danajohnhill.org

My understanding of civics and history is decent.  I’m not an authority, of course, and there is something I would really like to understand.

Following a US presidential election, like the one we had last week, when the results come in from states across the country, and one candidate passes the required 270 mark in the electoral college, they are the winner.  Sure, the electoral college doesn’t formally convene until December, but last Tuesday night it was clear that Senator Obama was the winner, and will be president elect.

Here’s where it gets a little foggy for me:  So, Senator Obama is watching CNN, and he sees Wolf Blitzer and John King analyzing the maps, and projecting winners in each state until, finally, the 270 mark is passed. What happens then?  Obviously, Senator Obama–and everyone else–knows he’s won.  But is there some sort of formal procedure that’s followed?  Yes, the loser generally concedes, as John McCain did in a speech that exhibited a great deal of class.  And President Bush called Senator Obama, too.  But neither of those events are necessary.  I mean, even if, hypothetically, John McCain had stood up in that Phoenix hotel ballroom and said, “I declare myself the winner!”, it wouldn’t have mattered; 346 electoral college votes say otherwise.  But does some government official call up Barack Obama and say, “We’re watching CNN.  They say you have the votes, so, if you’re going to be home tomorrow morning, we’d like to come by and start telling you the all the classified state secrets you’re going to need to know”?  Something like that must happen, because, sure enough, the day after the election the NSA or CIA or some agency was briefing President Elect Obama.

Are there any authorities on US presidential history reading?

WASHINGTON — It seems like this presidential campaign has been going on for years, and, in effect, it has.  It wasn’t always clear that it would end up being Obama and McCain whose names would be on the ballot, but, here we are.

Obviously, I have been extremely interested in the election this year, and, as you know, I have a preference.  I am encouraged by the poll numbers for my guy, but you never know what will happen.  It will be a bittersweet win for either candidate, since the epic failure of the Bush administration will constrain the agenda of the next president.  There was an opportunity in 2004 to set things on a better course, but it didn’t come to pass.  The next four years are about clean up.

In any event, it’s critical that everyone remember that we are our government.  The extent to which it works for us or against us is on the line.  We don’t have direct democracy, so this election is our best opportunity to voice our opinions.  And that only can happen when we vote.  I already voted.  If you haven’t yet, I hope you will.

Last night was the third and final presidential debate this year, and it was probably the most interesting, and best moderated.  Tom Brokaw seemed powerless to maintain any control in the second debate; Jim Leherer was decent, but didn’t seem to demand answers.  (Gwen Ifill allowed Sarah Palin to get away with declaring she wouldn’t answer the questions asked, and did nothing when Governor Palin proceeded to use her response time to make unrelated talking points.)  Last night, Bob Schiefer was pretty good.  He did the best job maintaining focus, which is a tough task considering how rambling politicians can be.

John McCain was finally animated.  I think he did much better for himself sitting at a table than he did in the “town hall” format that was supposed to be his strong suit.  But I think for all his fustiness, he didn’t do himself much good.  He constantly brought up “Joe the Plumber”, and criticized Senator Obama, declaring that under Senator Obama, Joe would pay more taxes, and have a tougher life.  The papers are all over this story today, and it’s amazing how quickly Joe’s actual circumstances have been brought to light, and how incorrect Senator McCain was.  Even if Joe owned the business he would like to own–and that isn’t probable any time soon, since he doesn’t have the money, and apparently isn’t licensed–given the annual revenue of that plumbing business, Joe would do better under Senator Obama’s proposed tax plan than he would under Senator McCain’s.

