Tag: candidates

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Politics Politics Feature

MAD AS HELL: Political U-Turns in New Hampshire, GPS-Style

CREDIT: Cheri DelBrocco

MANCHESTER, N.H. –No doubt, the Global Positioning
System is one of the greatest inventions to come along in a long time. That
voice that tells us to turn left, right, and pull a U-turn is so reassuring.
Last night, I would have been as lost as a little lamb in New Hampshire snow
without it. Driving the highway from Nashua to Manchester seemed less
stressful knowing that a satellite signal in the sky had figured out a way to
keep me from getting lost by keeping me on the right path to my destination.

The double header debate on the campus of St. Anselm
College gave voters a chance to hear the candidates from both parties. It was
cold and snow was piled two feet high, but inside the Dana Center for the
Humanities, the candidates were getting hot. In this state, whose motto is
Live Free or Die, it’s do or die for Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton.

Clearly, not only Governor Romney and Senator Clinton but
all the candidates have become hyper- aware of a new fact since the Iowa
Caucus. A new word, the word, has emerged like a bull’s-eye on the
elective radar: change. Folks in New Hampshire are using a kind of political
GPS to determine which candidate will make the quickest U-turn on the policies
and actions of the last seven years. Most want a change in almost every
policy and aspect of government, both foreign and domestic. Tina, the 20 year
old student/waitress at Chili’s Restaurant in Nashua summed it up this way,
“I’m not sure who I am voting for yet, but I am looking for the one who is
going to pull a fast 180.”

But before the primary, the people here will have to
navigate through something else: a monster spin machine. After the debates
last night, the spinning was so full tilt, it felt like I was watching a
broken down Maytag with too many towels. Every candidate had a spin-doctor and
the stampede of cameras, recorders, mikes, and lights was like the stampeding
buffalo scene in Dances with Wolves.

Elizabeth Edwards entered the room looking energized as
she passionately discussed her husband’s debate performance. She predictably
claimed he had hit a home run and emphasized his “you cannot ‘nice’ people to
death” comment, an obvious jab at the call of both Obama and Richardson for
dialogue with Pakistan’s Musharraf and other leaders in the Middle East.
Assisting her was former Michigan congressman David Bonior, who pointed out
Edwards’ debate commitment to end all combat missions in Iraq and to close all
bases there in the first year of his presidency. Joe Trippi, former manager
of the Howard Dean campaign, was putting additional frosting on the Edwards
cake by claiming Edwards would definitely carry the day on Tuesday.

Senator Obama had his own spin game going through the
medium of campaign strategist David Axelrod, who immediately declared Obama to
be the clear winner and forecast a sunnier outcome in the New Hampshire
primary for this candidate than the win last week in Iowa.

The room was also filled to the rafters with heavy
hitters such as Joe Scarborough, Joe Klein, Bay Buchanan, and Jeff Greenfield,
each trying to out-spin and out-opinionate the other. This went on for well
over an hour, at which time the media fanned out to various networks and local
stations to broadcast their latest chestnuts

In a little over 24 hours, the good people of the Granite
State have got their work cut out for them. The die is cast and the call for a
change in direction is resonating loud and clearly. For now, we can only
speculate on whose voice we might be hearing when the nation turns on its
political Tom Tom in November.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

It’s Secular

The office of the president is a secular office in a secular government. There is not a word in the Constitution that authorizes the president or anyone else in the federal government to make a religious decision.

Why then are both voters and candidates wasting their time talking about religion? The personal religious beliefs of the candidates should be considered irrelevant. Furthermore, people should not forget that there are a lot more professors of religion than practitioners. What a person claims to believe and how that person leads his or her life are often quite different.

Laws are, in the final analysis, words on paper. They cannot and do not control human behavior. If they could, there would be no crimes. Americans, especially politicians, have developed the bad habit of thinking that there ought to be a law to cover every conceivable human action. Consequently, there are so many laws today that no human being can possibly know what they all are. This defeats one of the useful purposes of laws, which is to educate the public.

As for religion, people should recognize that all the world’s religions have failed to eliminate sin, and therefore no one should expect the government to do that. Christianity in particular is based on the twin concepts of sin and forgiveness. Governments are better at finding sin than at forgiving.

Religion has a legitimate role in our society. George Washington said religion is the best way known to instill virtue in masses of people. That is job enough for religion, and religion should stay out of politics as an organization. Religious individuals, of course, have the same rights and duties as any other citizen.

