Anatomy of the World’s Lamest Campaign Season
It’s funny how disinterested I am in this election. Part of it is the deep disappointment I felt about Howard Dean’s Iowa flameout in 2004. I was tremendously excited about Dean, and it was a huge blow to see him knocked out of the race by the skittish party establishment who would rather lose the election than run a candidate who wasn’t part of the team.
Now it’s 2007, and we’re faced with a gallery of establishment candidates — Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden and Dodd. Kuccinich and Gravel are both outsiders, but who in their right mind would support them? I have long been wobbly in my support of Clinton. Her early debate performances convinced me that she was the right candidate, but her increasingly shrill attacks on Obama have lead me to support him, largely due to sympathy.
In many ways, the Republican race is more interesting than the Democratic one. It seems the frontrunner changes daily, and Mike Huckabee, who impressed me as a contender due to his funny and disarming appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher over the years has emerged surprisingly as the current front runner. Huckabee in many ways is the Republican Howard Dean — he represents an appealing alternative to the establishment picks, particularly to young evangelicals skeptical of Romney’s Mormanism, and distrustful of pragmatists like Giuliani, McCain and Thompson. But the corporate-types in the Republican party hate him and loathe the large evangelical base they’ve used to get their candidates elected. It wouldn’t surprise me if Huckabee gets knocked out by McCain or Thompson thanks to party elites reluctant to let fundamentalists take over the party in more than name.
Granted, I’m not exactly a fan — the guy is a theocrat, and he’s in bed with the kind of people who want to make people like me go away. But it is interesting to watch a guy with very little money beat up puffed up heavy weights like Romney and Giuliani.
Don’t get me wrong — I’d sooner write in my dog’s name than vote for a Republican — but at least the Republican slag-fest is entertaining. The Democratic race on the other hand, is at worst cringeworthy, and at best dull. Clinton’s attacks on Obama — particularly the use of surrogates to question everything from his experience to his religious credentials to his past drug use — are sickening. It’s like watching George W. Bush kick the shit out of poor John Kerry, except this time it’s a Democrat doing it. She seems mean and abrasive, and I never hated Bill Clinton more than when he was on Charlie Rose bashing Obama on his wife’s behalf. This coming from a stalwart defender of the Big Dog during his battles with the Republicans in the 1990’s. Any goodwill Hillary earned from me during the early part of the campaign has largely been lost. I’ve been tuning her out for at least a month. If she wins the primary, it’ll be another unenthusiastic and largely symbolic trip to the polls in November for me. I don’t even know why I bother to vote.
But that’s politics — just disappointment after disappointment. I feel bad to have never experienced FDR or JFK — the two heavy weight Democratic presidents of the 20th Century. One only has to look at all the presidents of my lifetime — from Gerald Ford through Bush II — to see why we’re a nation in decline. And the field on both sides is incredibly uninsipiring (again).
But hey, I’m supporting Obama, anyway. At least he’ll make us look good to the world. There’s something to be said for good PR.
