hands together because he will have control. I see Oprah priming up to dub herself a president-maker responsible, with her new best buddy Michelle Obama, for a bright new black agenda.
I see a lot of people around Obama, pulling strings - but I do not see a man with great depth of potential in his own right.

I never did - not from that first encounter in NH, when I went to the Seniors Centre to get up close and personal with him, to listen to him and see what he was all about. That was when my hopes melted away in a puddle of Obama rhetoric. He is a sophist. He is a sophist. There was no "there" there.
I left feeling a bit empty and disappointed.

It made the deciding factor for this old political animal. I had been to see and hear Hillary and I needed to know how Obama matched up. And there was a man with no real policy. Just fluent sophistry. That was the point at which I phoned the Hillary Campaign and offered my services.

So, of course, I think my choice is the right choice.
I think Hillary Clinton is absolutely exceptional - a very able woman with an informed grasp on almost every aspect of most ever domestic and international political issue. That is pretty rare and I'd challenge any other candidate to match her erudition.

Sadly, the common voter neither knows nor cares. Many have some media-induced idea of a Clinton agenda. They have believed what the media has told them - that she is cold and ambitious, which are taken to be evils in a woman, albeit strengths in a man.
The media wins.

The media has marketed Obama as a favoured Dem. It suits the precious youth demographic which is all the media wants to know about. His is quite a marketable commodity, of course.

Obama is really very nice in myriad ways. He is superbly fluent, like an elegant preacher. His books are fantastic. I rather fell in love with him when I read him.
He is tall and handsome.

But the very "change" business that the media has marketed and the young have embraced with such enthusiasm, is still turning me off.

Give us a break!
Elections are all about change. They are for change

What actual change is Obama promising? Just change.
His policies are more philosophic than political nitty gritty. He promises hope. Nice things. He promises to bring the cost of living down with tax breaks and to raise the minimum wage. He does not want anyone to be poor. He wants college to be affordable..so long as students work for the peace corps in return. This is their pleasant payback for tuition. Of course this is very appealing to the young.
Obama is very appealing.
The young are rapt.

Now, in the grand scheme of potential presidents, he is a pretty classy possibility. There is no doubt about that.
The Democratic candidates made a lineup of exceptional individuals. Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, John Edwards...and, of course, the brilliant Hillary Clinton.
Each one had fine potential as a president. America can be proud that it can, in fact, line up such an array of pure class.

And from fair Florida...

2008-01-30T04:43:00.000-08:00

I have to say that I am a bit sad for the old Giuliani. He could not have made a greater mess of the primary. Who on earth was his strategist? Someone who is not going to get work as a strategist again, I suspect.
Apart from being too arrogant to go on the campaign trail and thinking that networking in Florida alone was going to win Florida, his other error, methinks, was the endless reiteration of his heroic role in 9/11. He could not understand that capitalising on 9/11 in any form at all is plain offensive to most Americans. I hear the rabid rightist commentators on Fox saying that Giuliani's failure lay in his sex life - his several marriages. Florida should be judgmental about a man who has married more than once? Florida?
Oh, Fox, you do fill the airwaves with some arrant nonsense. It is a terrible disadvantage Downunder to have only Fox as 24-hour news from the US. CNN does an Asian/Pacific service which loads it with endless Asian finance reports and Sky loads itself with sport. So, we are pretty much stuck with Fox, since we are on Rupert's cable. It is peerless in its reportage of a world crisis - but the rest of the time it pads itself with incestuous studio chat and preoccupative Clinton-bashing.

But if we are talking about wives, surely Fred Thompson would be the turnoff with his blonde bimbo wife and small child - at his age! Repulsive man in my opinion and I was glad to see the back of him in the primary.

The ranks are, indeed, thinning out.

John McCain surprises me no end with his steady growth. My encounter with him in New Hampshire was anything but impressive. I more or less wrote him off. It was a wickedly cold and wet day and it was an outdoor rally-style event in Manchester. McCain, with his blonde and young-looking wife, was very late but the old veterans waiting to support him were stoic old blokes who had been through military training and were not going to let anyone forget their self-discipline. There is a potent movement of veterans in the US. They wear clothes to identify themselves and have car numberplates identifying themselves. They expect respect for their service and they get it.
These days, they are tough old things and they are keen to have one of their own in the White House.

McCain was the least impressive speaker of all those whose events I attended. He was the only one who had a teleprompter.
He seemed old. I figured he would never last the distance of relentless campaigning. Indeed, his campaign was in terribly disarray mid-year. Low funds, staff firings. But the old soldier marched on.
He seems to have gone from strength to strength and he has even been more articulate. He is very, very conservative, more so than Goldwater was, I am told. But he is not a nut case extremist.
The voters are culling the extremists right out. They are not stupid.
It is good to see.

The last of the ratbags, and I am not counting Ron Paul among the ratbags, is Huckabee and, despite Fox promoting him on a daily basis, it seems there is not enough money among his trailer park supporters to fund a campaign competing with the big business boys. Then again, Mitt Romney has the billions and he, too, is being trounced.
The old soldier is what America trusts. A war veteran. A prisoner of war.

I am sad that John Edwards has called it a day. He had no choice. He had no chance. But, my heavens, he worked hard. The problem was that he was not saying anything different from the policy he was espousing when he campaigned in NH in 2003 - and I got to stage of thinking I'd scream if he said one more time that his father had been a mill worker.

So far as the Obama/Hillary race is going, well, it is not making me radiantly happy.
They are two stunning contenders.
My perfect solution would be Hillary as President and Barack as Vice - with him running and taking the presidency 8 years on.

But to see them sniping and to see ugly images such as those of Teddy Kennedy whispering in Obama's ear as Obama looks conspiratorially in Hillary's direction. Or the image of Barack turning his back on Hillary as she approached to shake hands...
This is not good enough.
Obama loses points again in my book.
My reservations about him grow.
And, it is no secret that I have found Hillary Clinton to be the best-equipped and most able of all the candidates.
And, so we watch the evolving fates and the wild machinations of the US media.

What a fascinating business it is.

The racism card

2008-01-26T15:24:00.000-08:00

Credulity is taken for a long walk and refused water.
What warped interpretations are being aired by the mainstream media on the issue of Obama vs Clinton vs race?

How can they manipulate it so that, suddenly, Clinton is waving a race card?
It is not Clinton but Obama who has been using the most racially-conscious and racially-motivated identity in the world - by which, of course, I mean Oprah.

Obama has taken Oprah out on the campaign - Oprah, the massive marketing machine. Oprah, "the colour purple" of contemporary black pride. She endorses, people buy.

Obama has written two books about race - lest the entirety of the US forgets. Well, it has forgotten, obviously.

But, when it comes to the race card, the white guilt, the endless light-stepping fear of political incorrectness, turns it back on itself. Whites are guilty of racism for being white.

Why does Obama not just fess up - campaign honestly for the black vote?

Watching and wondering

2008-01-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

This is a white-knuckle primary - even if one is not committed to any particular candidate. The fates seem fragile, the voters fickle, the candidates' teams allegedly coming up with some sly tricks...
There is an air of desperation, particularly from the Obama camp Not only has Oprah continued to keep pressuring for the black vote but also there are tales of some not quite kosher dealings with potential Hillary voters. Tsk tsk.
And still Hillary inches ahead.

Then on the Republican side, well, this is far more colourful than the Dems, as it turns out.
There is Mormon Mitt Romney blanketing the media with an unprecdented volume of advertising. I heard that more than 50 per cent of the ads running on television in Carolina were Mitt Romney's campaign ads. No wonder they didn't vote for him. They were offended by the overkill.

And it goes to show that you really can't buy the presidency. Mitt is the richest candidate and the one spending his own money in his desperate bid to rule the world - and it ain't paying off.

But what of Giuliani?
He was my frontrunner choice for the GOP.
What on earth is he doing skipping the other states and hanging out in Florida? That is the oddest gamble. High stakes, Rudy!
But I am sure you are working the rooms of the retirement state - just as you worked the rooms of New Hampshire.

Not that it gave you the win.
Funny old McCain scored the state. Funny old McCain is doing rather well. Surprising, really, since he did strike me as just a bit out of it. But he certainly has shown the old stamina on the campaign trail.

Sigh of relief

2008-01-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

Bravo to Hillary.
Bravo to the campaign workers of New Hampshire - all those door-knockers and phoners, placard-holders, web reporters, ushers and organisers. I wish I had had more time there to add more of my energy to the cause. I'd love to have been there today! How rewarding.

But what a white-knuckle ride the last week has been.

The Barack phenomenon in Iowa caused me to sit down and study Barack and Michelle Obama in a way I had not done since last year when I arrived in New Hampshire. Then, I was making sure of which candidate I was going to support - and Obama was definitely the main rival to Hillary when it came to that choice. I did my homework and made my selection, just as the New Hampshire voters have now done.
And I understand how hard it was for them.

The beauty of the Primary is the quality of the candidates who are out there vying for the presidency. There are some outstanding politicians in the mix.

I decided early on that Obama did not show the political savvy and personal discipline that Hillary has. I think his "change" platform is a bit on the glib side - since the election itself is about change and each and every candidate is about change. Hearing people say that Clinton or Edwards have "stolen Obama's message of change" just makes me laugh. What on earth do they think this whole epic is for?

However, I do like Obama and admire him. He is a beautiful writer. I like some of his philosophies and I am even gaining a grudging admiration for his fiesty wife. She is a magnificent orator. Better than her husband, I dare to suggest. But I can't help but sense a racial agenda.
Interestingly, there is a touch of the Bill and Hillarys to the Obamas - a couple of high-achieving, Ivy League lawyers.
I hope they have their day. A bit later.

However, while I went out and about and checked out as many candidates as I could in among the house parties and town hall meetings of the unique New Hampshire political process, Hillary shone forth as my number one. The more interaction I had with her, the more this decision was endorsed. This woman has the goods. It has nothing to do with her being a woman as such. It is about the woman she is - a devastatingly smart, coherent, balanced, prudent, internationally sensitive and highly self-disciplined individual.
So, I am thrilled to bits at this significant victory.

The race is far from over. Far, far, far.

There will be more strategists and volunteers slaving away in South Carolina, another important Primary. And then the rest. It is a long road of many states and many votes.
Hillary is looking tired now - but she and the others are astonishing in their stamina. And whoever wins the primary goes on to campaign for the presidency and then, when they win the presidency, they leap into the arduous business of being president. Oh, my - most of us would run from the very idea of such an onerous responsibility. But there ya go. Politicians are different beasts.

The Iowa washup

2008-01-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

Can Obama do in New Hampshire what he just did in Iowa - bring out the young voters en masse? It is what Howard Dean failed to do four years ago. He seemed feted by the young and yet they simply dematerialised when the cold night of caucus turned up.

In Obama's case, they followed through in the cold night of caucus. They put their bodies where their rally cheers had been.

I continue to harbour reservations about Obama - especially since I noted a new cadence in his voice, one taken directly from the "I have a dream" delivery of Martin Luther King. Cunning marketing ploy. Congratulations to whichever smart strategist groomed him up on that.

I would like Obama to be president in a few years, when that awful, pushy and divisive wife of his has learned a few things. We place First Ladies in power, too, you know. Michelle Obama is dangerous.
And I would like Obama to find some substance - since he is mainly sophistry.

So, why did he poll so well in Iowa? Could it be the Oprah factor? I bet she thinks so - and maybe it is so. Ah, and what a lot that would say about media power.

Talking of which, that featured appearance on the Jay Leno show, the much-publicised first show since the writers' strike, did no harm to Mike Huckabee. It was the most valuable sales pitch in the world. It made me wonder about Jay. Here we have another media celebrity throwing his weight into the electoral process. On the eve of the caucus, he provides national exposure which can only be compared to endorsement.

Huckabee did very well on Leno. Leno cunningly had all the old footage of the fat Huckabee who is now a slim Huckabee. If there is one thing Americans admire, it is a successful weight-loser. Vast amounts of television time are devoted to diet and weight loss. And Leno leaned away from the extreme right views espoused by Huckabee - moderated him nicely for the broad, mainstream audience. Intelligent design was not mentioned at all. We just got that very, very personable man. Oh my, he is a good candidate. He has a fatherly, protective, reliable, good natured facade and a lovely sense of humour. He is disarmingly attractive package.

So where was Hillary in all of this? She has the star of husband Bill shining at a discreet distance - and she looked and sounded wonderful. The pundits say she fared poorly because of her voting record in the Senate, because she was not against the war on Iraq, because she has never recanted that mistake... Gee, the negative market is tough. I don't know how many times she has to say "if she knew what she knows now she would never have voted as she did then". A zillion times is not enough. Perchance she is damned for ever on that cautionary stance which is seen and endlessly promoted by the Fox-driven anti-Clinton push as her buttering her political bread. If the Clinton campaign has made mistakes, not placing more emphasis on regaining this lost ground is at the top of the list. They have chosen to play ostrich. Wrong. They need to penetrate the dubious masses who have listened to Fox.

Hillary remains the candidate for the thinking voter, however. The thinking voter sees straight through Fox.

I was not at all unhappy to see John Edwards get some recognition in Iowa. One can only admire the utter dedication and determination of that man, the unswerving self-belief and the pure stamina in campaigning towards the presidency - again.
I like him.
I was sad Richardson fared poorly. I like him, too.
I was sorry that Biden and Dodd were presented with the writing on the wall and, wisely, stepped back. Good men, both. But there's simply not enough room for all these good men.

Romney is not a good man. I am enjoying watching this become evident. Romney and the mormon camp tried to look sweetie goody-twoshoes, happy families - until things started going against them. Then the facade came down and the dirty tricks and venom oozed out of the campaign like political pus. Romney must lose, for the sake of the USA and the world.

For all his sinister religious extremism, even Huckabee is a better choice.

Counting down, holding breath

2008-01-02T03:36:00.000-08:00

The countdown is on. Even from this vast distance I can feel the hype in Nashua as the primary voting day approaches.
I've seen the support bases out and about in New Hampshire - the Obama crowd versus the Clinton crowd versus the Giuliani crowd.
They are different beasts. Obama would seem to have made up a vast amount of distance catching up to Clinton as the vote approaches but I still wonder, having looked over that supporter base, if they are really all viable voters. Something about them reminds me of the Howard Dean phenomenon in the last election. An ephemera of enthusiasts.

The Clinton camp has always looked stronger insofar as Hillary has a large body of older, earnest voters who are serious about issues.

Perhaps I am saying that the voters mirror the candidates.

The Giuliani mob was besuited and staid. McCain's were strongly veteran families. I did not get a chance to see a Huckabee crowd. I wonder if I could have coped with all those creationists. Perhaps it's better I missed that lot.
The Edwards and Richardson crowd were more mixed and I sensed that there were many among them just checking out the candidates. They both are impressive, as it happens.

But now the crunch comes and the wheat will be sorted from the chaff.

But perhaps not immediately. Winning in Iowa or New Hampshire may be seen as a very good sign but the race is still only partly run. There are 50 states, all with different rules and regulations in the electoral business, and they will have to have their say - right down to the conventions. Perhaps there will be hung votes.

We can only wait and see, knowing that at the grassroots level of the campaigns, those phones will be running hot, emails will be flying, door-knockers will be out - and I, sadly, will not be among them.

Oprah - turning up the race card.

2007-12-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

In the past few weeks, I have been seething with frustration at being away from New Hampshire. It is such a critical time.
And, heavens, there has been Oprah to contend with.
On that subject, perhaps it is better I am not there. The squillionaire TV star out on the campaign trail is just too much for me. My blood boils. Who the hell does she think she is? What a complete moron is Barak Obama for taking her onboard - as if he does not have the clout or the wit or the media interest and he needs to lean on her popularity. Well, that is probably so. Whenever one comes in contact with Obama, it is a suprisingly underwhelming experience. Anticlimactic. There is no "there" there. He is bland, bland, bland.
So, yes, he needs someone to grab attention on his behalf - and he has Oprah.
The only problem with this is that Oprah turns everything into a racial issue. Suddenly the fact that Obama is black becomes more important than it was or should be.
I think Oprah has an appalling cheek to use her media popularity in this way.
I think she thinks she has the power to control the vote - she thinks she is so bloody important. Oh, what money does to people.
What I don't think is that the voting public is easily suckered - and I suspect that she may have done Obama a disservice.
From this vast distance, I do not weep.

Instead, I quietly cheer for Hillary. By default, I think that egomaniacal Oprah has done her a favour.

As for trying to pin Joe Biden down on the race issue in the last Democratic debate. Oh really. Isn't it clear that the only candidate playing a race card is pushy Oprah?
Oops. Did I call her a candidate?

Hmmm.