Now, I know that Senator McCain and Republicans like to protest that it isn’t fair that people should be “punished” for doing well, and have their taxes raised.  I understand that, on first glance, this seems punitive.  But, I look at it this way: the middle class–which drives the American economy–needs the break more than those making over a quarter-million dollars.  And, in any event, for those making more than $250,000, their taxes only go up for the portion above $250,000.  So, if Joe the Plumber did make $275,000, he might pay a couple hundred more dollars (it’s much less than $1,000) in taxes, but those extra taxes will allow the government to pay for things like bank bailouts that rich investors seem to be demanding, and will give the middle-class a break, which it needs.  Real wages have gone down over the last eight years.  Food any gas are much more expensive than ever before.

The argument that businesses create jobs when they pay lower taxes is wishful thinking, in my opinion.  Businesses exist to make as much profit as they can.  A business paying lower taxes–especially if it’s a small business that–isn’t going to hire more people simply because they saved a couple thousand dollars on the tax bill.  That’s just more profit for the owner.  Decades of experience have shown supply-side economics do not work they way advertised by Republicans.  All it does is leave massive budget deficits.  But, if you give the middle-class the tax break, the vast majority of people will have a little extra money in their pockets, and, unlike the rich, the middle class will actually spend that money, and small business will reap the rewards, and the entire economy does better.  That is so much more logical.

And, as for the argument that this is all class warfare, I say that’s phony.  Taxes are the price of civilization.  Joe the Plumber apparently doesn’t agree: he owes Ohio back taxes.  Maybe he wouldn’t had Senator Obama been president.  In Joe’s present circumstance, he’d pay less under Obama’s plan.  I’d bet you would, too.  And if you’re one of the people who would pay more, congratulations on all your success.  I’m sorry that you’re paying a little more, but I’m confident you’ll get by.  And some soldier in Iraq will have body armor thanks to you.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the hostility to Barack Obama displayed by the crowds at rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Indeed, some of the comments shouted by members of the audience have been very ugly at best, and, in some cases, borderline threatening.

It isn’t difficult to imagine why this is happening. McCain is substantially behind in the polls, and his supporters surely are aware of the long odds they now face with the election drawing ever nearer. A dying bull kicks the hardest, and the McCain campaign’s lackluster performance is causing its surrogates to resort to more extreme measures to try and even the field.

I don’t know the degree to which the most extreme of these shouted comments reflect the opinions of the average McCain supporter. The words “traitor” and “terrorist” are two of the more outrageous examples. I know that McCain himself was caught off guard in one instance, because you can see in the replay that he immediately recoiled. I don’t know if the same can be said for Sarah Palin at her rallies. I think she is naturally a more divisive figure. Perhaps the majority of McCain’s supporters are offended by the notion of someone accusing a sitting United States senator of treason. That’s a capital crime, after all, and no reasonable person, however conservative in ideology, has ever suggested that Senator Obama has ever betrayed the Constitution.

I am glad to see that Senator McCain is now correcting some of his supporters’ more absurd allegations and innuendo. He admonished some in a crowd recently by saying that Barack Obama is not someone that they should fear. That word, “fear”, is significant. I have heard McCain supporters recently saying that Obama “scares” them. I am very reluctant to attribute anyone’s opposition to Senator Obama to racism. But these comments seemed odd. It wasn’t “Obama’s proposals scare me”, as I might say “Bush’s foreign policy scares me”. And when you consider how many people are under the false impression that Senator Obama is Muslim, I cannot help but think that some of the people who say Obama “scares” them really aren’t misinformed.

And tonight I saw a woman addressing McCain at a campaign appearance. She was speaking into a microphone and said that she opposed Obama because “he’s an Arab”. McCain was again visibly disconcerted by this. To his credit, he corrected this woman, and again said that Senator Obama is a good American.

I am a little dissatisfied by some of the coverage of this I have been seeing at some of the websites I generally enjoy. Talking Points Memo has been hammering–a little too hard, I think–the McCain campaign on the trash talk. They have a point that the rhetoric has gone too far, and by saying nothing initially the campaign appeared to be tacitly condoning it. And while I do feel that Senator McCain has sunk a great deal in my esteem during this campaign, that is merely by virtue of his surrounding himself with advisers whom I consider sleazy. I appreciate that he’s now trying to correct some of the misrepresentations of his supporters. I know that must seem like a great distraction. I don’t want him to win, but I can at least say that it is because I disagree with his politics, and not his personality.

