Just some random political thoughts I had ruminating about in my head while driving home:

Will we ever have another good political debate? I mean in the spirit of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when the two men ran for the US Senate. The debates these days are so watered down, so lifeless, so uninformative. They don’t really even qualify as debates. The candidates don’t present their view on some topic and then debate the merits of their opponent. They get stock questions for which they have uninspiring answers. I don’t imagine we will ever have a series of debates worth recalling in US History class, worth just referring to as the Obama-Clinton debates or the McCain-Huckabee debates. That eloquence is gone, replaced with the 30 second sound bite. I think our political process has lost something with them.

Why is Clinton attracting the blue-collar vote? I read today that Clinton is attracting more of the blue-collar democratic vote. I have to admit that I am perplexed by this. I’m not entirely sure why, but I feel like Clinton comes across as more of an upper class or elitist person. That Obama is more “regular guy”. This might be just because I don’t know enough about Obama, but Clinton has money (she just loaned her campaign $5 million), she has connections to the party (she is essentially part of the party establishment), and she just comes across as having more airs. So, I’m not sure what about her would attract that blue-collar vote. Lisa speculated that maybe they remember the good Clinton years and she is a symbol of that. That was my first though too, that she is somehow comfortable for that block. But, really, it doesn’t make sense to me.

The next president, either democrat or republican, is essentially screwed. I don’t see how he or she can have a successful presidency. Spending has to be gotten under control; there is no way the next president can spend at the same rate Bush has been spending. That means one of two things: higher taxes or cuts in lots of programs. Either would be very unpopular. Then there is the war. What to do there? If a democrat cuts and runs, and the situation goes to hell in a hand-basket, the republicans will say “We told you so.” If a republican “stays the coarse” and things don’t get any better, the democrats will say “We told you so.” There is no obvious solution and it isn’t clear that anything we can do will make the situation better. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought Bush and Rove planned this from the beginning: screw up the country so bad that a democrat is almost guaranteed to win, but is stuck with such a bad situation that there is no way they can fix it. It almost invariably will get worse. With the short attention span of the voting public, the democrats will be blamed for all the failings, and the republicans will be back in power for quite a while. But, I don’t think they are that smart. I just don’t see how the next president can really do a great job with the baggage and burden he or she will have to deal with.