Australian role model

2007-11-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

Being on the other side of the world does not distance one from the campaigns of the primary. It clarifies them - crystal with objectivity. Connectivity is all - and so the reports and newsletters keep on coming in and one checks in with the campaign office sites and sees how the keen bean volunteers are going.

And, we have had the interesting phenomenon of our own campaigns here in Australia, our equivalent, a Federal Election - which delivers the Prime Minister in the form of the leader of the elected party.

We have just scored a new Prime Minister - and a government which moves from right to left, from conservative to liberal. It is an unfortunate irony that the Australian conservatives call themselves "liberal".

The election was a landslide to the left.

It omens well for the US and Hillary Clinton. The US is the last right wing government in the English-speaking world.

Around the world, people finally are rebelling against Iraq, economic rationalism, worker exploitation, dumbed down education, inequality in health care...

And so will it be in the US.

Fred's dubious bed-fellow

2007-11-05T19:53:00.000-08:00

How sad one isn't about Fred Thompson's lovely fundraising disaster.
Thompson is going to have to stop flying for free on his buddy's jet - because the fundraiser friend has a criminal drug-dealing history.
Oh, how the Republicans targeted Hillary when they found a shadow in a fundraiser's history.
They had better eat their niggardly words.
And, accordiong to the LA Times, this embarrassment for the hideously egocentric quasi actor candidate co-incides with his pulling rank among the candidates - putting Huckabee in his place. Huckabee has been on the rise - which is unsurprising when one considers that, among the GPO drears, he is really quite personable and able to crack a joke. Of course, he is also a born-again and a creationist, all of which should eliminate him from all running as a presidential candidate. One wishes. It remains a bone-chilling worry. But there one has George W. Bush as president - an example of all the qualities on would dread.

The Mormon is doing well, too. I read that I am not supposed to refer to Romney by his religion but, guess what? I will refer to him however I wish - and the fact that he is a mormon is the first thing that comes to mind. The only thing that comes to mind.
The super conservatives are not mormons - they tend to be fundamentalist born-again types. But they see the mormon as one of their own - and they have given him their seal of approval. Very telling.

For those of us who believe in a separation of church and state - and who positively abhor all this religious extremism, this is something of a worry.

We pin our hopes on the Dems.

Put a sock in it, Barack

2007-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

Now back in Australia, there is passionate frustration at being distanced from the campaign developments - which is absolutely ironic since the Internet age keeps me right up to date with every hop and hiccup. I am "virtually" there.
And, at the moment, railing with fury at Barack Obama for taking his negative campaigning.
At first, I was rather interested in Obama - the bright, young, black candidate. I watched carefully as he established a campaign. I went out and bought his books and read him - and I was even more impressed. He is very good with the written word.
Then I went along to see and hear him in person.
And I felt hollow.
All the positive feelings just melted...dripped into little puddles of disappointment.
There was now "there" there.
Something about Barack Obama was thin and insubstantial. Something about Barack Obama was not right. I could not put my finger on it. I just accepted the old gut feeling - and it was with relief.
He was absolutely no threat to Hillary Clinton as the best Democratic candidate.
He is not ready, not right, does not have the goods...

But he has stayed in there with a loud and enthusiastic youthful supporter base.
For all those who are new to politics, he is a dream candidate.

It is a marked sign of his unreadiness, his amateurism, his unworthiness that he has now turned his campaign not policies and the priorities of the nation but to attacking Hillary.

His idea of winning the race is not to be better but to cannibalise his own kind.
He should be gunning for the very dangerous Mitt Romney, that famous Mormon. Or the rising creationist Mike Huckabee.

Hillary has responded philosophically.
She does not need to rear up and make a fuss. She has suggested that he replace the old negativity with a bit of hope. And she is just getting on with it.

Which is one reason that she shines on as the primary primary candidate.

Hills and the MySpace outreach

2007-10-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

Never slow on the uptake, Hillary, one notes, has been campaigning brilliantly from within the ranks of youth. There are several worlds in which to sustain a profile these days. The classic hustings of the trail, the stump speeches from town to town, and then there are the "other" towns, the virtual communities which are huge, powerful and often cohesive.
Hillary has sustained a strong presence on MySpace which is virtual home to a daunting mass of brightly bubbling young people as well as much of the music industry. I am told that if you are in the music business, a MySpace page is de rigeur.
If you are trying to communicate with music consumers, with young people generally, MySpace also is de rigeur.
Hillary's team was quick to put her in there and to know how to escalate the message. Some 14703 have signed up as her friends and thus are eligible to receive postings of her blog. The blog is posted regularly - clear and coherent policies right there in your face, so to speak.
Today she talks about education, the most valuable investment the country can make.
It costs a fortune. Hillary suggests:

* Lowering the cost of college through a $3,500 tuition tax credit, enough to cover more than 50% of the cost of tuition at the average public institution for many families.
* Increasing the Pell Grant.
* Strengthening community colleges and training programs.
* Improving college graduation rates.
* Providing additional aid for people who do public service.
* Simplifying student aid.
* Providing clear information about the real cost of college well in advance to help families plan.

Meanwhile, here's to AL GORE, the first man since George Bernard Shaw to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.
Perhaps the Nobel prize may make some of the American anti-environmentalist right wingers wake up, just a little bit. Or will they only think the prize is a commie conspiracy?

The Fred factor

2007-10-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

Now Fred Thompson has had his first official exposure on the dais amid the hard-working lineup of Republican presidential candidates, the political pundits, endlessly and laboriously chewing the cud of opine, seem to have pronounced him okay.
Not great. But at least a fresh face.
If you could call that overexposed face "fresh".
In fact there is nothing fresh about Fred. He is a tedious ego.
I thought his attitude in the Republican debate was patronising. Quite frankly, he gives the impression that he thinks he is just such a star that becoming president would be a come-down.
The media questions him for laziness and commitment. Good questions.
But the public, especially in America, has an inbuilt admiration not just for successful people but for television stars. Despite the fact that he is potentially a worse president than Bush, despite the fact that his first debate was beyond lacklustre, despite the fact that he could not be bothered to exert himself in campaigning like the others and entered the race at the last possible moment...despite all, there are lots of wide-eyed fools out there who are agog with excitement about him - and he will probably fare well in the polls.

It should all make more sense.
One can only hope that common sense prevails and, in the end of the day next November, all the Republican candidates are irrelevant.

Hillary - racing like a thoroughbred

2007-10-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

The Iowa caucuses are just a couple of months away. So is the New Hampshire primary, come to think of it. The year has been racing forth mercilessly.
I continue to admire the incredible stamina of the leading candidates in sustaining the pace required to get the message across, meet the people, raise the profile…
Hillary now is so solidly in the lead that one has to fear that the opponents’ dirty tricks campaign are around the next corner. It has been a pleasure to watch her, the thoroughbred of political candidates, pull out into first place and keep the pace up without a backward glance.
Obama, who has never missed a chance to have a snipe at Hillary, has ramped up his television advertising in a last-minute bid to catch up with Hillary. But, last month he failed to show up for a Democratic debate in Iowa. What a mistake. I am not sure what his reason was but it was a golden opportunity for Hillary to shine – and she did.
The more she is diligently and consistently out there, the more the people are realising that she has depth and experience. She is spectacularly well informed and, oh my, she is disciplined and she is strong.

I have not mentioned John Edwards for ages – because he really isn’t worth a mention. He has campaigned with great confidence and determination yet again. But he simply is not “it”. The daddy working for the mill patter now is tired and no one will forget that $400 haircut. It was the lethal misstep. That is all it takes in politics.

Obama has not made one, but there is still time. He is the Howard Dean of this primary – boosted by noisy young. But the young are flighty. I’ll take a punt that half his support base has not even registered to vote.

Hillary has had a couple of close shaves, if one is to believe the beat-ups of Fox news. But, the more solidly she leads the pack, the more respectful the detractors seem to be becoming, as if readying themselves to accept her as president.
Even the old chestnut of how “polarising” Hillary is has not been getting much ink in the media.

Ah, yes, things are looking pretty good.

Hillary's roadies

2007-09-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the grass roots are positively verdant.
They line the roads.

Today Hillary's grass roots supporters, along with those of the other candidates, are converging simply to stand on the verges. They are driving and taking buses to Hanover to make an impressive rain or shine showing, waving placards, smiling and chanting her motto on the route to the latest debate.
This is not just part of the colour and theatre of the presidential primary process - but it is a demonstration of the enthusiastic commitment of the supporter base.
It is a surprisingly effective gesture, especially so far as the international media is concerned. The power of the people reflects the power of the candidate's position.

Hanover is a wonderful town - the Dartmouth university town in the north of New Hampshire. It is the place that Bill Bryson finally chose and settled in after his quest to find the perfect America town.

Doing the hard yards

2007-09-20T01:28:00.000-07:00

It'd s game of stamina and determination as the candidates roll on towards the yet-to-be-revealed NH Primary date at year's end. They must be getting sick of the sound of their own voices. I know I am a bit tired of hearind the same things said over and over - even when I agree with the sentiments.

On Sept. 18, calling for raised capital gains taxes and tax relief aimed at elderly and middle-class Americans, Barack Obama said: "If you talk about this in polite company, sooner or later you’ll get accused of waging class warfare. As if it’s distasteful to point out that some CEO’s make more in 10 minutes than a worker makes in 10 months."

Don't hold the presses.
Those are the same words he uttered when I heard him in the Nashua Seniors Centre months ago.
No blame to Barack. Hillary is repeating herself, too, albeit that she has saved a few goodies such as the health plan details to give the media a new hook here and there.
They are all repeating themselves, except for the ghastly Fred Thompson who has yet to say anything worth repeating.

This is an epic campaign, testing the strength and staying power of all the candidates. Having seen close up the schedules they keep as they sweep through the states and the myriad fairs, garden parties, town hall meetings, rallies and campaign office visits, one comes to realise that these presidential hopefuls are doing the hard, hard yards. Astronauts have it easy by comparison.

To big for presidential boots

2007-09-06T23:11:00.000-07:00

Oh, my, talk about the star making the late entrance.
Fred Thompson has finally declared his intention to run as a candidate in the Republican presidential primary.
Surprise it is not, since he has been campaigning for months. No, it's a big yawn.
What is surprising, however, is the aggressively bad taste of his choice of time and place.
With things coming down to the bone in Iowa, the other candidates were hammering it out in the fiestiest CNN GOP debate yet.
Fred chose to hang back from lining up on a stage with them.
Those politicians are not really his own kind.
Fred is a better kind.
He is a showbiz star. He can rub shoulders with the popular boys.
And so he chose to declare his intention to run as a candidate for president to Jay Leno.
Jay is his kind.
After all, more people would be watching the Tonight Show than the debate, surely.
I am not sure what are the ethics of this sort of manipulation of the media. Jay may think it is a bit of a scoop to have that second-rate actor making his declaration on his show but, truth is, the second-rate actor with presidential ambitions was using Jay and Jay's popularity for his own ends.
It is sleazy.
But the star has shown his hand. He has shown that he believes the voters will be more swayed by his celebrity than by the political positions of his rivals.
He patronises the public with this assumption - the assumption that they are all shallow idiots blinded by fame and oblivious to national priorities.

One can only hope that he is wrong.

Michigan, the ugly

2007-08-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

The role that New Hampshire plays in US presidential politics as the primary state geared my impetus for writing this blog. Swept into the state's hands-on action in the run-up to the 2004 election, I was wide-eyed with admiration. This, truly, is the democratic process, I thought. This is the people connecting with their politicians, putting them on the spot, picking holes in policies... This is the politicians, being tested on every level from stamina on the gruelling schedules to quick-thinking in the genuinely open forum conditions of house parties and town hall meetings. New Hampshire has been the first primary state for a very long time and its inhabitants have taken their role almost as a constitutional responsibility on behalf of the rest of their vast country. They are the nation's testing ground.

The old entrepreneurial spirit of America, however, turns out to be incompatible with this concept. The entrepreneurial spirit sees campaign expenses as a potential profit line. Politics be damned. Look at all that money!

Hence, the ugly jostle to steal dates, to push the primary dates forward until the first primary becomes meaningless.

Michigan is the latest culprit, going for January 15. That steals a month from the old schedule and pushes the primary primary and caucus states to yet earlier dates just to keep the status quo. It also forces the candidates to put more resources into Michigan - and that is what the game is all about. It is not that Michigan's 10 million people are in the least bit interested in taking on the political scrutiny game or even that they could. The sort of hands-on scrutiny that takes place in New Hampshire can only happen in the manageable demographics of a 1.3 million-strong New Hampshire, not in a hugely populous state. House parties in Detroit, population 5 million? Whose house is big enough? Intimate political contact is not a mass activity.
Mass political communication is - guess what? Advertising.
Hence, what Michigan seeks to achieve is to harness the campaign dollars into television advertising campaigns in Michigan. Forget human contact, genuine scrutiny of candidates and their policies. Let's have your dollars and whoever has the best advertising agency can win the presidency.
This is the short-sighted and mean-minded campaign now being waged in the USA. "Entrepreneur" is another word for "get rich quick" or "greedy". By definittion, entrepreneurship lacks wisdom, foresight or magnanimity.
These US states playing ugly entrepreneur games with the presidential primary are doing a serious disservice to their country.

Joe Biden, Democrat presidential candidate from the tiny state of Delaware, put it very well:

"Powerful interests are trying to change the Democratic nomination for President into a game of Monopoly, replacing the retail politics of Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire with a process in which the only credential necessary to be President is to be the wealthiest candidate.
Under the current calendar, voters can regularly meet candidates in their homes, town halls and diners. This provides an almost one on one opportunity to hold candidates accountable for their ideas and records for solving the most pressing issues facing this country. The communities of Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire provide a diverse array of voters and a level playing field for candidates to compete in, as a lead up to the larger states which will decide who the next Democratic nominee will be for President.

I call upon all of my fellow Democratic candidates to reaffirm their support for the retail role Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire and publicly ask their supporters, such as Democratic Senate Leader Mark Schauer, and Governor Granholm to oppose any attempts to break the Democratic National Committee’s “calendar window” as Republicans did in Florida on behalf of Mitt Romney.”

Hillary the nutcracker

2007-08-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

When first I saw this satirical object, my hackles rose. Hillary, the nut-cracker?
But, then I thought about it. Hillary, the nutcracker, is no bad thing.
The symbolism here is not what the makers intended.

It is about time that the nuts were cracked.

I would never call myself a card-carrying feminist since I despise sexism of any ilk.
However, the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld patriarchy, the patronising attitudes, the macho hubris...these need cracking, cracked down upon, crunched into the miserable place they will assume in the history books.

Hillary the nutcracker is a fine campaign tool.
I want one.

Hillary's hissy fit

2007-08-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

Hillary was angry about the China scandal."I don't want to eat bad food from China or have my children having toys that are going to get them sick," she exploded. You could almost see the steam coming from her ears in the last Democratic debate. And, she was right to be overtly furious and not evasively nodding towards free trade, as were so many of the other presidential candidates. It is not good enough that China is flooding the US and the rest of the world with poisons - not just lead paint on toys but polluted toothpastes and contaminated dogfoods. A proper leader would be making a stand. Hillary is the only politician yet heard with genuine anger in the voice. Barack Obama is just missing the point altogether. "China is not yet our enemy. China is a competitor," he says. Oh, really?

Barack has other things on his mind. He has been back in New Hampshire giving the state lots of attention as the primary comes closer - perhaps closer than we all thought, since with the other states jostling and grabbing at earlier dates, it will probably be in December. Oh yes, it is later than we think.

Barack continues to look to the youth vote, the fun vote. In the cut and thrust of serious politics and with the country at war, he told his Nashua crowd on Monday: "We have the most fun, the best music." He will have the New Hampshire motto "Live Free or Die" tattooed on his back, he laughs, acknowledging that New Hampshire is the nation's "due diligence" test on presidential primary candidates.
He definitely has the youngest supporter base and, as they are as enthusiastic as they are young. They remind me of the Deaniacs of the Howard Dean campaign of 2004. And, I'm still not sure what is beneath the BO surface. I'd like to hear more substance and less Hillary bashing from him.

Making a blonde joke of politics

2007-08-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

Now it is the Romney Girls - ditsy blonde triplets who seem to have been employed to be the YouTube campaign answer to the Obama girl. They are so vapid that they make Obama girl look like Einstein.

Why do they like Romney?
"He's so handsome!"
Would they vote for him?
Giggle. "Why not!"

The lowest common denominator scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The Britney/Paris syndrome of mindless, underdressed publicity-hungry bimbos creeps insidiously into politics - mocking the crucial issues behind the political process, not to mention the concept of the educated vote. I get the feeling that fundamentalist Christians and moronic sex kittens now are holding political hands. That, at least, amuses me, albeit in a sour way.