Religion itself has enough problems to solve. Christian Zionists, for example, are a heretical cult without any biblical foundation and with a political agenda. Other Christians have perverted the religion into a weekly course on how to be rich and happy. Christianity, in fact, teaches that it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Militant Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

If you are trying to find someone actually practicing Christianity, whom would you choose — a preacher with a six-figure salary, a limousine, and a private jet or, say, an actor like Brad Pitt, who has committed $5 million of his own money to build homes for people in New Orleans’ 9th Ward?

In judging human affairs, always look for actions, not words. What a person says tells you nothing reliable; what a person does gives you a better clue as to what kind of a person he or she is. At the same time, don’t forget the dual nature of human beings.

One can find faults with all religions. One should not forget, however, that the same can be said of all secular philosophies, ideologies, and institutions. Nothing human is or ever will be perfect.

As for the presidential candidates, people should be asking not what these people claim to believe about God, but what have they actually done? How do their lives measure up to their speeches? Do they demonstrate a belief in and a concern for the Constitution? Do they have a wide knowledge of the world as it truly is? Are they catering to special interests? Are they independent thinkers or followers?

The presidential race is, after all, a search for a secular leader, not for a pope or ayatollah. The United States is in deep trouble politically, financially, and economically. It will take a smart, sane, and courageous person to get us out. Opportunists and people who sell their souls for campaign contributions may well preside over our national collapse.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

GOP Candidates Slam Huckabee on Sunday Talk Shows

The Washington Post does a weekly roundup of the Sunday morning political talkshows. This week, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was getting hit from all sides. Tennessee’s Fred Thompson fired a salvo, and so did Mitt Romney.

From the Post: Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, surging in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination, faced criticism by two rivals yesterday.

Fred D. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, said, “Liberal is the only word that comes to mind, when he was governor.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Thompson criticized Huckabee for his positions on illegal immigration, tax policy and Cuba, and for his belief that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be shut down.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney criticized Huckabee for a recent Foreign Affairs article in which he called the Bush administration’s foreign policy “arrogant.”

“Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I think he needs to read the article. It would really help if he would do that. Because if he did, he would see that there’s no apology necessary to the president,” Huckabee responded on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

For more, see the Post‘s website.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Preacher in Chief?

As we all know, the president of the United States is elected by and swears to serve all citizens of this nation by protecting and defending the Constitution, not the Bible or any other religious text. America — founded by men who in some instances proclaimed Jesus as their God — was created to assure the freedoms of religion and conscience without regard to an individual’s personal beliefs, creed, or worship practices.

The Republican Party appears to have abandoned any commitment to this tenet of the Constitution and is positioned to nominate a preacher in chief, whose first loyalty will be to the dogmas of Christian fundamentalism.

And they have a constituency. Across the country, sprawling corporate religious “lifestyle centers,” serving more as Christian country clubs than as houses of worship, have produced congregations who foster a blend of ostentatious piety, self-righteous intolerance, and unyielding arrogance. For these churchgoers, voting Republican is de rigueur.

Unprecedented amounts of wealth have been amassed in many of these churches, not in small part as a result of the wealth-redistribution policy of the Republican administrations’ faith-based government programs. The threat of losing this power and money may in fact be looming large in the selection of the party’s nominee and in the desperately pious tone, manner, and attitude of the Republican presidential acolytes.

Not to be outdone, the media, particularly cable television punditry and radio talk-show hosts, are reliably helping to advance the idea of establishing a religious “test” for candidates. Although the most recent Republican debate fielded questions created by viewers of YouTube, those questions were vetted and selected by officials at CNN. Thus, all Republican presidential candidates were asked by Wolf Blitzer if they believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. (Any guesses as to how the pack of them answered?)

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a proud member of God’s Own Party and an ordained Baptist minister, may be the most flagrant offender against the Constitution. Huckabee recently told a group of students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that his astonishing rise in the Iowa polls is an “act of God.” He has also received letters of endorsement from Tim LaHaye, author of the “Left Behind” series of novels which extol the Rapture as an imminent end-of-the-world phenomenon.

Huckabee has stated on the record that he does not believe in evolution and lists among the most urgent issues facing the country the perils of abortion and gay marriage, as well as threats to the unlimited rights of gun-owners. His frequent statements of religiosity are delivered with a jocular smile and a sense of humor — designed, apparently, to seem non-threatening to anyone who is not a believer.

