Tag: Politics and Grassroots

Daily Kos: Earmarks are OK!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The rhetorical gymnasts at DailyKos are hard at work “taking the steam out of John McCain’s anti-earmark crusade.” Their two-pronged approach has two key points:

1. Earmarks don’t cost that much.
2. Earmarks pay for good things!

It’s not pointing out earmarks that McCain has supported, or rooting out hypocrisy in McCain’s position. They actually like earmarks (for the purposes of the 2008 Presidential campaign).

For the first point, DailyKos draws the analogy of a worker who makes $30,000 per year and carries $90,000 debt, approximately the ratio the country is in. Under this scale, the worker would spend $150 in earmarks – not enough to dent the debt. Thus, according to Kos, earmarks don’t cost that much.

On the other hand, I’d advise the worker that throwing around money and spending wastefully is probably the type of behavior that led to the $90,000 in debt.

And of course DailyKos advises it’s readers to highlight earmarks that do good things and were sponsored by Obama. Setting aside that it’s probably a bad idea to highlight their candidate’s record of supporting earmarks, is the point of reforming earmarks really about the outcome? If our government was spending money on the Monroe County Office of Puppy Punching, I doubt earmarks would be an issue.

Earmarks are bad because it’s taxpayer money – yours and mine – going to a project so a Congressman or Senator can buy their constituents’ votes. And regardless of DailyKos’s moral relativism, that’s wrong.

Don’t call us, we’ll call you

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It looks like the Senate will vote to approve the Wall Street bailout that failed the House earlier this week – despite intense constituent disapproval.

Public disapproval of the proposed bailout was so high, in fact, that the House website crashed under the weight of the public response: those who tried to email their Congressman got an error message about high volume. Their solution was to limit the number of emails constituents could send in.

That’s not a typo – Congress really told America, “Hey! Pipe down!”

It’s easy to blame Capitol Hill’s 1970s-era staffing structure for making Congressional offices amazingly ill-equipped to handle high volumes of electronic constituent communication. But as the internet becomes the easiest and most convenient way for most people to get in touch with their elected representatives, this may just be a scam to drum up business for the post office.

Drinking our milkshake

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it, the Congressional ban on offshore oil and gas drilling disappeared about 15 hours ago. Democrats decided to let the ban expire last week.

It was shrewd. There will be no policy change – given all the regulatory and procedural hoops companies who want to drill will have to jump through, it could be years before the first drill bit pierces the ground. And, as many Democrats are hoping, that will be long after the Obama administration works with larger Democrat majorities in the next Congress to “fix” offshore guidelines.

Failout

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It looks like you, me, and all our fellow taxpayers will not be chipping in more than $5,000 apiece to bail out Wall Street. (They will not be sending it back to us, so don’t get too excited.)

The Wall Street Failout makes me proud to be an American. Across the country, voters’ personal BS meters went off, as constiutuent pressure had a big hand in killing this bill. (Of course, Nancy Pelosi’s campaign speech didn’t help.)

Our elected representatives are now trying to come up with some kind of solution, but this is a good time to trust the wisdom of the people. Much of our current mess was created by government intervention in the first place, as the well-researched video below chronicles (and even though it’s 11 minutes long, it’s worth it). It seems unlikely that the cure for a government-created problem is more government.

Debate Day

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

We still aren’t sure whether or not there will be a Presidential debate tonight. We are sure that there was one 48 years ago today. The infamous Kennedy-Nixon debate ushered in the era of TV politics.

To say TV won the election for Kennedy would be an overstatement – after all, Richard Daley played a big part, too. Similarly, Barack Obama’s vaunted internet strategies will not in and of themselves win him the White House. But like Kennedy’s television presence, Obama’s online savvy involves the mastery of a new medium – and an instant connection with the voters who are catching onto it. By conquering these new conduits of information, both Obama and Kennedy have been heralded as forward-thinking and intellectual.

And, assuming McCain takes the stage at some time in the coming weeks, his age and aversion to technology will be every bit as effective a counterpoint as Nixon’s five-o’-clock shadow.