Campaigns are moving steadily onto YouTube and MySpace - desperately seeking a popularist image. The illusion lies in the demographic they find - lots of young people who can't vote at all and certainly are not going to listen to serious policy when they can have titillating footage of scantily-dressed airheads.

Ironically, the dividend comes from the old media mainstream - the television news and the print media - wherein newsrooms now monitor the Internet as a source of prime time news thus efficiently on-feeding the online ga-ga gimmickry to the conventional news consumer.

One can only hope that the news consumer sees this cheapening sexy nonsense for what it is.

Waitress puts the Mitt up

2007-08-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

How out of touch is Mitt Romney?
Absurdly!
First we hear the story, reported with gawking shock by the Utah media, of the waitress who dared to challenge the Mormon presidential candidate on the issue of health care. A mere waitress in a mere diner! Not only did she challenge the millionaire Republican but also she answered back and interrupted!
A number of people have forwarded reports of this encounter to me with varied comments, mainly astonishment at the Red Arrow diner waitress's daring. Of course, these were not New Hampshire people. The whole point is that this was a waitress in a New Hampshire diner and she had every right and then some to question this or any other presidential candidate. New Hampshire is the barometer state, the first primary and its voters take their role very seriously. Yes, waitresses and all! The other states pushing and shoving for a run at being first primary state are pissing into the wind if they think they can replicate the educated political people power of New Hampshire. Not that they would care, since their quest is simply to "have" or be "first" - not to improve the political process.
Indeed, opportunities for the likes of the New Hampshire waitress to speak up would go right down the sycophantic drain.

It is quite possible, although not probable, that the daring New Hampshire waitress was a Republican. In New Hampshire, party loyalty is no impediment to asking the hard questions and putting candidates on the spot. Quite the opposite, really. I saw Rudy Giuliani's besuited brown-nosers asking quite confronting questions. I have most certainly seen the Hillary supporters putting her on the spot on issues.
The New Hampshire voters test the candidates through and through.

Romney seemed askance at the waitress's impertinence and his response seemed blustering. He did not seem to realise that he was in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts, referring to his health care reforms as Governor of Massachusetts. These had no application in NH, of course.
One might forgive the campaigning candidates for getting a bit confused as to which state they are in as they whirl around the country - unless it is NH.
Mitt is out of touch.

Yet more so in the things he has been telling the Granite Staters.

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman," he told the Union Leader when asked if he will take part in a YouTube/CNN Republican debate in September.

Glib answer, Mitt. But, oh, so wrong.
The YouTube snowman is not simply genuine incarnation of today's voter, he represents a vast and powerful generation. You are just out of touch with the people, Mitt Romney. And you sound embarrassingly arrogant, to boot.

The millionaire Mormon also acknowledged that he had flown F-16s and shot Uzis and an AK 47s.
"They're fun, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that these kinds of weapons are going to be in the public domain," he said. Huh? Eh? Where is this man coming from?

Frighteningly, he is the Republican front-runner and it is where he is going that we have to worry about.

(pic - with thanks to Flickr MittRomney photopool)

Political strategists in the mix

2007-08-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one wonders just who is the real candidate.
I have no doubts about Hillary Clinton. She is the old hand. This is not her first time at the rodeo, so to speak. She has now spent decades in among the strategists, handlers, staffers and keen-bean volunteers. She has observed them from varied perspectives and I am pretty damned sure she is a step ahead of them and well aware of their assorted ambitions and motives.
Political strategists are both ally and encumbrance in the electoral process. One sees candidates fall into desperate holes thanks to the misguided directions of their strategists and, oh my, haven't we been seeing some firing, drop-outs and swerves of allegiance among the staffers as the primary plays out!
Hillary's association with the Mandy Grunwalds of this world go far back to a point of mutual understanding - or so I choose to think, having done the archival Hillary reading.
I see Mandy still there, a strong shadow in the scheme of things. Indeed, perhaps a stressed shadow, since last spotted on the campaign trail, she seemed to have put on a few pounds. Fast foods on rushed schedules, comfort foods in late night hotel rooms..?
I had an interesting insight into some of the localised campaign strategising for Hillary and, while charmed by the quality of some of the dedicated Democratic support, I found myself a little underwhelmed by the concepts of strategy. Well, put it this way, I've been to a few rodeos in my time, too, and there is not a lot I have not run into before. Oddly, there was no encouragement for us to put forth ideas. Strategic mistake. But it matters not a jot in this context, since all Hillary really needs to win votes is to be heard. Hardened cynics swing into her camp the moment they have actually seen and heard her on the stump! I've watched it happening!

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is surging towards a huge tumble as he follows the leads of his strategists who would seem to be urging him to "show some balls".
So he is uttering warmongering words - threatening Pakistan, for heaven's sake.
"The war we need to win" he touts - the chase for Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda. His latest campaign push is based on this strategy - and one can only assume it has been directed by strategists who seek to lure votes from the Right.

"Political masterminds have transformed the candidate from a political visionary into an electoral product like every other presidential aspirant", writes Chicago Times op ed columnist Salim Muwakkil.

Mukakkil has known Obama since the early 90s and offers dismal observations on the path that his campaign has been taking. He looks at the strategists. I look at the strategists. These people have their own agendas. They are potentially dangerous.

Indeed, they are a study in themselves - as are so many of the young staffers, each so very anxious to claim a piece of the action, the ingenuous quest for self-aggrandizement posing all manner of subtle problems for the smooth forward movement of the message.

With devotion and enthusiasm comes paranoia and territorial imperative.

The successful candidate will prevail, not because of their staff, but despite them.

YouTube marries CNN - debate update

2007-07-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

My brush with CNN in the context of its media facilities New Hampshire Democratic debate has turned me into something of a CNN fan. Hence I was not surprised to see the news station recognising the Internet not only as a resource but as a media partner and creating the bright new phenomenon of a co-hosting arrangement with YouTube. In many ways, this was more significant than the South Carolina Democratic debate it embraced. It was media history.

Of course, a lot of secrecy and fuss surrounded the questions submitted to the Debate via you Tube. No one wanted to blow the pioneer partnership before the event - so the teasers told us of the quantities of questions submitted and the fact that they would be screened.
One has to note that YouTube now is a vibrant political playground. All the presidential candidates have posted video in YouTube and there is a mass of political satire and commentary available amid the piano-playing cats, pratfalls and teen showoffs on the video-sharing empire which, I may add, is only two years old and already is a household name which was sold to Google for something like $1.6 billion.

It is realistic to see YouTube as a player in the political progress - and a brilliant idea to encompass its global participating in the American political process.

It also made for a livelier and more interesting debate with video questions from all sorts of people all over the place.

So, the big and usual question: Who won the South Carolina Democratic debate?

Of course I am going to say Hillary did.
There in her vivid magenta in the line-up of besuited men, she was as much as visual stand-out as she was a political one.

The more of these debates they do, the more the New York Senator shines.
She never has to try. She is simply serene and authoritative, confident and ready.
One reads the ongoing polls and observes the public reticence which holds her back - the old baggage being carted around by those who are stuck in a time-warp of media negativity from the old Whitehouse days when she was cutting her teeth, so to speak. One by one, they come around as they have any direct contact with Hillary. That is all it takes. That is the transformative moment.

The other Democratic candidates realise this and are working hard to compete. It is a bit sad in some ways. They are an impressive lineup, exceptional politicians each and every one.

Barack Obama continues to breathe down Hillary's neck - and his media performance improves steadily.
He fronted well in the debate.
He did, however, look alarmingly thin. If he was lean and hungry before, he is a bit gaunt in front of the camera now. Not good. The stress showing? Perhaps he should have kept on smoking. I am disappointed that he caved in on the smoking thing.

John Edwards, as a Southerner, was in home territory in this debate and he was just as shiny and gorgeous as ever. A very telegenic man. He is handsome and comfortable in the medium and he fared well.

Very tellingly, both Edwards and Obama showed the face of their fear of Hillary by sniping at her and her policies. She sniped at no one.

Joe Biden always presents well in debate and he did so again in this one.

Bill Richardson, a particularly classy and worthy candidate, never seems to come over as well on the electronic media. He may be a better candidate than Biden, but he is always pipped on the television.
Chris Dodd seemed a bit stodgy - despite the airing of his own YouTube advertisement which is all about the qualifications of his thick head of white hair.

Mike Gavel might have been on the end of the line but he was in the forefront of the camera when it panned from the YouTube screen to the candidates - and he got a lot of visual prominence, if not so much in spoken word.
One of the reasons for the latter was the fairly peremptory way in which he answered the questions. He has taken gruff to the extreme. He is pouting and snarling like a rather jealous loser - which is a pity.

Dennis Kucinich is a regular loser in the presidential candidate stakes and he does the whole thing with panache and good spirit. He will never admit defeat - and he knows he has a lot of important egalitarian messages to convey and he will use the platform to keep the true left alive.

The more of these debates they do, the more obvious it becomes that there are really just the three runners - Clinton, Obama and Edwards, in that order.

Calling for Hillary

2007-07-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Behind the scenes, there is the hard grind of campaigning - none of it harder than working the phone bank.
I was among the few brave hearts of the Hillary campaign out there working through Nashua and Hudson phone numbers on this steamy, stormy New Hampshire night. And I do mean brave. This is not a chore for the shy, faint-hearted or super-sensitive. It is the work of valiant heroes, of true believers, of eternal optimists. Yes, we brave few.

Since the Nashua campaign office is still not quite finished, we were allowed the after-hours facilities of an ophthalmic practice where, with cheat sheet in hand, we four worked our way through the phone lists provided by Kristen, our organiser of the night.
We callers were a wonderfully representative mix: a senior, a college student, a committed Democratic activist and me, the supporter with outsider perspective.
Of course, almost everyone hates unsolicited phone calls and, indeed, they now are illegal. These political calls are exempt from the bans and, the people listed have, at some time, expressed interest in the primary. Not that you'd know it.

There is a fair share of hang-ups and blunt rejections. A lot of the 114 people I phoned tonight were either out or had their phones on answer. They are thus registered on the call sheets and another attempt to speak to them will be made on another night.

Our aim tonight was to ascertain who may be a certain vote for Hillary and, therefore, perhaps willing to be a volunteer. We then worked in incrementals: those leaning towards Hillary, those undecided, leaning away or anti-Hillary. If they were not pro-Hillary, we asked which other candidate they preferred and what issues concerned them. Well, if we got that far.
Mostly it was answering machines and automated responses which rejected calls without caller ID.

When I scored my target person it was: "Hi there. This is Samela calling for the Hillary Clinton campaign in New Hampshire - just checking in to see if you have yet decided for whom you might be voting in the primary?"
I found that, if I said it very fast, they were more inclined to answer.

There were people who hung up the moment they realised I was a political call. Oh what relish some of them took in that gesture. Only one of my hang-ups was polite about it: "Have a nice day - CLUNK". It was really very refreshing.

Then there was an angry independent who demanded to be taken off the list - and, worst of all, a woman who said she was not interested in Hillary and, when I asked if any of the other candidates interested her, she said "No, I'm a Republican". Ouch!

Of those Democrat voters who chose to discuss the primary, it was the issues of health care and the Iraq War or the Iraq War and health care which concerned them.
Of the other candidates, only Barack Obama and John Edwards were mentioned as rival choices. Those voters who were already firmly decided on Hillary Clinton were really enthusiastic and all to keen to sing the Senator's praises and enumerate the reasons for their choice - intelligence, strength, experience, values, policies...

There are a lot more of these calls to be made as the primary progresses in New Hampshire - hopefully each wave bringing in more and more positive feedback. And, of course, the other campaigns will be doing it, too. These New Hampshire voters are under intense scrutiny. They are still the "gateway" electorate - the vote that matters.

Let's hope their patience holds up.
Certainly, the experience of being the one making the calls has changed the way for ever after that I will respond to any similar callers. Even when I want to hang up, I shall do it with kindness. Now I know just what good people are on the other end of the line.

The Hill and Bill show

2007-07-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

Ready for Change, Ready to Lead is the Hillary Clinton campaign motto - and it was her husband, the former president, that Hillary led to Nashua today. Quite a change for Bill Clinton.
As she told the local media: "When it's his campaign, it is his way. When it is my campaign, it is my way." Hence, Bill Clinton followed Hillary, a superstar not only playing second fiddle, but playing it with grace and, dare I say, love! "I'd support her even if she wasn't my wife," he told the rapturous crowd.
Interestingly, with Bill up there with her, it was Hillary at her absolute best.
That is saying something, since she is generally an exceptionally impressive woman.
But today one would never have imagined that she was on a gruelling campaign schedule. She arrived fresh, cool and serene. As ever, she gave the appearance of being genuinely happy to see everyone.

The crowd, about 1200, I estimated, had been waiting in the sun for several hours.
This show was the hottest ticket in town and there was a lot of rivalry about what colour ticket one held. The lowest was white, downloaded from the Hillary for President website. Then there were the black ones, handed out from Hillary Campaign offices - my pleasant activity of yesterday. Those tickets admitted only to standing room. The blue tickets provided seats or centre front standing room. The red tickets not only entitled their holders to seats, but seats right up there on the dais with the Clintons! How lucky were we to be holders of these coveted red tickets - thanks to New Hampshire Governor's Executive Councillor, Debora Pignatelli, who has been significantly helpful and generous towards us since that night we met to watch the first Democratic Debate at her house.

There was considerable jostling, bringing on of extra seats (why didn't any organiser notice how many blue ticket-holders had smuggled themselves into the red sector?) until Nashua's powerful Democrats mover and shaker Jane Clemons (her son, Nick, is Hillary's NH campaign director) was satisfied that everyone was accommodated and organised.

Then the Clintons made their entrance before a crowd bobbing with "Clinton Country" and "Hillary for President" signs. They worked their way down the VIPs - handshakes, air kisses, hugs - and then, oops, there was no chair for Bill while State Representative for Nashua, Bette Lasky, gave her resounding, if lengthy, introduction.
Bill didn't seem to care. Looking slim, a bit ruddy with sun exposure but really young and relaxed, he found a place and perched at the end of the dais, grinning at everyone around him. Then, oops, Bette gave Bill the big build-up intro, so he stepped up to speak. Then Bette turned back and went on speaking. Poor Bill had to find a new perch. Such are the small tribulations of unrehearsed performance - and the slightly Clochemerle qualities of small town organisers.

Finally, to everyone's relief, Bill's especially, one imagines, he was up to speak.
It was good to hear that familiar voice, that extemporaneous fluency... The former president spoke glowingly of his wife, their history, her history and the immense respect he has always held for her abilities.

He articulated many things that it would be inappropriate and, perhaps, even irrelevent for Hillary to brag- such as her history in the international diplomatic arena and her lifelong passion for "service".
Hillary, who was looking particularly pretty today, smiled with guileless enjoyment at his paeons of praise.
Courteously, Bill added that this was the first time that he had been able to like all the Democratic presidential primary candidates - since he was not running against any of them and, indeed, they were a pretty impressive bunch, albeit none with the solid experience and qualifications of Hillary.
Bill chided at the state of the US under Bush - but left it to Hillary to be the big guns. And she was.

She spoke, of course, of the significance of New Hampshire as the place where candidates came to "get their tyres kicked" by very experienced and particular voters. And then she spoke at length.

As a theatre critic, I found myself relishing her use of voice and the elegant music of her emphases. She is as accomplished as public speakers get. OK, we will not soon forget her strained acting efforts in her Sopranos spoof video, let alone her tuneless rendition of the National Anthem. But America needs neither an actor nor a singer to run the place. It needs strength, knowledge, discipline, experience, communication skills...
So strong and articulate is Hillary Rodham Clinton and so downright sane is her message that it really is just a matter of hearing her in person to be struck sideways by the conviction that she is just "it" as presidential material.
She uses some interesting tools of communication. One is an echo of the black church preacher dynamic - a rhythmic series of assertions which bring almost unconscious verbal responses and endorsements from the crowd.
For this speech on the theme of "Ready for Change, Ready to Lead", she had a surging, great list of "are you ready for..." questions, a litany of the ills of the Bush administration. The crowd was with her in roars and applause. There are so many things for which they are, oh, so ready.

Hillary pulled no punches. She went for the jugular of the Bush economic values and outlined her ideas for a fairer tax scheme. She is all in favour of the country being riddled by millionaires - but they should pay their fair quota of taxes. And it is not they who are the heart and soul of the USA or who formed it. This place is characterised by the working middle class and the entrepreneurs. She has a point.

She had many points.
The sun shone as she made them. The people listened. It was a jubilant political event - and, as so many of the New Hampshire locals kept telling me, it was a piece of history, a first not only of a woman running for president but of a president husband campaigning for that president. Oh, how they loved it, these committed New Hampshire voters!

