From the New West Blog: What it is ain't exactly clear
There’s Something Happening Here
By Jill Kuraitis, 5-15-08
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Something big is rumbling in the political climate, like a looming prairie storm that makes the cattle edgy and the coyotes settle watchfully in the tall grass.
This week saw Sen. John Edwards endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president, Obama overtake Sen. Hillary Clinton in the number of delegates needed, and, despite her victory in West Virginia, a settling assumption that she won’t make it.
In Oregon, voters could finally hand it to Obama, if they give him an outright majority of pledged delegates on May 20.
Obama is already acting as if he’s running against McCain, and Republicans are worried. After Democrat Travis Childers won a Mississippi special election this week – in a district that had been Republican since 1994, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., wrote to GOP leadership. “The political atmosphere … is the worst since Watergate and far more toxic than the fall of 2006 when we lost 30 seats,” said Davis’ letter. Two other traditionally Republican House seats also went Democrat this year.
The Childers Mississippi victory – a 12-point win in a district considered at least 60% Republican – is the story that has Democrats privately gleaming with hope. One analyst said, “Imagine the Democrats losing San Francisco – that’s how big this is.”
In Idaho, Republican Lt. Gov. Jim Risch is supposed to have a cakewalk right into Larry Craig’s Senate seat, but for the first time in 20 years, national stories and analysis give the Democrat, Larry LaRocco, a real chance.
The Idaho 1st Congressional District seat now held by Rep. Bill Sali is on the national Republican “panic list” and the national Democrats are pouring support to Sali opponent Walt Minnick.
And this from Republican John McCain: “Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring,” McCain said. “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great.”
Evidence of serious upheaval in the political picture is far from solid, but there is enough rumbling to settle down watchfully, like the coyotes.
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Comments
There was nothing in the Republican platform about being a crook, but all too many turned out that way. My wife and I decided that this R running for a newly open D seat in Congress has beady, dead eyes. Not to be trusted eyes. Predator eyes, set too close together. And lo, and behold, it turns out his eye-dear of "right to life" is to drive his preggers sex partner of the month to the surgicenter for a "Not fetus can beat us" special. He is now into the "he said-she said" phase of his denial, but his penny loafters a now holier than old gillnet. And the hack he is running against has a chance to get beat by a Democrat in the fall.
The recent head of Oregon's Republican party, Craig Berkman, is at trial for bilking millions from unsuspecting investors in his hedge funds (he used their money to hedge against his having to live like other folks with less money). A crook, he now appears to be. I am personally tired of Republican's thinking that their conservative political stance was an entitlement to excess in their private lives and a free pass on shady financial dealings. I had enough of that with the Kennedy, ad nauseum fortune and the entitlement lifestyle they brought to society. It now appears that rich Republicans just could not wait to act like rich Democrats, and did just that.
Now in the primary I have a choice between Hillary's new fortune Bill seems to be building like a beaver on meth, or the Obama steamroller out of Chicago, that Chicago which has a pretty unsavory past with pols getting filthy rich on paltry salaries. A horse racing friend is hoping that electing Obama will finally get a casino in black south Chicago so that the horse track owners can save their businesses with casino gambling as well, which Illinois politics has so far prevented until the black part of Chicago gets their own economic engine of casino gambling. My, what a productive country we have become!!!! And since the crooked Republican pols of Illinois and Chicago have been rooted out of office, there is a chance for change. Change of party crooks in control. As industry flees to other parts of the world, running from ever tightening rule of everyday life by the left in this country.