And, as if this country hasn’t suffered enough division, enough religious hypocrisy, and enough self-righteous intolerance in the last seven years, now we have former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, an ex-moderate of sorts, hastening to join the ranks of Christian soldiers in the Republican Party and seeking like the rest to impose a religious obligation on political service. His immediate motivation, amplified by concern about rival Huckabee, is to gain the White House at any cost, but the ultimate result of his apostasy from reason is to further erode the wall separating church and state in this country — something most Christian fundamentalists believe is a myth concocted by God-hating secular liberals.

Prompted by Huckabee’s surge, Mormon Romney has ramped up his attempt to sway the fundamentalist crowds and seems determined to try to one-up Preacher Huckabee. He may indeed have trumped Huckabee with this mind-bending assertion: “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Can Romney really not know of the suppression, torture, and murder of heretics and infidels by Christians (and members of virtually every other religion) throughout history?

When candidates such as Romney and Huckabee ratchet up their efforts to destroy the separation of church and state established by this country’s founders, it requires those of us in the electorate to ratchet right back. After all, it is an election that will be held in America next November, not an altar call.

Cheri DelBrocco writes the “Mad As Hell” column for MemphisFlyer.com.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Here’s the thing about our friend Tim Sampson, who fills this space most weeks: He knows what he’s talking about. He reads all about the politicians, forms detailed opinions, then writes his columns secure in the knowledge that he is well informed. You’d think that’s a good thing, but the problem is so many of the rest of us are completely uninformed and therefore don’t fully understand what he’s talking about. Although I have figured out that he stays pretty pissed off.

Yes, I am one of the deliberately unaware. There may have been a time when the whole politics thing seemed groovy to me and I kept up to date, but those days ended sometime around President Clinton’s Hummer-Gate. All of those old white guys getting squeamish while trying to make political hay made me find other ways to keep entertained. I’ve been very busy deciphering the instructions to my new cappuccino-maker. Hours of my life have been filled laboring to teach my cats tricks. This is important work, people.

Still, I try to read Tim’s column because he’s an old friend. In fact, the dissolute misanthrope was once my boss. (Wrap your head around what that was like.) Now, I open the Flyer and wade my way through his screed, often baffled at who the players are and what their agenda may be. Tim knows his local politics, and there, I’ve got nothing. There are a whole lot of Fords, and they seem to get folks awfully riled up, but I don’t like getting riled up. We’ve had the same mayor for a really long time, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing isn’t for me to say.

On the national front, as far as I can determine, the Republicans are apparently going to run Fred Thompson, Rudolph Giuliani, or the Mormon guy who doesn’t want to always be referred to as the Mormon guy. I understand his wishes on this, but the only name I have for him is the Mormon guy. I will give him this: He has majestic hair. If we elected presidents solely on their sartorial splendor, he’d already be measuring for drapes. Or one of his wives would be. (It’s a joke, son.)

Giuliani seems pretty cool to me. What I love is that at one point while he was mayor of New York City, he was living in the mayor’s residence with both his soon-to-be ex-wife and his mistress. That’s not bad for a squirrelly guy with a bad comb-over.

I’ve met Fred Thompson, and he was very actorly. When you meet someone who is actorly, you know it. They’re very well spoken, have a practiced conspiratorial wink, and know how to wear makeup. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the fact that I know lot of actors and they’re, um, not that smart. They can memorize words really, really well, but you don’t want one doing your taxes.

On the Democrat side, they seem destined to run Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or Barack Obama. There’s also that crazy little elf, Dennis Kucinich, but this country will never elect a President Dennis. Damn it.

John Edwards seems like a genuinely nice guy, but it’s hard to get past the whole fighting for the poor while having a house the size of an airport thing. Obama is a very charismatic guy. The few times I’ve seen him on TV, he’s come across as totally prepared to be president. You know who also seems totally prepared to be president? Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Yeah, that’s not going to happen either.

Hillary. If you noticed that I saved her for last, it’s mainly because I’m afraid of her. We can quibble about whether her eight years of icily smiling at her husband while she was first lady qualifies as “experience” or whether it even makes sense that she’s a senator from a state she had never lived in before, but the truth is, most every American is scared of the woman. I don’t mean that we fear that she’ll do something crazy as president. I mean we’re afraid that if she got angry at one of us, she would personally kick our ass.