I tag this post with a photo album of the day.

Bill wears this bracelet. I wonder what is its significance?

An ink stain on Hillary's jacket.

Of course, Secret Service officers were omnipresent. Note the bulge to the left.

Hillary's campaign knotches up

2007-07-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

ACTION.
Not only are Bill and Hillary hitting Nashua tomorrow but also Hillary's Nashua campaign office has been born - almost.
It was still full of builders and paraphernalia when I arrived at midday today to man the ticket office for tomorrow's big Ready to Change, Ready to Lead tour event at the local university. I was supposed to meet Doug, the new Nashua region campaign organiser, outside the office to receive tickets, office keys and instructions but the door was open and Doug was not there. I was a bit perplexed, especially when people started rocking up for tickets. I scrounged around and set myself up with a chair and a little table and chatted apologetically to the arriving people.

Doug breezed in after about 20 minutes, just in time for a strong influx of ticket-seekers. While he sorted them out, I helped the friendly builder to haul out a desk and a big executive armchair - and suddenly the place took on a more authoritative look.

The people coming for tickets had RSVPed to campaign invitations to the event and were unable to print out numbered tickets from the Hillary website. Hence, they were mostly older people - except for those of the sleek New England bourgeoisie who were coming to pick up VIP tickets which we were keeping in named envelopes to one side. Doug trotted off to lunch and I had a pleasant time greeting, meeting and distributing these most coveted tickets. With Bill in tow, it is a stellar event on the Hillary campaign tour.

So much so that special signs are required.

After 2pm, it was sign time. Doug, who has driven all the way from California to work on the campaign here, produced a box of poster paints in primary colours along with mixing plates, foam brushes, large felt-tipped pens and a pile of large, thin cardboard art sheets. To begin with, there were just three of us - Doug, Kyra from the Manchester office and me.

As the afternoon wore on, volunteers rolled in and joined us on the floor. It was like a political playgroup - mixing colours and painting slogans. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. By the time we were through, there were about 13 of us, an delightfully disparate mix of ages, sizes and races. One very sensible woman chose to clean the windows instead of paint - and soon we had a bright, clean shopfront onto which she taped some of the new signs to complement the Hillary campaign signs and patriotic bunting.

A photographer from the Nashua Telegraph rocked up and snapped a million pix, concentrating on the two cute kids in our midst, of course. As they do. Newspapers love to run photographs of children. It made me a bit sad in this context insofar as this was not actually child's play - it was politics in motion. I would rather have seen people of voting age being depicted. But, hey, what can you do! The idea is to get the message into the paper by whatever means.

The Nashua campaign office is not on Main Street. It is off to the side on Elm Street. But, what it lacks in visibility it makes up for in size and facility. The ground level shopfront is handsome and spacious with a proper semi-enclosed office area at the back. Most significantly, it has a vast and spectacular basement - very smart and modern, freshly painted and wired and ready for banks of phones, printers, faxes, computers...
This will be the beating heart of the Nashua campaign.

Um, yes, one rather unconventional poster slipped its way in..
;)

Power of the people

2007-07-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

July 4.
Independence Day street parades in New Hampshire are also presidential primary street parades.
Oh yes, the usual community groups are out there bedecked in the glory of Uncle Sam's Americana - the stars and stripes and the red white and blue - with candy scattering across the tarmac to thrill the children.
But for the grownups, it is a political parade.
All the local politicians showcase themselves - and, as primary fever revs up, the presidential candidates also are represented by a showing of the support base.
It turns out to be the pollster's dream - a stunningly transparent statistical message.

Here is how the primary is panning out - as demonstrated by the marchers of the Merrimack parade.

Number One for organisation, numbers and the copious early spreading of the support stickers among the crowds was Hillary Clinton. Almost everyone seemed to be wearing Vote for Hillary stickers.
Not only did she have a large and cohesive band of marchers but also her team had prepared a proper parade float, a race car with the promise of leading the way.

Number One for noise and pizazz was Barack Obama.
His green team, in matching t-shirts, chanted a loud Obama chorus - leading the way with the letters of his name. They were mainly young and keen.

Number One for turning on the real thing was the Bill Richardson campaign. It featured Bill Richardson - the New Mexico Governor wearing the highly emblematic Boston Red Sox garb and out there glad-handing the people all the way down the parade route, surrounded by a cheery hubub of his volunteer squad.

All the way, the Democrats were Number One - in terms of candidates represented and in terms of numbers. Among them, after those three outstanding firsts, came:

Number Two - John Edwards. As ever, the North Carolina candidate was given very strong and enthusiastic support. His people had hooters and noise-makers and revved along in infectiously high spirits.

Number Three was Chris Dodd. His campaign is not the richest in the race but the supporters truly showed their love by the large number of well-wrought home-made signs they carried. It was a strong and interesting showing.

The Republicans, generally, were a bit lacklustre compared to the leading Democrats. There simply was not such a mass out marching, not such a sense of solidarity or excitement. Among the GOP candidates, however, it was John McCain who seemed to show the most supporters. Not that this was a lot. But at least they tried, defying McCain's flagging numbers in the official polls by carrying giant number 1s.

For all the publicity he has been receiving and for all the advertising with which he has been blanketing the media, one might have expected something more impressive from Mitt Romney's volunteer brigade. It was a fairly meagre showing with a pretty hokey banner.

Similarly Rudy Giuliani managed only so-so representation in the unofficial people poll of the Independence Day parade.

The Republican maverick, Ron Paul, fared better. He has an arresting campaign motto and the few outsider supporters he has are about as passionate as political animals get. Paul is the libertarian Republican, the man who would just about abolish government itself if he had his way.

Democrat Joe Biden is a very fine candidate and really deserves better than the thin ranks who carried his name through the parade. Fact is, he simply hasn't raised his profile enough in New Hampshire so far.

Republican Tom Tancredo is the man who stands on one issue - immigration. He is against it. He had a huge van plastered with his photograph. Not too many people, though. This man led them. Need I say more.

Last and least was Sam Brownback, the Republican who, like Tancredo, doesn't stand a chance. His people had a car.

And thus do we see, very clearly, that the Democrats are a vital force and that the given leaders in the polls seem pretty well represented as such. If there is a big surprise in this display, it is Chris Dodd, who may well be the dark horse on his way up, if one gives significance to this public showing of personal support among the New Hampshirites.

Words and more words

2007-06-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

Signs of renewed action in New Hampshire primary - at last. Several candidates are coming up to participate in July 4 street parades, Mitt Romney is attending a lunch for the local Republican committee members, Barack Obama is making an appearance in Laconia and Fred Thompson is holding fundraisers at $500 a ticket - which may sound a bit stiff but, oh goodygoody, includes the opportunity for a photo taken with the former senator.

I am not revved up about any of these events. I certainly don't need a $500 photo taken with Fred Thompson. Heavens, Rudi Giuliani did not charge a cent when he stood there shaking my hand in front of the cameras.

Rudi is not doing so well in the GOP polls. Mitt Romney, the Mormon, is pushing ahead, with much thanks to the Boston Globe which has been running a week-long uber profile of the former Massachusetts governor.
I have never seen such a magnanimous dedication of space to a political candidate in a metro daily paper. Front page leads are followed by double-page spreads inside the paper day after day with chapters so extensive that they may as well be a book. The writing is entirely uncritical. It is possibly the biggest puff piece in journalistic history. In terms of advertising space in a metro daily, I imagine it is worth close to $1million.

My interest in this massive Romney promotion faded after the first three days. I am still reading Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton and thriving on the revelations therein. I was a little shocked to discover that she is not much of a newspaper reader but prefers to get news from public radio. Well, it beats the garbled bites on television.

Meanwhile, there is much uncertainty in the air with contemplations of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg entering the primary as an Independent. Could he be the Ralph Nader of 2008?

Hillary ain't no actor

2007-06-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

Celine Dion's You and I was not my choice as Hillary's campaign song. It's a bit, well, Celine Dion, albeit that the sentiment is good. Now I am wondering if one would define that strident voice as "soprano", thus giving a double entendre to zany little home video with Bill and Hillary doing a Sopranos final episode spoof. What a stroke of genius that little video. It shows that Hillary is ready to have a bit of fun. More importantly, it shows that she is a lousy actor - which is a good thing in a politician.
Let's hope she gets and keeps the day job.

With the campaign trail still in quiet mode, I am engrossed in Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge which I am finding to be a fastidious, well-written and illuminating biography - so far. Certainly I am learning a lot about what influences have formed the Hillary Clinton character - a "mind conservative and a heart liberal".
I was intrigued about her young experiences as a Republican and now see that she moved steadily so far to the left of the GOP that she clear fell out the side.
I also feel much clearer about her religion now I know of her Methodist upbringing. She is no holy roller, just a straight-laced and self-disciplined Metho.
Her "ambitiousness" is constantly flagged in the media as such a wicked, evil, unfeminine quality like some form of rampant hubris. In the book it emerges as a steady wish to play a role in social reform, equality and fairplay. She believes she can do it!
But I have more to read...

Meanwhile, while the New Hampshire political action is in the doldrums, the e-campaigning is going strong. Every day I get hammered by emails from the candidates, each and every one of them asking for campaign donations.
I am finding the begging mail very tiresome. I wish they would stop asking me and let me decided if, where and when I would like to contribute.
This fundraising preoccupation, I think, is highly alienating and the campaigns should cool it and, at least once in a while, impart some information which does not come with a money ask.

Political baggage check

2007-06-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

Poll-watching is the sport of the moment. It is not unpleasant since it is Hillary Clinton's name which is up there on top. She continues to work the country - as they all do. Campaigning for the nomination is an exhausting business - and after a full year of that, the winning candidates will face another ten months of campaigning to win the presidency. This game is not for the weak or lazy.

Which is why I think it is probably a good idea that the actor/Republican Fred Thompson stays out there in undecided land. One gathers from the biographical details that laziness has been a lifelong characteristic. This explains why he has still not declared his candidacy - despite displacing Romney, McCain and others in the polls.

The Republican race is honing down to Giuliani versus Romney. They both have a lot of baggage so it will be interesting to see how the media weighs it up and penalises them both. In an odd way, it is the same baggage. Wives. Giuliani is much maligned for the fact that he is on his third wife. Romney derives from not only a religion but a family which represents polygamy. Of course Romney regularly reiterates the official line that the Mormons discontinued polygamy in 1890. But it is not so. Right when Romney needs it least, HBO has come up with Big Love, a brilliant television drama series which portrays the various worlds of Mormon polygamy and everyone is riveted and learning about Mormonism. Big Love is a "now" series about a "now" issue.
Sooner or later, Romney will have to stop sidestepping this and come clean on his religion.
And while he is at it, some of us would like to know about how he made the millions which set him up as the richest presidential candidate, worth a quarter of a billion dollars? It is my impression that much of this wealth was creamed off from that business management business by which companies are bought, scaled right back and then sold off. People and their jobs are the casualties of this ugly business game. And while workers are laid off, management consultants responsible for the ruthless toecutting are fleecing away immense fees. Perhaps some of those displaced workers will hold up their hands as the campaign evolves. Surely they are Romney baggage we have yet to see. Where are you mainstream media? Get digging.

Whichever of the front runners America chooses, it will have to be over the barrel of at least one major cultural hurdle....
An Italian who does not keep his wedding vows.
A millionaire Morman.
A black man.
A woman.

Great Scott, it's about faith

2007-06-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

Another hiatus in the candidate visit business, but unsurprising following the debate.
Hillary is the first to be making a return trip to New Hampshire - heading up north to Hanover to "host a conversation about expanding stem cell research and moving our nation forward on important scientific research and medical issues".
I am invited to attend, but I simply can't get up there, as much as I would enjoy this issue and crowd. Hanover is the town where Dartmouth College is located. It is also the town in which satirical travel writer Bill Bryson chose to settle following his Lost Continent travels seeking the perfect American town. It is a very pretty college town.
However, I won't be there on Friday.

Hillary is clearly a force for medical progress and the advancement of science - unlike the Republicans with their rash of creationists and pro-lifers.
But even she has been dragged into the faith game which has become an unhealthy aspect of this presidential race. It seems that placating the Bible-thumpers is de rigeur. This is a scarily religious country.

I can understand why Hillary chose to join the very religious Barack Obama, who belongs to a rather powerful black church, in doing the old religious tell-all on television recently. I didn't watch. Couldn't bear to. I just understood that, with the obsessive Christianity of contemporary America, Hillary had to show her religious side. She has always been something of a church-goer. Nonetheless, it saddened me that waving the faith flag is necessary at all.

I was grateful to Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh, who summed it up thus in Piety on Parade, a magnificent opinion piece which really merits reading in full:

I'd prefer a candidate inclined to keep quiet about his faith, rather than wear it on his sleeve. Or even one who held with the philosopher Herbert Spencer: Whether God exists is intellectually unknowable.

I'd rather hear about a hopeful's earthly justifications for his policy positions, about the real world values that guide her. When a candidate says, "My religion teaches me . . . " what he or she is really saying is: I'm about to base my answer in a realm that helps me barricade it against rational argument.

Do we really want a president who relies on faith more than facts in making his decisions? Or who thinks he has the imprimatur of God as he moves forward?

Hillary facelift? I don't think so.

2007-06-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

Over there in California they have decided that Hillary Clinton has had "work". She has been looking so good on television that she simply must have had cosmetic surgery, they say.
They should know better, those sculpted narcissists of the west coast.
Instead of face lifts, they should go get glasses.
They are so wrong it is just plain silly.
And it is quite clear they have not been reading this blog - which has observed the heavy make up Senator Clinton has been wearing. She had the full pancake on for the Democratic Debate on Sunday night. She looked younger than springtime. But it was all the artistry of television makeup.
Hillary is aging along with the rest of us.
She has not wasted working time on turning herself into a fake spring chicken.
Let's face it, a shot of Botox had the media savaging John Kerry in the last primary. Old craggy-face smoothed the worry lines and caused an image crisis really worth worrying about.
Doubtless this was not lost on Hillary Clinton.
She turns 60 on October 26 - and she looks just that.
As the gurus of looking young were telling Oprah the other day, there is really one and only one secret which our grandmothers could not apply in looking younger than their years and it is the good hair colourings of today. Hillary's hair is well coloured.
This photo was taken just over a week ago. It does not show the face of a woman who has been nipped and tucked by the cosmetic surgeon. It shows a woman comfortably living in her own skin. Click on it to get a really close look!
So shut up California. You are out of line.

But -
While the surgical knives have not been on Hillary, the media knives are all out for her and being well and truly sharpened by the abrasion of books that are hitting the shelves.
No one has a good word to say for the former First Lady.
In many people, men especially, ambition is seen as a strength. In Hillary, it is treated as the ultimate evil. This would seem to be the heaviest piece of baggage she carries, and almost no one to whom I have spoken about Hillary's presidential chances fails to snipe about this dreadful trait.
There are six months of campaign ahead before the New Hampshire primary and this means six months of increasingly voluminous white-anting of Hillary.

At the moment she is just riding above it. I have not heard her defend herself - but only move doggedly forward with policy and politic. The time has to come when she confronts it all - and stands up not only for America but for herself.

Note: "White-anting" is an Australian term which means to eat away and undermine. "White ant" is an Australian name for termites.

Republicans' turn to debate

2007-06-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

Once again, this time at the CNN Republican Debate in Manchester, New Hampsire, Ron Paul seemed to rise from the Republican ranks as the most balanced and sensible of them all.
I was not at this event, choosing to stay home on this wild and stormy night and watch comfortably on the TV. Wonderful CNN, however, kept the transcripts popping into my email. What a class act.

Ron Paul is a back-runner who comes to the front every time the Repubs get to open their collective mouths. He's not the popular modern model of the conservative, but an old-fashioned Libertarian - and a straight-talker. He's forceful and vehemently against unilateral aggression, and for general equality of human beings. He spoke up against the Republican obsession with God - saying that prayers in schools and the makings of laws about religion was not the business of Federal Government. Of course, Paul was perched at the very end of the lineup, again, the outsider. But here's my five-cent bet that the viewers and voters were really impressed with him yet again. Despite the fact that he was given so few opportunities to speak.

Rudy Giuliani has the presence and acquits himself most eloquently. But as the creationist Sam Brownback so ferociously stated, there is no way a pro-choicer is going to make it.

Mitt Romney believes in himself as much as in Mormonism. He played the cameras and the people - sidestepping direct questions, reiterating what we have already heard, practised and overly confident. He played the hawk.

John McCain has lifted his act and was really quite impressive, despite a tendency to keep addressing the audience as "my friends". The more debates he does, the more fluent and articulate he becomes, the more authoritative. He is making no secret of his contempt for the Bush administration's handling of the War of Iraq.