Oregon is pretty much rural Republicans and urban Democrats. The sheer numbers of people living in the urban sprawl of Portland and I-5 corridor cities down to Eugene, means those Democrat folks are in control. Portland is hard into spending the second Billion dollars of Congressional pork on light rail, the s----l----o----w mass transit system of choice because it runs on dead salmon (electricity generated by dams) instead of fossil fuels. The space for extra freeway lanes have been squandered on s----l----o----w light rail, which has huge problems with fee collections and now crime as it moves the gang bangers about the area to terrorize at will. More police are promised. And that will be until tax collections falter, and then it will be just another urban free-for-all. In the minority rural Republican wide open spaces of Oregon, life continues to devolve to summer jobs selling sno-cones to tourists, and winter jobs milking the system for whatever the Dems feel is enough. Even the Republicans in some sort of pious inattention to their lost fiscal moral authority, failed to replace the missing timber share dollars with a permanent in lieu of taxes program, and Democrats have yet to get the job done, either, and some counties in Oregon are soon to be without sheriff deputies, road maintenance crews, open libraries, and whatever else you need to run the private parts of counties with 70% or more public lands, those lands contributing nada, zero, zip, to keeping the courthouse doors open. The money runs out after the primary but before the general election.
I am not a GOOD Democrat. I just wanted to vote for someone in the primary. McCain has a lock. Half the statewide offices did not have a Republican interested in running (attorney gen'l, sec of state to name a couple). No farm team. When the urban voters elect a governor from the same party for 24 years, there is no farm team for the R's. No agency personnel, no deputy asst. gofers, no R lawyers working for the D Attorney General. No farm team. No loyal opposition, because there are no jobs for experience. And because there are not jobs for experience, there are few who want to even try. Government by default. One party rule. That will get old someday, but I wonder if change is now even possible. It will take more than one Fanny Foxx in the fountain to make change. More than one Chappaquidick....more than one phony book deal. I guess it is just not fun to look forward to having the rest of my life look like the first half, where the Democrats ruled Congress like a private fiefdom, and the Barney Franks could house male hookers, and the Gerry Studds could get under-age pages to perform oral sex in the capitol elevators, without censure. The Republicans act like that and they are run out of town on a rail. (Until Craig. He is not only a closeted gay, he is a closeted Democrat.) And so they should be. But there is another long regime of Sen. Foghorns on the horizon, and I cannot find it in my mind to celebrate the occasion. Those specialized speech mannerisms that senators like Wyden and Spector seems to acquire by some sort of osmotic pressure from the marble and granite of Washington DC...Senatorial oratory to talk down to the masses...even with orange hair, botox, eye jobs (ever notice that the eye jobs make them look like Odd Job with a giant erection?), and lots of hair plugs, trophy wives, test tube babies for the new family, and a conveyor belt of staff sent to the state to represent the Senator or Congressman, and become part of the farm team which rules Oregon. Rep. DeFazio is a Rhode Island farm teamer who can as the staff dude for a Rep. Porter who elected to take out bankruptcy while serving, a shot to the foot from which he never recovered. Senator Wyden came from Stanford law, was a multiple bar exam failure, and got a job lobbying for the Grey Panthers, a geriatric interest group and ran for Congress as a nice young man who helped old people. Now he is a geezer himself, but nobody has had the guts to tell him, what with the new babies and all. At least the kids will not be scared by anyone at Hallowe'en, what with that face looking down into the crib.
So, as a new Yellow Dog Democrat, a Blue Dog, whatever they are called, I will vote for conservative D's in the primary, and just have to accept that is how it is always going to be. I have had enough of crooked Republicans, of born again secret gays, of right to lifer's with no qualms about paying for an abortion. I will light my way with the ballot as I search for the honest man or woman.
There are lots of bearbait-like folks out there, and if they're abandoning the GOP, then November looks to be a political earthquake on par with 1932 when FDR put together a coalition that saved the US from its capitalist excesses and calmed down a restive citizenry that could easily have swung to the extremes of fascism or Red revolution out of sheer desperation.
Any of your friends, neighbors, relatives or co-workers "desperate"? I know many and I'll bet bearbait and you do too.
I'm not sure Obama is our next FDR, but I'm darn sure Hillary and McSame are not -- they're way too indebted to rich benefactors and lobbyists. What gives me hope for Obama is his 1.5 million donors who've given less than $200 a pop. That opens the door to the possibility that he'll be President of all the people, not just the rich. Then maybe, just maybe, we can get the Big money out of politics and politicians can start running on the basis of ideas rather than taking care of special interests.
Perhaps our Senators and other pols are like the missionaries Michenor describes in his epic "Hawaii". The missionaries can to do good, and they all did well.
Sandy