Between now and whenever we’re supposed to vote — which I think is probably sometime next fall — I’ll do some actual research. Or I’ll just keep reading Tim’s column. And do the exact opposite of whatever that lunatic advises. Like I said, I know the guy.

Dennis Phillippi is a Memphis writer, comedian, and radio host.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Understudy

Earlier in the year, local Republicans, like their counterparts elsewhere in Tennessee, were jumping ship from other presidential campaigns to make known their allegiance to former Senator Fred Thompson. That was back when Law & Order star Thompson, presumably on the strength of his Nielsen ratings, was considered the answer to GOP prayers.

The lanky, rawboned actor/lawyer/lobbyist, a native of Lawrenceburg in Middle Tennessee and a University of Memphis graduate, had ample cachet. A protégé of former Senator Howard Baker, who in 1973 made him minority counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, Thompson had by 2007 been in the public eye for a full generation.

His acting career in the movies as well as on TV, plus eight years in the Senate, had made him a figure familiar enough to be a formidable trump card. But when he got turned up on the table — or, more to the point, when he began standing side-by-side with his GOP rivals on the debate sage — something seemed to be missing.

Maybe it was age (some thought Thompson looked unexpectedly thin and ravaged), maybe it was conviction (what was his role supposed to be? moderate? arch-conservative? Bushite? critic?), or maybe it was the candidate’s well-known laissez-faire attitude toward exertion. Whatever the case, the Thompson boom went from bang to whimper in record time.

Meanwhile, another Mid-South candidate has been auditioning well on the road. That’s Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and, as has been pointed out ad infinitum, a native of Hope, hometown of two-term former Democratic president Bill Clinton, another up-from-nowhere sort.

By now, Huckabee has actually taken the lead among Republicans in Iowa, whose caucuses will be held in early January. His dramatic arrow up parallels Thompson’s going down. And, whereas Thompson had never quite defined his character in the ongoing campaign drama, the folksy but articulate Huckabee has his down pat: He’s an unabashed pro-life social conservative but also an economic populist who raised taxes for social programs as governor and who regularly denounces “Wall Street” in the manner of a latter-day FDR.

As such, Huckabee performs the improbable feat of yoking two points of view that have been politically sundered for well over a generation. In some ways, he’s a throwback to the old Southern Democratic model. He’s a former Baptist preacher who can also play a mean bass guitar on “Free Bird” — a feat he performed alongside current Shelby GOP chairman Bill Giannini’s lead guitar at the local Republican “Master Meal” last year.

Huckabee’s plain-spoken oratory was also a huge hit at that event, and there’s no doubt that the seeds for a mass following have been planted in these parts.

Tracy Dewitt of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club is a dedicated supporter, as is Paul Shanklin, the local businessman and successful impressionist who does all those politicians’ voices for Rush Limbaugh. The Arkansan’s national campaign manager, moreover, is Chip Saltzman, an ex-Memphian and a graduate of Christian Brothers University.

When the East Shelby Republican Club, one of the GOP’s local bedrocks, had an informal straw-vote poll at its regular monthly meeting last week, Thompson still had the residual strength to come out well ahead. Huckabee was down among such relative also-rans as New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney.

But that, as club president Bill Wood acknowledges, was then. Now is something else. “That was before Huckabee got a front-page article in USA Today and all this other recognition.” If the same straw vote were held today? “Oh he’d go up like a bullet. There were already a lot of people here who liked him. Now they’re starting to see how he’s doing in the rest of the nation.”

Indeed, it is probable that, if Huckabee should hold his present numbers and win Iowa, you couldn’t build a big enough bandwagon to accommodate his supporters locally.

One caveat: Thompson could still come back. There are many political observers who remember his lackadaisical start in 1994 against Democratic Senate opponent Jim Cooper, whom he trailed at one point by 20 points in the polls — the same number he would eventually win by against Cooper.

But for the time being, the man from Hope has center stage.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Thin Gray Line

Though the grins were plentiful as Mayor Willie Herenton and members of his council-to-be in 2008 got together for lunch at the Rendezvous last Wednesday, the smiles may have tightened up a little when His Honor climaxed the get-acquainted event with a speech that warned of a “gray line” and of “certain areas where either branch decided to get into the other branch’s domain.”

A shot across the bow it seemed, a recap of sorts of the mayor’s troubles with past councils — most recently on council staff appointments — on matters where, as Herenton indicated, the legislative and executive branches of city government may have had conflicting ambitions.