And as for the army wife who asked a question about EYErac - stubborn ignorance or cultural insult?

Of course these events are not really debates. They are question and answer sessions, television happenings. And, like almost everything in the American news media, they are always so rushed. The clock is constantly running out on everything. So the candidats are expected to express themselves in 15 second bursts, to speak really, really quickly. This, of course, ensures that everything is comfortably superficial.

The other candidates? I am not sure they are worth the time of day. Well, not my day, anyway. Mike Huckabee on Creationism? There is an unhealthy preoccupation with God and faith and creation. This is not politics. It is religion. It is frightening.

And wasn't it sweet to see Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giulinani wearing identical ties?
And, ooh, wasn't it spooky when lightning strikes zapped static into the sound system just when Giuliani was responding to criticisms by a Catholic bishop. It was a moment of much-needed levity, although the funniest moment was when Tom Thompson said that, in giving George W. Bush a job under his administration, "I would not send him to the UN". It did not raise a laugh among the Republicans - but some of us got the joke.

But here, just for the record, are some quotes from Ron Paul on Iraq:

"If we made the wrong diagnosis, we should change the treatment. So we're not making progress there and we should come home.

The weapons weren't there and we went in under U.N. resolutions. And our national security was not threatened. We're more threatened now by staying."

"...our foreign policy is designed to protect our oil interests.

The profits, that's not the problem. It's the problem that we succumb to the temptation to protect oil interests by literally going out and fighting wars over oil."

"...you can't enforce our goodness, like the necons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work".

Come in Spinners

2007-06-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

When the debate ends, the spin begins. And there is a special room for it.
Fortunately, on the drizzling, cold New Hampshire night, the Spin Room was in the building right beside the media's giant File Room. We just had to scuttle past a couple of rain-protected State Troopers and into the bright lights of spin. It was another vast, high-ceilinged Saint Anselm indoor sporting arena of some sort. But the sport was spin - with keen volunteers gathered around towers bearing the names of the candidates, all of tem holding signs aloft. These identified the candidates' spin doctors. Yes. True story. The media was invited to get the spin. Now, we all know that spin is PR - so this struck me as a bizarre ritual for journalists - go interview the PR people? Isn't that what we want to avoid? To be fair, these good news-bearers were campaign strategists, pollsters and, well, important people had endorsed a candidate.

Of course it was hoped that the candidates themselves would appear in the Spin Room before the night was over - but for some time they would be engaged in post-mortem interviews back in the debate hall which was some distance away. So the media swarmed around the Spin Room earnestly interviewing the spinsters.

They gathered in tight clutches, notepads and tape recorders to the fore, hanging on every word. Every grouping attracted curious rivals - anxious not to miss a scoop. I simply couldn't see this as scoop territory, but I played along.

Bruce recognised the very powerful political advisor and Hillary confidant Mandy Grunwald so I zeroed in. I liked the look of her, as it happens - but I was not about to make her like me. I'd decided to go for the nitty-gritty, the thing which is worrying us most of all in the Hillary Clinton candidacy - the "baggage".
Thus did I enumerate the Bill baggage, the 2002 vote for the War on Iraq baggage, the fact that American voters think she is too ambitious baggage and the fact that she is a woman baggage, asking Grunwald if America could ever let go of this, since every time I mentioned my preference for Hillary, people responded with a baggage agenda.
Grunwald gave me something of a withering look and said: "In case you hadn't noticed, she is ahead."

Yes, I had noticed, but there was a long way to go and media corrosion applied to baggage in American politics presented a need for constant defence. Could Hillary surmount the baggage over the distance? How hard was it?
Grunwald, her eyes raking the room for someone or something, told me that Hillary is definitely the most able candidate for the job, the most experienced and best and that, despite baggage, the polls were going strongly her way.
But what of the national sexism, what about America voting for a woman?
Here her spin ended.
"We shall just have to wait and see," she sighed.
I left it at that.
There really is nothing left to say. Indeed, there is a long way to go before the NH primary vote in January. Hillary has been working very hard in the state and I do believe she has won many hearts and minds. But there could so easily be a slipup. John Edwards lost ground with his $400 haircut. As the Washington blogger told me when we swapped notes, Edwards is now irreparably handicapped by that extravagance. He is a joke. Just as John Kerry in 2004 was doomed from the moment the media labelled him "Flip Flop". It only takes one little thing in this game.
The up side is that all the Democratic candidates are good - a quality of politician of which we could only dream in Australia.
And, unlike in Australia, they are accountable to the voters - not picked for leadership in some backroom, faction-driven party in-deal.

Clearly the Spin Room media was in for the long haul, waiting for candidates to turn up. They milled and jostled, killed time with interviews and photographs that will never see the light of day and jealously watched the CNN post debate interviews on a giant TV screen.

Bruce and I figured we could watch them more comfortably at home - and set off into the night drizzle, past the rows of trucks topped by satellite dishes, giant high-tech OB vans, damp outdoor reportage tents and the big, shiny CNN Express bus, parked in a dazzle of floodlights on one of the campus lawns.

Indeed, we were able to catch up on the television coverage at home and, heavens above, who was that looking earnest in the midst of the Spin Room throng? 'Twas me.

Blitzer blitzes in CNN Dem debate

2007-06-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

And there was Hillary with her back to the wall again about her vote for the War on Iraq. The NY Times today devoted most of its Sunday magazine to a dissection of her moves on the subject, did or did she not read the full briefings on Iraq, and one could have been sure that CNN"s Wolf Blitzer would take it a step further and see if a yet more decisive backdown could be elicited. As, of course, he did.
And thus did Hillary Clinton explain again:

Wolf, I was thoroughly briefed. I knew all the
arguments. I knew all of what the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department were all saying. And I sought dissenting opinions, as well as talking to people in previous administrations and outside experts.

You know, that was a sincere vote based on my assessment that sending inspectors back into Iraq to determine once and for all whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and using coercive diplomacy was not an unreasonable act.

What I did not count on, and what none of us did who voted to give the president authority, is that he had no intention to allow the inspectors to finish their job.

CLINTON: Now, we can argue about the past, or we can answer the question you asked about the National Guard. Our troops did the job they were asked to do. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They conducted the search for weapons of mass destruction. They gave the Iraqi people a chance for elections and to have a government. It is
the Iraqis who have failed to take advantage of that opportunity.

BLITZER: So let me just be precise, because the question was:
Do you regret not reading the national intelligence estimate?

CLINTON: I feel like I was totally briefed. I knew all of the arguments that were being made by everyone from all directions. National intelligence estimates have a consensus position and then they have argumentation as to those people who don't agree with it. I thought the best way to find out who was right in the intelligence
community was to send in the inspectors.
If George Bush had allowed the inspectors to finish the job they started, we would have known that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD andwe would not have gone and invaded Iraq.

These peerless, perfect quotes do not come of my lightning note-taking skills. They come from CNN's svelt services to the media. Debate transcripts ping into our email as the debate is going along. We are here in the Press Room with our laptops, connected through CNN's whizzy wireless network, and CNN is doing the transcriptions for us - which is just as well since, despite all the technological brilliance of this set-up, the sound quality in the hall is absymal and we have had trouble understanding what the candidates were saying.
Not only do the transcripts arrive by email but also they are delivered as printouts to our desks - literally hot off the printer.
One can't say we are not well looked after.

But, back to the debate.
And a very lively debate it has been - and is. I write as it goes on.

Blitzer sought to establish in what ways the Democrats were divided over assorted issues - hence a lively exchange on Iraq and an even livelier one on whether English should be the official language of the USA.
Blitzer asked for a show of hands on this.
Only Mike Gravel, the delightful renegade former senator from Alaska, raised his hand.
It was an odd moment.
Obama leapt in asserting this was the kind of question that was designed
precisely to divide the candidates.

Quoth he: You know, you're right. Everybody is going to learn to speak English if they live in this country. The issue is
not whether or not future generations of immigrants are going to learn English. The question is: How can we come up with both a legal, sensible immigration policy? And when we get distracted by those kinds of questions, I think we do a disservice to the American people.

Turns out he was off the mark. Hillary leapt in like a wise school ma'am to explain what it was all about. She had encountered the issue in the Senate.
I, for one, needed her elucidation:

The problem is that if it becomes official instead of recognized
as national -- which indeed it is, it is our national language -- if it becomes official, that means in a place like New York City you can't print ballots in any other language. That means you can't have government pay for translators in hospitals so when somebody comes in with some sort of emergency there's nobody there to help translate what their problem is for the doctor.
So many of us -- I did, at least -- voted to say that English was our national language, but not the official language because of the legal consequences of that.

It will be interesting to see what angles the assorted reporters take on the debate. For the proletariat, there is the happy agreement that Bill Clinton should be employed by a Democrat president, including Hillary, to be a roaming global envoy, bringing back good spirit towards the USA.

Then there is the who-was-righter-than-right about Iraq....which Obama seems to think he won, turning on poor old John Edwards, who had just apologised yet again for voting for the war, and telling Edwards he was "four and a half years behind in leadership". Obama had better watch that self-righteousness.
But Iraq issue is far from dead but it is descending into nit-picking. When one thinks of how long the campaign has yet to run, one imagines the public will be utterly fatigued by the time it comes to vote.

It was hard to tell in the busy context of that giant media room with its fuzzy acoustics just who it was who came out on top on the night. My bias would give the night to Hillary because she always presents so very well. She was the only one who managed to laugh - and she remained absolutely unruffled by anything, albeit that she was, at times, forceful.
Thus, methinks, the race positions remain unchanged.

More anon....

Bruce was officially accredited photographer on this adventure into political media and was taken off in a bus with other still photographers to get snaps from within the debate hall. Hence, the candidate snaps here are his.

CNN puts on the Debate ritz

2007-06-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

No need to consult the map or ask for directions to Saint Anselm College where the big Democratic Debate takes place tonight. It was more like following a colourful breadcrumb trail - campaign posters and groups of chanting supporters raising the profile for their chosen presidential candidates marked the route through the back streets of Manchester, NH. If the roadside turnout reflects voter popularity, John Edwards is leagues ahead with his bunches of banner-waving people. Then again, if spread of lawn placards is the indicator, Bill Richardson had won the front yards of Manchester, prongs down. On the other hand, if size is the winning quality, Hillary just stood right out. Her signs were few, but absolutely huge.

As we swung into the College campus drive, just past the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, the supporter crowds chanted raucous welcome.

The media parking area was a bit of a suprise. It was as big as an oval and already crammed with cars. We were directed down and in, a long way, ending up parked beside a shock of pink rhododendron at the far end. Of course it was raining - so we donned the old rain gear and shuffled off through the long wet grass. Blech. My smart sneakers are not waterproof.

It was quite a walk to the Press Centre where, despite the door being right there, we were told to walk the perimeter of the building and approach the credentialling room from the other side. More rain. More shuffling through long, wet lawn. Then the queue to get in. Security is tight. We went through the full airport routine - emptying pockets into plastic trays, having bag contents scrutinsed, walking through screener arches, getting the wand once-over...

And then it was the credentials. No problem at all, and a cheery welcome from CNN's delightful Mara Gassmann, with whom I had been liaising for access to this event.

"Seats are allocated," we were told. "You just have to find them."

Oh, dear. Who could have imagined the scale of this thing! Where to begin looking when faced with row upon row upon row of tables and chairs laid out in the Carr Center - a room so caverous and vast it felt like like Centennial Hall on steriods.

And there, laid out on the trestle tables, were the names of America's top journalists..the NY Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post... Bruce swooned.

We figured that, as antipodean ring-ins, would not be in their midst. I headed for the back of the hall, and sure enough, in the back row, there were Bruce's and my name between Le Monde and, how nice, NewsLtd Australia! CNN has very thoughtfully placed our terrific NY correspondent, Stefanie Balogh, beside us! Camaraderie, no less! Beside us is Le Figaro and De Spiegel along with the London Telegraph. In front of us are Japan, Sweden, China and Switzerland. The world media, in other words.
Thus do we sit with the vista before us, beautifully placed to see the ebb and flow of almost 800 journalists - along with scores of TV monitors all showing CNN's coverage of the event.

An hour and a half before showtime, dinner was served. CNN has spared no expense - hot Atlantic salmon and Chicken kievs, masses of veggies and rice, cakes, bread, fruit... The head caterer assures me there are no trans fats, either. Yippee.
It is all presented with classy, china-thin disposable plates and even very upmarket disposable silverware. CNN has done this all before and does it with style.

Journos are meandering all over the place, looking for their seat allocations. Just chatted to a Washington blogger - he wanted to ask me the same things I wanted to ask him. In the end, we agreed that Bill Richardson may be the candidate to back if one was looking dispassionately at the big picture.

And this is what we are here to do.

Repubs field a new runner

2007-05-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

A new candidate seems set to enter the Republican presidential primary race.
His name is Fred Thompson and, as a former senator, he is best known as a character in the television series Law and Order.
He is uber conservative - pro-life, pro-gun, pro-war, anti-gay marriage. I can't find evidence that he is a creationist, but he is described rather scarily as "saviour" for the political aspirations of the Christian right.
Of course, in a Republican mood of gushing retrospective adulation for movie star Prez Ronald Reagan, it suits that Thompson is an actor, a face familiar to KFC-munching families across the land. The people find nothing more reassuring than to be led those who have entertained them in their living rooms - viz Governor Schwarzenegger, Mayor Clint Eastwood, Congressman Sonny Bono, Governor Jesse Ventura...
So, Fred Thompson is not even officially declared, but polling way ahead of frontrunners Romney and Giuliani. What does this tell us?
I think the New York Times had it in the can back in 1994 when it reported:

"The glowering, hulking Mr. Thompson has played a White House chief of staff, a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a highly placed F.B.I. agent, a rear admiral, even a senator. When Hollywood directors need someone who can personify governmental power, they often turn to him."

And now the country is turning to him.

There is another move afoot - a delicious undercurrent of subversion I have been observing here and there on the bumpers of cars.

I'll drink to that!

Hillary eyes her voters

2007-05-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Hillary's convoy of big black SUVs purred up so quietly that the awaiting crowd was taken by surprise, despite having been waiting for 20 minutes or so. Even more surprising was the presidential candidate's swift disappearance into a shop. The media thundered down to the shop door and waited respectfully, cameras at the ready.

The Senator was quite a long time in said shop - one of those aromatic furnishings and bric-a-brac places. But, as it turned out, and much to the frustration of her organisers, if Hillary is going to mingle with the people and do a "town walk", she is not going to be hurried.

When, finally, she emerged, it was to be obscured by a throttle of television cameras and microphones. She made her way slowly up the footpath where locals were grabbing a spontaneous chance to thrust out hands and express their support. The campaign volunteers outside Martha's Exchange Restaurant were apoplectic, urging people to make a clear passage for the Senator, to keep out of the way of the little lineup of arranged greeters, to go into the restaurant and get off the street.
I was perfectly placed, just where they didn't want me to be. And I watched the slowly approaching scrum, seeing Hillary thoughtfully turning from one side to another, to acknowledge one person after another - a smile here, a few words there, a handshake...

Every individual was given eye contact from those vivid blue eyes - and a connection which told them that she was absolutely delighted to see them.

I watched in growing awe. This was a consummate politician. The people came first. If someone had something to say, she listened with interest. Her face was a mobility of expressions, from friendly beams to suprise and amusement and even the fleeting shadows of one sharing a problem. She was moving steadily in the required direction, a very solid African American security man always at her elbow, but she was serenely unrushed, those amazing blue eyes sparkling friendship towards each and every potential vote. Oh, those eyes are good weapons for a politician. It was impossible not to like her.

She was, however, wearing a lot of makeup. I wondered how much exhaustion this must be covering. Her campaign schedule has been gruelling and she came to us in Nashua after giving a major economic policy speech at Manchester's School of Tecnology.
There, she had spoken of the “rising inequality and rising pessimism in our workforce.”
"While productivity and corporate profits are up, the fruits of that success just haven’t reached many of our families,” she is reported to have said, likening it to "trickle down econonics without the trickle."
The plan, it seems, is to "hit the restart button on the 21st Century and redo it the right way".

I did not stay on after Hillary had entered Martha's Exchange. There were hundreds of people in there all waiting to shake her hand - and I had no need to shake her hand. I have had that pleasure. And, looking at the mainstream media pack queued at the door and the further folk waiting in hope, I could only think of how hungry Debora was, and doubtless Hillary, too.
She was not making a speech. She was, after all, just going for lunch.
I drifted off into the glorious Nashua spring day, hoping that Hillary would, at least, after all that handshaking, have a chance to wash those hands before she got to break bread.