Debate ’08

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Presidential candidates Bob Barr (Libertarian) and Ralph Nader (Creepy) have offered to fill McCain’s slot in tomorrow night’s debate. McCain can only hope the Commission on Presidential Debates says yes. (The rest of us can only hope they have to bicker and fight over the same podium.)

A Barr/Nader/Obama debate looks like alternative, non-mainstream programming – and with both candidates striving to “look presidential” (even as each pays lip service to being an “outsider”), this puts Obama at the kids’ table for Thanksgiving Dinner while McCain and the grown-ups handle the economy. It’s probably the only way McCain’s ill-fated “skip the debate” strategy works.

On a side note, I’m having trouble reading stories that call Nader and Barr “third party candidates.” How can they both be in a third party when they are in different parties? Doesn’t one of them, by definition, have to be at least the fourth party?

No "YouTube Debate" this fall

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced they will not hold a “YouTube debate” – with questions submitted through voter-generated videos – for this year’s election.

That’s a little disappointing – since 1992’s “townhall” format, the Commission has seemed willing to experiment with new ways of pitting candidates against each other. Still, the idea was tried in the primaries and proved to be little more than a gimmick. Debate co-sponsor CNN essentially picked the questions anyway, so the only difference was that a talking snowman asked candidates about global warming rather than Wolf Blitzer.

A better “voter-generated debate” format might work along the lines of 10questions.com, a project originating from TechPresident.com. The site invites video questions, allows people to vote them up or down, and submits the top ten to all candidates for their response. That would promote videos which are both informative and entertaining. Best of all, those submitting videos would have to “campaign” for votes as well by rounding up friends and social network contacts to vote – which means the project could have an opportunity for viral expansion.

For critics, the long-term solution is to simply break the current debate monopoly by offering new and exciting debate formats every four years – independent of the Commission. As with any idea, it may take time to catch on, but a smart candidate will view it as a way to connect with voters – and, since this is still politics, an opportunity issue a withering criticism of his or her opponent for not jumping on board sooner.

Leadership with a side of crazy

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Senator Jim Webb’s interview in Esquire is worth a read. I always thought Webb had one or more screws loose upstairs, but he gave a great answer when asked about his legacy:

When I first came in people started talking about this could be your legacy project or that could be your legacy project and I said, “No, my staff is my legacy project.” We’ve got people in here who are going to do some really great things in their lives.

That’s a rare type of leadership in Your Nation’s Capital – someone who feels responsible to the staff that works so hard for him. Maybe, I thought, Webb isn’t as loco as I thought.

Then I kept reading, to the point where Webb was asked about finishing his most recent group:

But then my son, we had gotten a tattoo together when he was like eighteen, nineteen, something like that, so he goes, “We’ve got to finish that tattoo.” So I celebrated my book and he celebrated getting into Maryland by finishing up our tattoos.

There’s the Jim Webb we know and love…

Obama doesn’t waffle on racial strategy

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Team Obama has remained relatively mum on the controversy over Obama Waffles – the satirical souvenirs sold at a Family Research Council event by some enterprising third-party vendors. If you missed it, because Obama is black and his cartoon likeness was on a breakfast product, some folks automatically assumed it was a takeoff on Aunt Jemina or other stereotypes. The AP story abandoned objectivity to directly call the image a racial stereotype.

The product was indeed ill-conceived as a political tool – its creators should have predicted the firestorm. And the box includes an image of Obama in a turban on one flap that is, quite simply, political hackery. But is it racist?

A similar flap happened in 2006, when an independent expenditure commercial in Tenessee made fun of candidate Harold Ford’s attendance at a Playboy SuperBowl party. A white, blonde playmate cooed that she had met Ford there and mouthed “call me” to the camera. The ad was denounced as racist because Ford is black and the “playmate” was white. Ford eventually (and reluctantly) joined in the chorus of racial arsonists looking to make something from nothing and lost the race. In ambiguous situations, the electorate doesn’t respond well to the candidate who plays the victim card.

(Incidentally, Ford’s eventual statement about his controversial partygoing might have helped him overcome the controversy altogether had he said it from the beginning: “I like football. I like girls. I don’t have any apologies for that.”)

Barack Obama is making no such mistake, and has issued a “no comment” on the waffles.