But that was as contentious as things got Wednesday as former councilman and Rendezvous owner John Vergos, along with another former council member, the Rev. James Netters, co-hosted the luncheon in which nine newly elected members came together for the first time with the four holdover council members.

Oh, Joe Brown made special mention of “divisiveness,” and Netters referred to even worse times of the past, like the late 1960s, when he and other members of the city’s first elected council had to deal with “riots, violence, and murder” in the context of a prolonged sanitation strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

But mostly talk was of the upbeat sort, beginning with Vergos’ mention of a Rhodes College brochure touting Memphis’ virtues and continuing with mutual pledges all around of cooperation in the new year.

Afterward, the mayor, who announced he would not hold the annual New Year’s Day prayer breakfast on which, customarily in recent years, he would issue policy thunderbolts, gave reporters a list of objectives which included such familiar (but unachieved) standbys as metro government and bringing the city school system into municipal government as such.

Herenton also pledged to resolve financial and jurisdictional disputes in the operation of the Beale Street tourist quarter. He deferred to the council on the matter of whether it should pass its own version of a County Commission ordinance on topless clubs, but it is taken for granted he wants a more lenient ordinance than the county version, which bans beer sales in such establishments and requires pasties on dancers.

Ironically enough, a wall of the basement room in which council members, staffers, and the mayor met contained a rendering of a reclining nude, sans pasties.

The entire complement of the 2008 council membership was on hand, with the exception of new member Reid Hedgepeth. Mayoral and council aides also attended.

Continuing in its get-ready mode, members of the council will be holding an all-day retreat next week.

• Local Republican chairman Bill Giannini became the first candidate to throw his hat in the ring for the 2006 county election by filing last week for the office of Shelby County assessor. Other potential GOP primary candidates are John Bogan, Betty Boyette, and Randy Lawson. Cheyenne Johnson intends to run as a Democrat, as might Jimmy White.

• One of the bona fide movers and shakers in the local political world (and the civic and financial worlds) is Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd, who reports that he expects to make a “full recovery” from a recent operation for colon cancer.

Byrd, a former state legislator and candidate for Congress and county mayor, has legions of friends from all points on the political spectrum and has been well-wished by most of them of late.

Just now, Byrd is trying to organize a charter flight for the University of Memphis Tigers’ appearance at the New Orleans Bowl on December 21st. Given that the basketball Tigers are playing a big game against Georgetown at the FedExForum on the 22nd, that’s no cinch, but, as Byrd points out, taking the flight, which goes and returns on the same day, is a surefire way of taking in both events.

• From a Standing Start, former Republican governor Winfield Dunn‘s political memoir, drew a good crowd for a recent book-signing at Bookstar on Poplar.

Among other things, the book contains some amusing anecdotes at the expense of Dunn’s vanquished Democratic foe in 1970, John Jay Hooker.

But there is an aura of good will in the book, as there was at the signing. When someone mentioned the Hooker reference to Harry Wellford, who managed Dunn’s 1970 efforts, the former judge nodded and said, “But they’re good friends now,” then smiled and added: “And that’s as it should be.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Who Is This Huckabee Mug Anyhow, and Why Is He Stealing Fred Thompson’s Thunder?

Earlier in the year local Republicans, like their
counterparts elsewhere in Tennessee, were jumping ship from other presidential
campaigns to make known their allegiance to former Senator Fred Thompson. That
was back when Law and Order star Thompson, presumably on the strength of
his Nielsen ratings, was considered the answer to GOP prayers.

The lanky, rawboned actor/lawyer/lobbyist, a native of
Lawrenceburg in Middle Tennessee and a University of Memphis graduate, had ample
cachet. A protégé of former Senator Howard Baker, who in 1973 had made him
minority counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, Thompson had by 2007 been
in the public eye for a full generation.

His acting career in the movies as well as on TV, plus
eight years in the Senate, had made him a familiar figure enough to be a
formidable trump card. But when he got turned up on the table – or, more to the
point, when he began standing side by side with his GOP rivals on the debate
stage – something seemed to be missing.

Maybe it was age (some thought Thompson looked unexpectedly
thin and ravaged), maybe it was conviction (what was his role supposed to be?
moderate? arch-conservative? Bushite? critic?), or maybe it was the candidate’s
well-known laissez-faire attitude toward exertion. Whatever the case, The
Thompson boom went from bang to whimper in record time.