Hillary's quiet lunch

2007-05-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

It was suppposed to be a quiet lunch with some core VIP supporters - or so they thought, said New Hampshire Executive Councilor Debora Pignatelli as the crowd grew and grew around Martha's Exchange in Nashua. Debora, who had hosted us at the Democratic Debate house party, was among the chosen few actually lunching with Hillary and she was hungry, enviously asking what Bruce had been eating as his on-the-hoof lunch.
Seeing the cram of people plus the jostle of cameramen - Fox, CNN, WMUR, NBC, the Nashua Telegraph, the Union Leader and the Boston Globe among them - she knew she would be in for a long wait. But it was good networking time and this expert politician was chatting, introducing people and giving the good PR for Hillary. To this end, she presented me with the last of her collection of coveted "Women for Hillary" buttons which I donned proudly beside my Hillary for President sticker.

I was also wearing a white "ONE" wristband, presented by a group of placard-waving campaigners for peace and an end to world poverty.

The waiters of Martha's Exchange were busily serving sidewalk table diners as the Hillary fans massed around them.
Stern young female campaign volunteers were trying to steer people inside the restaurant where a Hillary handshake was promised to all.
I could see Debora's lunch getting later and later.
To the chagrin of the volunteers, after taking a peek at pack of people inside, I chose to stay outside with the media and the still-growing crowd.
It was a wonderful mix of young and old, a very positive, excited spiri. Many of these people were just in Nashua shopping and were thrilled at the opportunity to meet Senator Clinton. Others, like me, had heard word of this "town walk" on the campaign grapevine. Yet others had been invited to come along for an arranged handshake. Then there were the valiant Health Care campaigners out in force, as they are at every event, handing out their "I'm a Health Care Voter" stickers.

And, of course there were the security people and the police...and perhaps some who had just chosen, like Hillary, to have a quiet lunch at Martha's in dear old downtown Nashua.
Let us not forget that Nashua has a proud Presidential Primary tradition. It was, after all, where JFK gave his very first campaign speech. Nashua locals take such political happenings in their stride - nay, they expect them.

On being a small fish...

2007-05-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

So much for depending on my own kind to get things done here.
As requested by its editor, I made application through the Union Leader for tickets to the June 3 Democratic Debate up the road in Manchester. They asked for some personal details to which end I had to use my husband's name since they seemed to wish for legitimate NH voter credentials.
No tickets were forthcoming.
Indeed, no word was forthcoming. Nada. Silence.

Perturbed, nay, gobsmacked, I contacted the Hillary campaign who directed me to the New Hampshire Democrats' office, the helpful press officer of which directed me to the Debate's co-host, the NH television station, WMUR. What a friendly and charming response - but no tickets. Their quota all went yesterday. Yesterday!

How frustrating is this!
I realise with a jolt what a spoiled media person I am. I am used to people knowing who I am. I am accustomed to people actually wanting me to be at events or to picking up a phone and having doors open. I am used to a diary bulging with in invitations.
But, as much as I feel at home here, I am not on home turf. I have no strings to pull.

At least I am carrying my media union card.
So, I followed the WMUR advice and have appealed to the Debate's other co-host, CNN - this time asking for the only access left, media accreditation.
My regret in this context is that being among my own kind will distance me from the special people of NH, the discerning voters, who are, to a large extent, what this blog is all about. Then again, being with my own kind in another country would be an interesting study in its own right.
And, of course, it would give one a yet closer look at the candidates - which can't be bad.
My fate, however, rests upon the kindness hands of strangers.
They don't owe me a thing.
I can only wait and see.

Meanwhile, there has been good news.
Hillary will be back in NH next week and she is scheduled to do a town walk in Nashua!
I will be there with bells on.

The quiet trail

2007-05-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Another frustrating hiatus. Apart from much playing of songs, everything seems quiet in the Hillary camp. Not even a word of protest about the recent claim from the Obama campaign that it created a precedent by going out canvassing in NH last weekend. Although we have not been called back to continue canvassing for Hillary, it is very much on the record that the first doorknocking was us on the May 12 "Hillary Day of Action".

There has been no word from the Union Leader on my application for tickets to the Democrat Debate - and, I note, the option to apply for tickets now has been removed from the paper's website.
I've not heard from Senator D'Alessandro following my email asking for access to his forthcoming house party for Joe Biden, either. So it is all very quiet.

Barack Obama was in NH as were Bill Clinton and George Bush Snr - but there was no chance to get along to those events since they college commencement speech engagements. Bill is doing a fundraiser appearance for Hillary in Boston, but at $100 a head. Not going to that.
Newt Gingrich is in Manchester signing his new book at Wal*Mart, of all places. That is of zero interest to me. John Edwards has been in the state, but concentrating his appearances in the north, which is far to drive. Rudy Giuliani is in Vermont. Yawn.

It was amusing to read in Nashua's Sunday Telegraph of what the presidential candidates had cited as "alternate career choices.

Hillary said she'd work for causes in a university or foundation.
Barack Obama said he'd be an architect.
Chris Dodd said he'd be a teacher.
John Edwards claimed he'd be a mill supervisor.
Dennis Kucinich said he'd be an astronaut.
Bill Richardson said he'd be a Yankees player.
Sam Brownback said he'd be a farmer.
Rudy Giuliani said he'd be a sports announcer.
Mike Huckabee said he'd be a rock'n'roll bass guitarist.
John McCain said he'd be in the foreign service.
and
Mitt Romney said he'd be an auto company chief executive.

Hmm. A few tongues-in-cheek and a few very telling disclosures.

Songs of praise and mutters of dissent

2007-05-17T13:33:00.000-07:00

The hunt is on for a Hillary song.
I've noticed the prominence of music at all the candidates' major events - not always liking what I heard. In the Hillary case, it would seem to be because the campaign theme song has yet to be chosen.
Now, as the action revs up, the time has come.
It's tricker than one may think. One needs something that falls between familiar popular song and an anthem. Something that creates the right mood and delivers the right message. And, bloody hell, it turns out to be a can of worms - or so I am thinking now I have listened to the selection thus far chosen for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The campaign has asked us all to vote and, if we don't like the choices, to suggest something else.
One by one, I eliminated the nine proposed songs - one was too dirge-like, one sounded like a lesbian love song, one did not sound positive enough, one sounded too girlie...
So, if I don't like them, I have to think of something else. OK. So I have surfed around and listened to things I thought would be good options and, guess what, none of my ideas is perfect either!
I'll just have to wait and see what other supporters come up with.

Meanwhile, we await the forthcoming Democrat Debate in New Hampshire. It is being hosted by CNN and the Union Leader newspaper in Manchester - rather a good paper, I have noted, with a terrific web presence. Getting hold of tickets to the debate is not easy. They are very strictly rationed and one has to apply by email, giving personal details which include date of birth. Then one has to wait to see if one is accepted. This makes me very tense indeed.

Methinks New Hampshire also is getting a bit tense. The other US states are doing their best to close in and undermine its first primary status. We've had the date changes from the other states with Florida pushing hard to turn the presidential candidate campaign into a rush, to squeeze up those dates and force New Hampshire back into 2007. Now we have Associated Press (the Australian version of which I once worked for) and its analysis of the America census statistics to show that NH is not the perfect archetypal American state. It does not have a "national average" demographic. AP says that Illinois is the average state. It also is a huge state. Too intensely populated for the sort of hands-on intensity of the NH political activity.
The criticism of NH is that it does not have the diversity of population, the percentage of blacks. But what it does have is a political tradition and a population geared to undertake the responsibility of scrutinising each and every candidate as a state mission and a national obligation. Of course this is not average!

Republican men in suits

2007-05-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

The big surprise of the Fox network's Republican Debate in South Carolina was the confronting nature of the questions directed at the ten presidential candidates. Of course, there could be an agenda there. Clearly, at debate's end, very clearly, there was disappointment that the phone votes favourite had been Ron Paul and not Mitt Romney. The Fox anchor team made no secret of their preference for Romney and sniped that Paul's team must have been the quickest on the speed-dial to get those votes in. So saying, they made a mockery of their very own voting system. If it is a competition of candidates' teams phoning in, well, it is all pretty meaningless and there is really no point in the viewers thinking they are having a say. On the other hand, it could just be that the people out there preferred the old-school Libertarian Republican who has an uncompromising stance on almost everything. The veteran congressman from Texas is what his supporters call "the real maverick" of the Republicans - the right-wing version of Dennis Kucinich - and he really stirred up the debate.

Ron Paul stands alone against the war on Iraq, claiming that the Republican party has "lost its way". It had a long history as an anti-war party which once believed in making friends, talking, negotiatiating and trading with the world. He tried to explain that the 9/11 attack was not, as the Bush administrations keeps asserting, because Islam hates American values but, rather, because "we are over there" interfering in their countries, bombing and provoking hostility. He added "we're now building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican". Hmm. I didn't know that.

Giuliani, who has "owned" 9/11 as a political issue since handling the crisis as NY Mayor, leapt on Paul's statement, his face contorting as he sought to control his rage - mouth a thin line of fury, eyes slits of burning coal. He could not and would not hear Paul's rationale, interpreting it as a simple "we brought it on ourselves". He called it the most "absurd" explanation he had heard and asked for Paul to retract. Paul did not retract. He reiterated, explaining the concept of "blow-back", using history's examples and concluding "they do it because we are over there".

Paul is a tough old cookie and his views, generally, belong to a bygone era of Republican sentiment. He is also an obstetrician, a pro-lifer and, while he is drawing a lot of attention or, as the Fox reporters put it, "ink", in the media, he is not a viable presidential contender because the mainstream Republicans just don't get him.

So who did come out on top of the Fox debate which, by the way, seemed fraught with some technical colour and definition shortcomings.

Well, it was not Duncan Hunter from who is still obsessed by the border fence but did get in a good rant about the 1.8 million US jobs lost to China saying "the arsenal of democracy is leaving these shores and we need to bring it back".

It was not Virginian Jim Gilmore who bragged "I've been a consistent conservative my entire life" and plugged his website and blog. Yawn.
When asked why it was the line-up of candidates was so like the membership of a country club, devoid of woman or minorities, he could only, again, brag about himself, citing his "reach out" to Hispanic and African-Americans.
Of course it was an excellent question. The candidates are all Christian white men in suits.

It was not Tom Tancredo from Colorado who claimed to have been getting "conversions" about immigration and gun control but "I'd trust them on the road to Damascus and not the road to Des Moines". He also claimed that there was still scientific doubt about global warming but "if it's true..." I find Tancredo just a bit creepy.

It was not Tommy Thompson. He is a particularly rigid man, barely moves more than his mouth when talking. His claim to fame was: "I'm the only candidate up here that has over 1,900 vetoes". A positive record of the negative?

It was not Sam Brownback from Kansas who, asked if abortion could be an option for a rape victim, replied: "I don't think so, and I think we can explain it when we look at it for what it is, a beautiful child of a loving God that we ought to protect in all circumstances." He should try being a rape victim some time.

It was not front-runner Rudy Giuliani who gave one a very scary insight into the Republican aggression by generating resounding applause when he said he would, in the case of another attack on the US, "tell them to use any method they could think of" to extract information from detainees.

This was in response to a hypothetical which had produced much endorsement of a thing called "enhanced interrogation".
It would seem to be euphemistic newspeak for "torture".

John McCain was the only one adamantly opposed to torture. He spoke eloquently about the way in which it diminishes a nation, the way in which it sets an example for treatment of one's own prisoners in enemy hands... He was statesmanlike in this context - but it was not what the audience wanted to hear. McCain is as much a dead man for not following the popular line as is Giuliani for his stand on a woman's right to choose. This time round, however, Giuliani expressed it thus: “You want to keep government out of people’s lives, or government out of people’s lives from the point of view of coercion, you have to respect that.”

"Flip-flop Mitt" did not acquit himself particularly well in this debate, I thought. He was back-footed on his abortion flip-flop, was all for "enhanced interrogation techniques" , had an illogical solution for the legalising of America's 12 million illegal immigrants and was just to bit too keen on sniping at other candidates. There was quite a lot of sniping in this debate.
Interestingly, in his post-debate interview, the Mormon made a very telling Freudian slip: "The missionary, er military..."

This, surprisingly, leaves Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas. He scored the one laugh of the night saying “we’ve had a Congress that’s spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.”
He said a few sage things: "It takes more money to do it over than it does to do it right." We're now seeing that in the United States. We're doing a lot of things over. Maybe we should have just done it right."
He presented very well, calm, articulate and quite good looking. He is, however, a Baptist minister.

At debate's end, it was clear that, well, they're all fierce Republicans who want tax cuts. They were still white Christian men in suits, all of them wanting to be the most powerful man in the world. The back runners are due to fall by the wayside very soon, especially if rumour comes true and Newt Gingrich throws his hat into the ring.

Doorknocking for Hillary

2007-05-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

A fat folder full of names and addresses, a map, an instruction sheet complete with "script" and "tips and tricks", a stack of postable Hillary support cards and a "Hillary for President" lapel sticker - and we were off on the canvassing trail.

It had been a strange gathering of the volunteers at Number 2 Clocktower Place. It's one of Nashua's former cotton mill buildings now transformed to apartments and when we eight or so volunteers had gathered in the foyer, we were told we had to leave since management did not approve of "political meetings". Having been given a brief rundown on the principles of cavassing, we adjourned outside to be handed these terrifying folders of names and addresses. Hardly a morning's work. A week or two, maybe, lay in my Ward 6 folder - and something of a navigational nightmare. Definitely not a walking job.

The up side was that we were not expected simply to walk door to door sounding out sympathy towards our candidate. The list contained only the names of people who already had expressed interest in supporting Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Fear of terse rejections, door slams and abuse evaporated. Phew.

My doorknock partner was Aunt Libby from Virginia - a retired history professor and a staunch lifelong Democrat who offset my Australianness with elegant American cultural credibility. With husband map-reading and chauffeuring, I scanned the instruction sheet and decided to ignore it. It was too late to be learning a script. The brief was to ascertain interest and, if it was positive, to ask if people were interested in volunteering in some way or, perhaps displaying an election sign in their garden. If they were not interested, one bade them a polite farewell. As Libby pointed out, we were supposed to say "have a great day" to those who supported our candidate but only "have a good day", if they did not.

Our canvassing area was pretty much Nashua working class - small homes in quiet back streets.
Our first voter was in the garden tending her mass of spring flowers. She was keen on Hillary but not entirely decided. Then again, she was happy to have a Hillary sign in her front yard. She had a lot of issues she wanted to talk about - the exportation of jobs overseas and the health care system. Both things had affected her life. Several companies for which she'd worked had closed operations to outsource to China and, at the end of her working life, she'd found herself working at WalMart and coming down with asthma. She'd had a nightmare of doctors and pharmaceuticals and this had driven her to becoming an expert in all things that had ailed her - and her husband.
She was quite the talker, segueing into her childhood and the way in which people could live from the land and not depend so much on electricity, how you can get an education at night school...
These are some of the most salient issues of this election and here was a first-person example of the political casualties for whom the Democrats are fighting.
However, Libby and I were beginning to worry that if all our voters were so keen to talk at such length to strangers, we wouldn't be covering too many houses.

Fortunately, that did not turn out to be the case. In fact, we found ourselves not talking to anyone at most houses. Either people were not at home or, I often suspected, they were lying low because they just did not want to answer the door. I could relate to that. There is nothing I hate more than canvassers coming to the door.

Those who did come out to us were warm and enthusiastic. The definite Hillary supporters are emphatically positive. Not that they wanted to volunteer or display a sign. But at least we knew where their vote would go.

The Hillary team had told us that once we knew this, the campaign would leave these people alone until the end of the campaign. No need to pester them or waste resources on them. We love them just as they are.

And thus, for an hour or so, we drove to and fro around the sunny suburban streets, being confounded here and there by bizarre numbering arrangements, entrances that were hard to find and, most commonly, by doorbells that did not work. Indeed, it occurred to me that there was a good business opportunity for door-to-door doorbell salesmen.

We only had to bid "have a good day" to one person - a pleasant gay man who announced that he simply was not "into politics". We wondered how he got on the list.

We were in and out of the car, over and over and over, jotting results notes on the list beside each name. There was a coded system for this - but I had not found the key, so I wrote an approximation. We were moving so fast in and out of the car, up and down the streets, trying to get as much done as we could which, looking at the fat wad of names and addresses, barely dented the load.

We completed about five or six streets before running out of time and returning to Clocktower Place to return the folder to the campaign volunteer.

It had been an interesting, if somewhat hot and tiring, experience. It had also been a positive one, thanks to the careful selection process of the doorknockees.

This had been the first foray of its kind for the Hillary campaign but there are seven months to go...and it is all very well organised.

