Words and more words

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?

Political baggage check

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.

Republican debate good for Dems

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?

Websites and electronic friends

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.