It is not just that his finances are hurting or that the
national media is beginning to write him off or that his numbers have dwindled
to single digits in Iowa, whose caucuses are coming up within a month’s time.

The real problem is a rival area candidate who has been
auditioning well on the road. That’s Mike Huckabee, the former governor of
Arkansas and, as has been pointed out ad infinitum, a native of Hope, home town
of two-term former Democratic president Bill Clinton, another up-from-nowhere
sort.

By now, Huckabee has actually taken the lead among
Republicans in Iowa. His dramatic arrow up parallels Thompson’s going down. And,
whereas Thompson had never quite defined his character in the ongoing campaign
drama, the folksy but articulate Huckabee has his down pat: He’s an unabashed
pro-life social conservative but an economic populist who raised taxes for
social programs as governor and who regularly denounces “Wall Street” in the
manner of a latter-day FDR.

As such, Huckabee performs the improbable feat of yoking
together two points of view that have been politically sundered for well over a
generation. In some ways, he’s a throwback to the old Southern Democratic model.
He’s a former Baptist preacher who can also play a mean bass guitar on “Free
Bird” – a feat he performed alongside current Shelby GOP chairman Bill
Giannini’s lead guitar at the local Republican “Master Meal” last year.

Huckabee’s plain-spoken oratory was also a huge hit at that event, and there’s
no doubt that the seeds for a mass following have been planted in these parts.

Tracy Dewitt of the northeast Shelby Republican Club is a
dedicated supporter, as is Paul Shanklin, the local businessman and successful
impressionist who does all those politician’s voice for Rush Limbaugh. The
Arkansan’s national campaign manager, moreover, is Chip Saltzman, an ex-Memphian
and a graduate of Christian Brothers University.

When the East Shelby Republican Club, one of the GOP’s
local bedrocks, had an informal straw vote poll at its regular monthly meeting
last week, Fred Thompson still had the residual strength to come out well ahead.
Huckabee was down among such relative also-rans as New York’s Rudy Giuliani and
Massachusett’s Mitt Romney.

But that, as club president Bill Wood acknowledges, was
then. Now is something else. “That was before Huckabee got a front-page article
in USA Today and all this other recognition.” If the same straw vote were
held today? “Oh he’d go up like a bullet. There were already a lot of people
here who liked him. Now they’re starting to see how he’s doing in the rest of
the nation.”

Indeed, it is probable that, if Huckabee should hold his present numbers and win
Iowa, you couldn’t build a big enough bandwagon to accommodate his supporters
locally.

One caveat: Thompson could still come back. There are many
political observers who remember his lackadaisical start in 1994 against
Democratic Senate opponent Jim Cooper, whom he trailed at one point by 20 points
in the polls – the same number he would eventually win by against Cooper.

But for the time being, the man from Hope has center stage.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Idol Fancies

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon,

Going to the candidates’ debate.

Laugh about it, shout about it.

When you’ve got to choose,

Every way you look at it you lose.

— “Mrs. Robinson” by Paul Simon

These traveling roadshows called debates have increasingly taken on the air of a TV reality program. I watched one Republican debate, but after seeing a majority of the candidates admit, en masse, that they questioned the validity of evolution, I didn’t need to watch another.

The Republican debates are equivalent to the summer replacement show America’s Got Talent. (The Democrats shade toward American Idol.) The contestants are carefully scrutinized as to appearance and confidence levels, and expectations run high each week over who will stumble and who will rise to the challenge. They even have judges posing as questioners. They critique the candidates’ answers and attempt to build rivalries within the group. The role of the intemperate asshole judge is played by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (alternately, Chris Matthews). The flaw in the concept is that we can’t phone in each week and get somebody booted in order to thin this herd and maybe hear something of substance.

I took an online poll in which you were asked to match your opinions with the candidate who most closely holds your views. Mine came out Dennis Kucinich, which is good and bad.

I admire the congressman’s courage to call for impeachment openly and often. (He nearly got a vote to the floor last week.) I agree with him on ending the war in Iraq and holding the planners accountable. And he has been the single most consistent liberal voice in all these dark Bush years.

But I also know Kucinich hasn’t got a chance to win the nomination. I’ll happily vote for him in the Tennessee presidential primary to make a statement. Hell, I once voted for Prince Mongo for county mayor. I also voted for LaToya London on American Idol.

But once again, machine politics and corporate cash rule over procedure, and even though Kucinich’s rousing debate performances rival the American Idol appearances of Bo Bice, he’s going to lose to the blond lady who was mistreated when she was younger.