McCain's blame game

2007-05-12T04:54:00.000-07:00

John McCain's campaign has not been going well in New Hampshire. The Republican might have trounced George Bush here in the 2000 primary but it looks as if, this time, he will lose to Bonzo the clown, or almost any of his party rivals. He is panic-stricken because, as his campaign has explained, the NH primary is of primary significance.
McCain's reaction has been to fire his NH campaign manager, as if this hapless organiser is the reason for McCain's lacklustre showing. Methinks that no matter how many scapegoats 70-year-old McCain finds, his poor polls are because the Repubs simply don't see him as up to the job.

Meanwhile, it is Hillary Day of Action in NH today - and we are off to hit the streets.

Into the streets

2007-05-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

The May 12 New Hampshire Hillary Day of Action approaches and her volunteers are being rallied for a door-knocking blitz. I am instructed to turn up in central Nashua and meet the troops at 10am on Saturday. Ironically, Hillary is going to be in NH on her sixth visit, but she is not making any public appearances - just addressing firefighters and attending small fundraising events. Her campaign manager, however, is giving a talk.

Bill Richardson's six-day plan

2007-05-07T05:45:00.000-07:00

First things first. The increasingly controversial date for the New Hampshire Primary was the subject of Bill Richardson's introductory remarks. He'd just heard that it was going to be on January 8 - in response to the impertinent move forward of Florida from March to the last Tuesday in January.
"You should be the first Primary," declared Richardson, adding that this sudden scrunch of Primary dates put great pressure on the campaigners.
New Hampshire house parties are very informal and interactive - and immediately someone pointed out that NH is first "by law". Assorted very early dates were jovially suggested.

Then the New Mexico Governor launched into his address, prefacing it with some of the ways in which he believed he was the most outstandingly qualified of all candidates for the presidency. These were not only his administrative experience as a state governor, but his extensive CV as a Congressman and the country's Secretary of Energy - not to mention his time as a UN diplomat wherein he had liaised with leaders in world trouble spots such as Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and Sudan.

From these experiences he had learned the essence of making peace with enemies and turning them into friends and, indeed, the most pressing thing he'd do as new President would be to bring people together in a bi-partisan thrust to terminate the "nightmare" of the Iraq War.

As a succinct format, he cited his policies in the form of "six issues and what I would do with my first six days in the White House".
Day 1 would be Iraq. He would not only withdraw the forces but he would install diplomacy and an all-Muslim peacekeeping force and apply some of the $400 billion war into "the domestic needs" of Iraq.

Day 2, Richardson would dedicate to Energy Independence, liberating the country from the 60 per cent oil import statistic and the "stranglehold" that "unfriendly" countries have over the USA. He would call on private and public investment in a blitz of auto greening with all cars at 50mpg. "I don't care what Detroit says," he challenged. He added a list of energy alteratives including green buildings, solar roofs on schools...
"You gotta sacrifice. It's a sense of community because energy efficiency is for the common good. We generate 25 per cent of the world's pollution," he said.
Interestingly, his state, New Mexico, is the only US state which abides by the Kyoto Protocol. This man has a track record.
He gave fulsome credit to Al Gore for his service in informing the country about the urgency of environmental reform, adding: "Al, stay out of the running."

Day 3, said Richardson, would be for education. Here he absolutely soared in recognition of what the US really needs to bring itself back to the future - science and math! India and Korea have left the US, and the rest of the world, behind in these vital subjects. Australia needs to pick up its socks, too. Richardson is on the ball in knowing that this is the foundation of a knowledge economy. He also spoke of languages and, particularly, the arts - to engage "and stimulate the mind". Yes!

Day 4 he allocated to his National Health Care plan to which he gave scant outline, since, he explained, the complexities and funding thereof requires lengthy extrapolation.

Day 5 was for his job-generation plan. "The Democrats would be the party of economic growth and science and math," he underlined. "The Democrats have been the party of the poor, which I endorse, but do you what what? We have forgotten the middle class."
He went on to speak of tax incentives for new technology and employment iniatives with an emphasis on renewable energy, technology and aviation. "The future is renewable energy," he reiterated.
When someone interjected a question about nuclear power, he acknowledged that it was non-pollutant but still worried about disposal of its by-products. It was not an energy option of his choice.

Day 6 would be devoted to "restating our commitment to civil rights". Richardson strongly supported "a woman's right to choose". "If you have different sexual orientation, I'll be on your side," he added. He sought "fair immigration laws and not that wall - that's not American".
"We're a nation of immigrants," he emphasised, suggesting that immigration regulations should incorporate speaking English and passing background checks.

The American voting system was also a target. Only 48 per cent of Americans voted in the last election. "One of the problems is that we don't trust the ballot," he said. "I want a shift back to paper."
The New Hampshirites interjected that they had a paper trail here, despite an electronic ballot.

Richardson finished by saying that he knew he was an "underdog" in the Democratic Presidential candidate polls "but I've got nine months to go - and a lot of house parties".

And, just to add levity to his list of credentials, he confided that "I'm holder of the world handshaking record - 13,000 hands in 8 hours. That record used to belong to Teddy Roosevelt".

The party guests were keen to question the New Mexico Governor - and threw some tough ones at him, particularly about tax, Iraq, mental health and health funding. He fielded them all with amiable ease, at home on all issues, it seemed.

And he added some interesting snippets - insight about North Korea which he has visited no less than six times and which he still finds very different in thinking.
He told of talking to President Bush about negotiations with North Korea and the way in which using China as an intermediary was a mistake since the North Koreans hate China.
Bush replied: "Bill, I don't talk to countries that exhibit bad behaviour."
Richardson retorted: "Pretty soon you're only going to be talking to the Vatican."
He half-expected an angry response from the President, he said. But no. George Bush thought it was funny.

The Richardson campaign aides were keen to get him moving along - next stop an interview with CNN. Richardson, however, was reluctant to short-change these voters and his lingering to answer personal questions, shake hands and sign his book was clearly agitating his clock-watching aides, as we slipped quietly out the door ahead of him.

A good man, I'd say, who came across poorly in the Democrats' television debate. Gun supporter or not, he shone as an example of the extremely high quality of candidate being fielded by the American Democrats. If only politics was dominated by such people. If only.

Governor Richardson on house party tour

2007-05-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

The house party is one of the particular characteristics of New Hampshire primary campaigns and it turns out to be Governor Bill Richardson's favourite form of exposure to the voter. Or, so he said, after being introduced to the crowd of locals who had gathered at the home of John and Marie Anne Knowles in the neighbouring township of Hudson. The Knowleses both are elected members of the New Hampshire State Legislature.

John Knowles had kindly agreed to squeeze me in to the already well-subscribed party in their pleasant, book-lined home set on a sweeping cul de sac in a rather gracious and spacious modern housing estate cut into the New Hampshire woodlands. Richardson is not a front-runner at this stage, but he is a former Ambassador to the UN and US Energy Secretary and most definitely a superior presidential candidate. Interestingly, he also is half-Latino. His Mexican mother graced him with swarthy good looks which, frustratingly, are very hard to convey in photographs.

It seemed a particularly civilized group of thinking people at the party - one felt that one would like each one of them if given the opportunity. The Knowleses had turned on a spread of sweet and savoury snacks along with wine, soft drinks and, amazingly, casks of hot coffee from Dunkin' Donuts.

Candidates usually are running late on these hectic campaign schedules and, indeed, Richardson has been criss-crossing NH at a rate of knots for three days. But he was only a few minutes late to the party and a round of applause went up as he entered the living room.

Republican debate good for Dems

2007-05-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

Who won the Republican debate?
There were ten men in uniform dark suits. Four wore red ties. Three wore red-striped ties. The anti-cloning brigade were ironically clone-like.

At debate's end, nothing much changed. The three leaders remain the leaders and, if any of them shone more brightly in the artifice of debate context, it was Mitt Romney who was as smooth as a bowl of homogenised cream.

The shock of the debate was the revelation that three men who believe themselves equipped to be President of the United States are men who do not believe in science.
Senator Brownback, Mr. Huckabee and Representative Tancredo raised their hands when asked if anyone in the debate lineup rejected evolution. Creationists! Can one imagine putting people of this regressive mindset out there on the world stage?
Fortunately, these men don't have a chance in hell and should save themselves and everyone else a lot of time and money by pulling out of the race now.

In fact, so should most of them.

Not one of the seven outside runners stimulated any interest or excitement.

Ron Paul was expected to stand out - and in a way he did. He stood up against regulation of the Internet. He urged against going to war against Iraq. He defended "free society" by objecting to a national ID card. Paul is a libertarian, old school. He'd get rid of all taxes. He's also an obstetrician who is against abortion. Fie upon you, Doctor. Fie.

Mike Huckabee said something I liked: "The most important thing a president needs to do is to make it clear that we’re not going to continue to see jobs shipped overseas, jobs that are lost by American workers, many in their 50s who for 20 and 30 years have worked to make a company rich, and then watch as a CEO takes a hundred-million-dollar bonus to jettison those American jobs somewhere else. And the worker not only loses his job, but he loses his pension.

That’s criminal. It’s wrong. And if Republicans don’t stop it, we don’t deserve to win in 2008."
However, he also refused to grade the Bush administration's handling of the War on Iraq, saying:
"I think it’s too early to give them the grade. You don’t give a student a grade in the middle of the exam. We’re still in the middle of the exam. Let’s wait and see how it turns out, then we can give the president a grade." Huh? That war is only half over?

Tom Thompson made a complete idiot of himself by saying that 3,000 US lives had been lost in Iraq and "several thousand injured". He was only 356 out in the deaths - but in the injured, I'd never have described over 24,000 as "several". He should have known better. Disgraceful.

Brownback did not impress - until he said: "Life is one of the most important issues of our day". Gee. There was a day when it wasn't?

Hunter recognised global warming and the need to find alternative energy sources was a reat opportunity and challenge for the USA. Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, Rudi!

Gilmore barely made a blip on the radar and Tom Tancredo was obsessed with keeping Mexicans in Mexico. A one issue man.

John McCain came over fairly well. He clearly had learned his lines and he gave a potted version of his stump speech looking directly into the camera. He was still making very aggressive noises re Iran.

Mitt Romney spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone that his religion did not matter and that no one cared which church one went to so long as one went to church and so long as a man of "faith" was in the White House, because America is a country of "faith". Of course he threw in mentions of his uber-happy family. And, significantly, he promised that Osama bin Laden "is going to pay, and he will die". Romney also managed to crack a few jokes, which made him the only one who reminded one of Reagan at all. For some reason, all the candidates seemed to think Reagan had been the greatest President of all time - perhaps because they were debating in the Reagan Library in the shadow of a bloody great indoor aeroplane.

If I was a Republican voter, I'd give the White House to Rudy Giuliani, I think.
He is able to define the differences betwee Shi'ites and Sunnis. He is not a Bible-thumper. He has the integrity to be the one and only pro-choice voice, dissenting among a mob of pro-life God-botherers.
He keeps reminding us how he turned around New York City and, indeed, he did, even if we're sick of hearing him say so. But he also said that the reason for his success in NYC was the excellence of the bi-partisan team he chose - 6 Republicans and 45 Democrats.
Doesn't that speak the great volume? Wouldn't it make sense just to elect the Democrats?

Shame on Florida

2007-05-04T06:13:00.000-07:00

New Hampshire is known around the world for this one thing, its crucial role in the Primary. The reason the Primary works so well here is all to do with the size of the cities and the political commitment of the people. In the same way that big international arts festivals only truly work in compact cities such as Adelaide and Edinburgh, a hands-on political exercise can only truly work when the cities are not vast and the populations overwhelming. In the latter context, political appearances turn into impersonal rallies. They lose their intimacy and the opportunity for voters to ask the hard questions and meet the candidates in person. This has always been the magic of the New Hampshire Primary. The close scrutiny and the earnest way in which the New Hampshire people embrace it has given this Primary not only its legitimacy but a gravitas. These people have been a national political barometer - only because they truly measure the air. One needs to be here to see how very properly it plays out.

However, the USA is a fiercly competitive country and, as I have written before, the other states have become fiercly jealous of NH's role in national politics. This little northern state. How dare it be important!

So the fight to unseat NH has become nasty.

Florida has just tossed a savage spike into the wheels of the Primary, announcing that it will go to the vote on the last Tuesday in January - instead of March, or even February, which it had suggested was its early target.

One is not surprised to learn that a Republican Governor is behind all this. Governor Charlie Crist has said that he wanted Florida "near the front of the line in determining the next leader of the free world".

Hell, Florida has never needed a Primary to do this. Methinks it is a "by hell or highwater" business for the fourth-most-populous state to throw political weight around.

Who can forget the year 2000?

Florida was key in the 2000 election - with all its recounts and dramas of disenfranchised black voters, missing ballots, duplicated postal votes, malfunctioning machines... It was a disgraceful performance in which we all learned that weird word "chad".
It made Florida internationally famous for its political ineptitude and, perchance, corruption. That shameful 2000 election became known as "Floridagate".

And this is Florida's qualification for trying to destabilise the country's traditonal Presidential Primary process?
Shame upon you, Florida.

Image: Mike Collins' famous 2000 cartoon from taterbrains.com

Websites and electronic friends

2007-05-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

In this lull between visits, Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire campaign has been beavering away in Manchester - getting the office humming along, the campaign outreach liaised and, most importantly of all, the NH campaign website up and running.
It is full of juicy details about the groundswell of support following Hillary's five NH visits and the plans afoot for a Hillary Day of Action on May 12.

Meanwhile, one can see a very different support base growing on My Space. This community is so vast that no one can afford not to be a member. Even I have a page. Hillary and the other candidates most emphatically are on board. It is interesting to see the growth of "friends" in that arena. Hillary had 52199 this morning. John Edwards had 30276. Meanwhile, John McCain had 25367 and Rudi Giuliani, with several aggressive My Space sites, seemed to have only 192. Giuliani's unofficial site had some pretty ugly anti-Democrat material. Hillary's has this:

The Republican Debate is happening tonight and the Repub candidates, all 10 of them, are out and about claiming their moment in the sun. Mitt Romney, the movie star-handsome Mormon with only 14186 friends on My Space, scored an airing on Jay Leno last night showing what a smooth operator he is with his well-scripted jokes and constant family references. He's a "family values" man and recommended that America "look at my wife and me to see American values". Jay did corner him on a question about the Mormon history of racial discrimination to which Romney replied: "One of my best friends is in Ghana bringing people into the church right now". Shudder.

Only in America, eh. Like this whole fascinating process.

A hiatus in NH

2007-04-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

Following the great Democrat debate, the candidates seem to have capitalised on the national media spotlight by spreading their appearances around the country. This leaves New Hampshire with a bit of a lull.

The only person on the hustings this week seems to be Elizabeth Edwards, campaigning on behalf of her husband, John Edwards. Elizabeth recently was diagnosed with an symptomatic return of her breast cancer but, if anything, she has redoubled her commitment to her husband's bid for the presidency. She is an admirable powerhouse and a spectacular asset to the former North Carolina senator.
Nonetheless, she is not a drawcard for me since she is not a candidate. Well, unless this primary is about electing the First Lady.

So I continue to monitor the candidates' websites and the New Hampshire Primary websites looking for new diary annoucements which, oddly, seem to come very suddenly with only a day or so to spare before the candidate turns up in town. Hence, vigilance is required or, whoosh, they've come and gone.

Meanwhile, it is voracious tracking of the candidates through the media, reading Barack Obama's beautifully-written memoir - and waiting to see when or if the Hillary campaign is going to use some of my time.

(photo courtesy Steve Garfield photosharing on Flickr)

Hillary nails fairplay

2007-04-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

From Hillary Clinton working her way around California after the debate, came a promise "to treat all Americans with dignity and equality no matter who you are and who you love".

That comes as one of the great political quotes, a beautifully-put contemporary declaration of fairplay for all. It was doubtless intended for the California gay community but it embraces much more. I'm impressed yet again.

And the debate verdict is...

2007-04-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

There they stood behind their oddly tapering lecterns under the kitsch, over-arty red, white and blue MSNBC debate set - Hillary Clinton, the tiny one, Barack Obama, the tall one, and then John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden - and who the hell is that other fellow?

I'd never heard of Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska.
Well, we all know him now. The man who said he felt like a potplant perched at the edge of the lineup turned out to be the star of the debate. Talk about fresh blood and fresh perspective. He is an old-fashioned sage. A no-bull man! A realist.
Terrorism, he asserted, "has been with civilization from the beginning, and it will be there till the end. We're going to be as successful fighting terrorism as we are fighting drugs with the war. It doesn't work. What you have to do is to begin to change the whole foreign policy."
On Iran and nuclear threats, he noted that the US was the greatest violator of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. "We signed a pledge that we would begin to disarm, and we're not doing it. We're expanding our nukes. Who the hell are we going to nuke?" he blustered.
He also said this:
"We have no important enemies, We've got to deal with the rest of the world as equals. Who are we afraid of? We spend more on defence than any other country...the military controls not only the budget, it also controls our culture." Wow!

Straw polls following the debate have given Gravel a surprising surge.
On Daily Kos, he has zoomed to a 10 per cent vote, ahead of Kucinich, Biden, Richardson and Dodd - but behind Hillary, Obama and Edwards.

I was pleased with Hillary Clinton, however. She was my winner. She has a confident clarity. Her voice has a headmistress timbre, so we pay attention. She is emotionally controlled - calm and rational. She also is comprehensively informed on any topic you throw her. She can think on her feet. She is diplomatic, always knowing what not to say as well as what to say. She has been criticised for this, but, hell, that is what politics is all about.
She also has been endlessly criticised for insufficient mea culpa about voting for the War on Iraq. How many times does she have to regret it? How many times does she have to say that, if she knew then what she knew now, she would never have done so? Anyway, she said it all again - and was criticised all over again by the likes of Edwards and Kucinich.
It was a rather delicious irony to note that she was the most generous-spirited among the candidates, ready to give credit to others.
Oh, yes, she stood right out.

John Edwards lost ground for me in the debate. He says his $400 haircut was "a mistake which has been remedied now". How? He paid the campaign fund back? That is really not a remedy to the primping vanity of $400 haircuts. Edwards went on to defend his "privileged" millionaire lifestyle by claiming not to have forgotten his roots and went into a Southern boy, Down Home childhood tale of how the family left a restaurant when his millworker father realised he could not afford to pay its prices. I think we have had enough of these cornball anecdotes from Edwards. I, for one, have heard them all before. Furthermore, he was the only candidate to suggest that he felt a need to consult his "Lord" .

Dennis Kucinich also lost ground. I had respected his uncompromising leftist views - but in the debate, he showed a bitchy streak I did not like, sniping at his peers, glancing at Hillary and saying "apologies aren't enough". What the hell? Apologies are enough - and forgiveness is all. Kucinich also admitted to being a gun-owner. Hillary was one of the few who indicated never having owned a weapon, at the same time reiterating careful placations to the mighty gun lobby. Everyone seems to do this.

Bill Richardson is known as the darling of the gun lobby. He is a Westerner and he owns guns - but thinks the screening processes for gun purchase are lacking, as evidenced by Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting.
I found Richards a bit bombastic, something of a hothead and too fond of speaking in lists. From this quaint pressure-cooker appearance, I wouldn't put him in the White House.

Joe Biden is charming and he looks the way a president should look. When asked about his greatest mistake, he said it was in "overestimating the competence of this administration" and "stupid enough to believe that I could influence George W Bush's thinking". He brought the house down when, accused of "uncontrolled verbosity" and being a "gaffe machine" and asked if he would have the self-control for the role of president, he said simply "yes" - and not another word. Silence.

Chris Dodd pointed out his considerable qualifications for the job of president but was underwhelming in debate, especially when he spoke on civil unions versus same-sex marriage. He is for the former and against the latter. I liked his idea of diplomacy rather than war, and his quote: "This administration treats diplomacy as if it were a gift to our opponent; a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength".

Barack Obama was my biggest loser. He seemed extremely nervous, which is forgivable. But he also seemed arrogant. He never makes a speech that does not mention his wife and children, which is beginning to grate - and, gratuitously, he mentioned them again. His big mistake in my book was when he went to town on Iran, showing that he has swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the current media campaign to turn Iran into an immediate threat. It is rather reminiscent of the Iraq and "weapons of mass destruction" campaign. Obama said that he believed that Iran was a nuclear threat as well as the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the form of Hezbollah and Hamas and therefore was a threat to the security of the USA.
My conclusion is that Obama is, indeed, the young and inexperienced candidate - and it showed. He is simply not ready for the presidency.

Hillary is.

NH house partying

2007-04-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

It seems something of an anathema, if not downright risky, to invite strangers, sight unseen, to one's home to break bread and sit down in front of the telly.
But such is the culture of New Hampshire in Primary mode. House parties are held to meet the candidates or, as was the case last night, to watch the candidates on television.
I accepted the online invitation of NH Executive Councilor Debora Pignatelli and her husband, Mike, to come over and watch the Democrat Primary Debate on television. Debora is a former State Senator now in the powerful but esoteric role as one of an elite council which advises the Governor, approving budgetary matters and nominations. She has been active in supporting Hillary's campaign, so much so that she has already held a house party for the NY Senator - evidence of which one noticed in the form of a large Hillary Rodham Clinton autograph on the wall.

The Pignatelli home was a salubrious contemporary spread in one of those uber-bourgeois gated estates in which the homes line the fairways of a golf course. The windows look out onto lush lake-view green - and golfers tramping past with their bags of clubs.

Inside the front door we were greeted by a personable young Hillary-for-President staffer called Alex and the usual form-filling registration complete with campaign buttons and stickers. Alex is one of that impressive breed of young American political campaign professionals who move their worlds to the key places where campaign focus is required. Originally a journalism graduate from Maryland, he has come from California and places diverse to spend the best part of a year in NH on the Hillary-for-President mission. He has just settled into an apartment in Manchester where the NH Hillary campaign headquarters has been set up. We saw his ilk on West Wing - young, bright, single-minded and earnest.

Debora materialised to issue a warm welcome and lead us to her vast spread of food. We had not expected such hospitality so had quickly eaten beforehand. There were about 20 people, most of whom seemed to know each other. They were indifferent to our arrival. We chatted with our hosts and, as time came for the telecast, we pulled up chairs and formed a group around the telly in the high-ceilinged living room.
A convivial spirit ensued in the sharing of the experience - 90 intense minutes interspersed with the odd comment or eruption of mirth.
After the debate, Debora had liaised a conference call with Hillary's campaign strategist - but the phone was playing dire hold muzac for so long that, finally, we made our departure because I was getting edgy about making my nightly call too my mother in hospital in Australia.

And, of course, one wanted quietly to digest the contents of the debate. It had made a number of changes in my thinking.

McCain and his idiot sheet

2007-04-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

It was pouring rain. They had given a "rain venue" address in case of such predicted weather but, as we drove past Veterans' Park in Manchester, there was the set-up for McCain's first stump speech as a presidential candidate, a sea of umbrellas and soggily loyal supporters. Why give a rain address and not use it?
Well, it became clear once McCain was up and talking - staring intently in front of him and rarely making eye contact with his dripping audience. There, hooded against the rain, was a giant teleprompter rolling large text! The man was READING his speech. A presidential candidate who did not know his own words! Is this the makings of the Leader of the Free World?

The nickname for teleprompters in Australia is "the idiot sheet". Need I say more?

Well, yes, of course I must.

Clearly, the logistics of moving the chunky great heap of technology which put words in McCain's mouth was the reason they decided to keep the event in the park. Moving it would throw out the whole schedule. As it was, McCain in his "Straight Talking" bus was late and we all stood about shivering and listening to Country music for over half an hour. "Straight talking" was what we got - a man talking straight to a teleprompt.

I didn't attempt to take notes in the rain, so I did not record the content of the speech. Since it is all written as a script, I am sure it is online and I am sure all the reporters were given nice, neat copies. Indeed, the only spontaneity of this political event was when McCain was forced to respond to the interjectors, calling and chanting for an end to the War on Iraq. He was not quick. First he absurdly thanked them, then he said this reflected American freedom of speech and, finally, he clued up enough to echo the New Hampshire motto: "Live Free Or Die".

There were lots of protesters dotted about outside the roped area of this event - brave and wet and passionate people. Predominant were the Ron Paul people waving placards asking "Who's the real maverick?" McCain likes to call himself the Republican maverick but, in fact, his track record is deeply conservative. Ron Paul of Texas, however, turns out to be the real Republican rebel, a congressman who voted against the Iraq War, against the Patriot Act and against regulating the Internet. I'd never heard of him. He turns out to be an obsetrician, of all things.

Amid the steely veterans in leather jackets and "Chosen Few" caps, there also were peacenicks holding anti-war placards and one couple with a long banner mocking McCain's appalling gaffe of singing "Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran".

McCain's no go!

2007-04-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

John McCain came to New Hampshire today to announce officially his run for president.
I went up to Manchester to see his first stump speech.
I return shocked and scandalised.
There is very good reason that this man should not even be considered by the electorate.
His team arrived equipped with a teleprompt.
Yes, he had to read his speech from a screen.
That simply is not presidential material.

McCain is running neck-and-neck with Giuliani as a Repub front runner.
He is 70 years old and he is the man preferred by the pro-war voters.

Giuliani's America

2007-04-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

There was no grandstanding from those introducing Rudy Giuliani to the business voters of Nashua. Simply these succinct declarations:
"New Hampshire is the time-tested proving ground where presidential candidates test their messages with experienced voters to prepare for the long national campaign."
And:
"Grassroots civic engagement is taken very seriously in New Hampshire."

Rudy echoed this:
"There is no better place to do it than New Hampshire where it is traditional. Tradition is important in politics. The idea that NH is the first in the national primary is one that I endorsed a long time ago and now I am running for president, I endorse it more!"

This gained a satisfied titter from the business crowd.

Like most speakers, the former NY Mayor opened with some frivolity - an indulgence in jubilation about the recent historic four home runs hit by the New York Yankees baseball team.
"My wife says the Yankees affect my moods," he admitted, perhaps unwisely, since I, for one, immediately started envisaging a president with the international grumpies because his team had lost.
Rudy went on to recall that he had suggested to Hillary Clinton when they were competing for the NY senator spot that, instead of a conventional senatorial campaign debate which bored viewers, there should be a Yankees trivia debate. Hmm.

"Baseball statistics are endlessly fascinating - and so are economic statistics," he said, in a very nice segue into campaign patter and his "four policies for growth".

"These are not ideas, they are things I've done, things I've brought about," he bragged. "Don't just listen to what I say but listen to what I've done."

Lowering tax came first - to allow private enterprise to grow and hence, allow the national economy to compete with the rest of the world.
"The Democrats blur that line," he said.
Rudy said he had done it in NYC and "if you can do it in New York, you can do it in Washington, DC".
He went on to expand on how, by lowering hotel occupancy tax in NYC, tax revenue had increased.
"Democrats don't understand. Liberal columnists don't understand but if you lower tax, you collect more because more people are using and therefore there is more revenue."
Hotels consequently employed more people and the assorted services grew accordingly, he explained, adding that his term as Mayor had been described as "the most conservative term of office in America in the last 50 years".
Jobs had grown by 30 per cent and fiscal deficit had turned to a multi-billion dollar surplus.
"The Democrats are working out which taxes to raise and I'm working out which to lower," he said.
He cited Capital Gains tax, lowered to encourage more people to invest, and Death Tax (known among Democrats as Estate Tax) whihc he said was an unfair tax which hurt families.

Next Giuliani wanted to reduce the size of the government and reduce government spending, as he did in his Mayoral role.
"Spending restraint and economic growth has to come from the Mayor or President. Executives have to understand this. It has to be part of your DNA."

He went on to criticise over-regulation which is "the same as taxes", and to call for sound monetary policy.
"You have to run government in an effective way, like it is a business. You have to pretend that it is a business," he declared.
This meant constant measuring of performance levels for which he recommended to ComStat Program (which turns out to be an accountability measuing program which he used on reforming the police in NY).
"Measure every week. Are you achieving this?" he reiterated.
This struck me as a form of performance-based management so ferocious that it would leave its staff in a constant state of neurotic stress. Clearly Rudy Giuliani is a tough boss.

He spoke also of US Ambassadors and the State Department with its "overriding purpose to expose America to the world and, secondly to expose the rest of the world to America."

He concluded by saying that people had said it was impossible to reduce crime in New York and that he had done it.
"I'm good at doing impossible things. I like to do impossible things," he triumphed.

The breakfast business crowd, the mass of men in dark suits and ties, might have been devoted Republicans - but they also were New Hampshirites. They had questions and their questions were confronting.

Dependence on foreign oil came first.
Rudy did the old political sidestep by saying "let me give you a slightly different perspective" - and then tackled the issue by suggesting that as Chinese and Indian populations emerged from poverty to middle class, the idea was to sell them things - such as potential energy technology, an American "growth industry". Of course, one needed "to put the emphasis on the private sector" with incentives from the Federal Government to develop this. But this was a "tremendous opportuniy" for the USA.
"I'm a glass half full person," he declared.
He was also in favour of more nuclear power for the US. There has not been a new nuclear power station in 30 years "because some special interests are frightened".
"Nobody has died as a result of nuclear power," he said, adding that wind, solar and carbon sequestration were also worthy of attention. And that OPEC was something of an obstacle as "a cartel that fixes prices". "If it operateed in the US, it would be illegal," he snarled.

Asked about Federal Government entitlement and pharmaceutical subsidies, he returned to the free market theme - "competitive and profit-driven"
"If the goverment takes over, the costs go up," he said.
He envisaged tax incentives for people to buy health insurance, to make a market of individual consumers, suggesting a $15,000 deduction would encourage people to choose $9,000 insurance policies and pocket the rest of the money. My eyebrows shot up.
He mentioned health vouchers, too, and different health products.
"Let's create a vast consumer market," he trumpeted.
"We'll have socialised medicine if we do what the Democrats want."

A black Marine Corps veteran asked about what was to be done for disabled and fallen comrades.
Rudy was passionate about the obligation to give them more support, telling of how he would always visit injuired NY police or firemen in hospital "not only out of respect but to ensure they got high quality care". And they did.
"Whenever the Mayor showed up, the head of the hospital turned up," he laughed.
"What I wanted of these men was that they take heroic risks, so what I owed them was to take care of them. We owe this to veterans, too. We must fulfil our basic humanitarian obligation - which will encourage people to serve. We're going to be a volunteer country."

One last question - and it was Iraq.
The former Mayor saw Iraq as part of the War on Terror and was strongly against the Democrat move to put a date on withdrawal of troops, believing that this simply informed the enemy. He saw an almost limitless terrorist threat from within Iraq and from Iran and Syria and Afghanistan. He thought it was time to get Bin Laden, to ensure Iran did not have nuclear power, and to pursue terrorists "on offence, not defence".
He defended the Patriot Act's incursions into privacy and as "uncomfortable but essential" as yet more of the "offensive against terrorism".
"We are not a warlike country. We are at war because they want to come here and kill us," he concluded.
At which one could only hear, loud a clear, a perpetuation of Bush Administration policy. The only difference was that Giuliani had not mentioned God.

First sight of Rudy

2007-04-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Rudy Giuliani is the Republican Party's bright light as a presidential contender. He is beloved for the statesmanlike way in which he stepped up to the plate after 9/11 when the President seemed not to know what to do, and he is trusted for his track record in turning around crime and unemployment as Mayor of New York City.

Not that he is every Republican's cup of tea. He is a moderate rightist, daring to hold emancipated views on abortion and social justice - attitudes which enrage and alienate the NeoCons. He also has a terrible history with women, now on his third marriage after a really squalid break-up with his second wife, one which had the tabloids in ecstatics. And he has suffered prostate cancer. American voters like to think their Presidents are in top health and won't fall off the perch when in office.

In his big, sleek campaign bus, he came to Nashua today to speak at a breakfast for a National Leaders Forum in the vast neo-Tudor Sheraton Hotel. It had taken me a few phone calls to secure seats at this event which was hosted by local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce.

Indeed, it was anything but a people's events. It was men-in-suits all the way.

We were given 7.30am as the registration and start time, but Rudy did not turn up until after 8am, giving us plenty of time to drink watery hotel coffee and engage in small talk with the others at our table. One was a retired corporate management type who had barely said hello before he had had a little spit about how a lot of migrant voters barely spoke the language and should go home rather than vote. A very nice couple from Tennessee made for easier conversation. They are visiting their daughter in Nashua and thought this was a great chance to get a close, New Hampshire-style look at Giuliani. Such opportunities are uncommon elsewhere.

As always, the television cameras were on their dais at the back of the room with the usual couple of journalists sitting at their feet tapping away on Blackberries. Local press photographers milled around taking social snaps.

A heaving, great breakfast of scrambled eggs, pan-fried potatoes, bacon and sausage garnished with kiwifruit and orange was delivered to the table just as Rudy made his appearance. The cameras erupted in a barrage of flash and the former Mayor made his way down the side of the room amid a scrum of adoration.

Then, like the seasoned pro he is, he worked his way around the room, from table to table, signing autographs and shaking hands.
And there I was, with his silky hand in mine. Good heavens!