Before Hillary gets measured for crown and scepter, however, it would be well to remember that not a single vote has yet been cast and that the American voter is a famously fickle animal who will turn on you in an instant. How else can you explain Taylor Hicks winning American Idol, or George Bush winning anything, for that matter?

I’m sure Kucinich is at least as deserving as fellow ugly duckling Clay Aiken was. But if I had to review Hillary’s debate performances thus far, I would say, à la Randy Jackson, “It was just aw’ite for me, Dog. You’re a little pitchy.”

While this lite operetta continues, President Zero is neglecting some serious issues: The Chinese are trying to date-rape our children; Wal-Mart has been discovered taking out life insurance policies on its aged workers and collecting benefits when they die; Laci Peterson has morphed into Stacy Peterson; a discovered statement left behind by the still-deceased Saddam Hussein said his flim-flammery about WMD was not to threaten the U.S. but to fool Iran.

Barack Obama has promised to take off the gloves this week. And did I fail to mention our troops are in the middle of a foreign civil war with no end in sight? Too bad we can’t just vote the troops off the island.

Al Gore may have won his Oscar and his Nobel Prize, but Carrie Underwood and Daughtry kicked major butt at the AMA’s, and Fantasia was up for an award, too. With the current television writers’ strike, the mid-January start of the new season of American Idol might have to be moved up, just like those nervy upstart states want to do with their Johnny-come-lately primaries.

Then we could have five nights of nothing but American Idol and debates. But if the debates are going to compete, they have to really want it, Dog. This is, after all, a singing competition. And there is one lonely voice singing in the corner, crying, “Impeach now. Impeach now.” Can you hear him? It’s Dennis “The Dark Horse” Kucinich, and his spouse is better looking than Hillary’s any day.

Hey, no one believed Ruben Studdard could win either. Seacrest out.

Randy Haspel is, among other things, a Memphis musician and wit. He writes at bornagainhippies.blogspot.com.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

“Fixing” Elections

It seems clear enough that several of the City Council races just run were determined by such obvious factors as name recognition and big-money advertising. On the latter score, so numerous and ubiquitous were one successful candidate’s yard signs that his campaign manager was able to say, only half-jokingly, that some of the signs probably needed to be recycled. That candidate, who campaigned in lieu of attendance at the several candidate forums held at frequent intervals and at a variety of locations, won. Yes, he probably was supported by what could be called “special interests,” but so were several other candidates — well-regarded incumbents and newcomers alike.

Giving all these worthies the benefit of the doubt (and yes, there was a definite correlation between financial support and victory), we have the right to hope that they will act in office with integrity and independence.

Another feature of this and other recent political campaigns was the prevalence of attack ads on TV. Results in this sphere were hit-and-miss, though there was little doubt that the persona of Jerry Springer, television shlockmeister nonpareil, was a downer for any candidate his name was coupled with — whether a candidate was bragging of a connection, as in one case, or imputing an unsavory relationship, as in another.

Then there were the polls. Heated controversies erupted between the camps of competing mayoral candidates, both as to the reliability of these supposedly scientific surveys and to their sponsorship, acknowledged or unacknowledged. We are not in a position to judge the latter question — nor, for that matter, the former. All we can say with certainty is that the results on election day were somewhat out of kilter with any and all of the published surveys.

Today’s financial-disclosure laws exist to provide curbs on overt special-interest support. The public media are similarly required to make space and time available on a non-discriminatory, first-come/first-served basis. As far as attack ads and polls are concerned, there is very little remedy, except for voters to outfit themselves with abundant supplies of those proverbial grains of salt.

In the end, it is the people themselves — not hucksters, not pollsters, not technicians, and not even the ever-burgeoning class of campaign professionals — who are charged with the duty of electing our public officials. There have been several intriguing proposals made of late for re-charging our electoral process — ranging from a guaranteed-instant-runoff formula (dependent on multiple-choice ballots for voters) to proposals for mandating majority turnouts.

But the remedy we continue to take most seriously is the one we hear the most about but which rarely gets acted upon anywhere — and in Memphis and Shelby County, never. That is the idea of publicly financed elections. Chances are, unfortunately, that the newly elected crop of City Council members will lend an open ear to the idea of continuing PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) subsidies for new industry. Even a small fraction of the money thereby given away would pay for publicly financed elections.