UPDATE: As I wrote above, I think that Governor Palin has done more than McCain to fan the flames at rallies, and Frank Rich writes about that in his column today.  One important excerpt that I feel goes to the heart of what I dislike about the whole McCain/Palin campaign:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

I have no doubt that this text was inserted into her speech by some staffer who probably, like Ann Coulter, thinks Joseph McCarthy was right.  It was probably even the same staffer who gave her the Ronald Reagan quote about losing freedom she used in the debate.  She didn’t mention it then–because I doubt she knew–but that quote was from a speech Reagan made long before his presidency, when he was protesting social security.  All this goes to show why I would not consider voting for John McCain.  It isn’t because he is a bad person.  It’s because, for all his mavrick-ness, he is still surrounded by people who do not represent the American ideals I treasure.  I know John McCain isn’t some racist reactionary.  But he has in his campaign people whom I do not trust.  And if the Bush administration has taught us anything it is that when a president is surrounded by crooked or incompetent people, you get bad government.  One of McCain’s economic advisors is Kevin Hassett, who wrote Dow 36,000, which argued that stocks aren’t as risky as pessimists would have us believe, and that the Dow would soon be at 36,000.  Hassett also said around 2005 that there was no housing bubble, and people like Paul Krugman were just ignorant naysayers.

Nobody expects the president of the United States to be an expert on everything.  That’s what the cabinet and advisors are for.  But if McCain would appoint people like Hassett or Phil Graham to solve our problems, I have a pretty good sense that we’d be looking at another “Heck of a job, Brownie”-type scenario.

Like everyone else in America, I watched the vice presidential debate last night, and here are my thoughts:

Senator Biden did a decent job limiting himself to brief answers, and not blabbing on and on forever as he is wont to do.  (This was actually something we can credit to the McCain campaign, since each candidate, when arranging for the debate was allowed some concessions. Senator Biden asked that the candidates speak at lecterns; Governor Palin requested that response times be short.)

Governor Palin didn’t answer half the questions she was asked.  She seemed instead to use the opportunity to recite campaign talking points about change and “the American people”.  I understand completely why she did this, since there is no doubt that she wasn’t going to do well talking distinctly about issues.  While I found it annoying to be spoken to as though I were retarded, I suppose studies show that people like candidates that speak their language.  I just despise anti-intellectualism for its own sake.

I guess the consensus is that neither candidate made any blunders, so, as the media would have it, it’s a tie.  But I don’t really think that’s fair.  Yes, everyone knows Senator Biden can put his foot in his mouth and sound pompous.  But he is universally acknowledged to know what he’s talking about.  Governor Palin, on the other hand, is so outside her element, and has done so poorly in the few appearances she has made outside of a campaign-controlled setting, that all she had to do was not embarrass herself and she’d be considered a success.  This is a distinction worth exploring.  The media spent days pondering how Senator Biden needed to avoid sounding too condescending or appear to patronize Governor Palin.  In fact, I heard several replays of the famous 1984 George H.W. Bush / Geraldine Ferraro debate, where Vice President Bush said something to the effect that he would explain to her some difference between Iran and Lebanon, and Representative Ferraro shot back that she was offended by his patronizing attitude.

But think about it this way: if Congresswoman Ferraro had been a man, that exchange would not be remembered at all.  Likewise, if Governor Palin were not a woman, Senator Biden wouldn’t have been cautioned to tread so softly, and he wouldn’t have practiced for weeks against Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to avoid that sort of George H.W. Bush blunder.  Sarah Palin got off very easy.  Joe Biden could have made her look like Dan Quayle.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it served Biden well not to sound menacing.  But I think that the double standard ought to be acknowledged.  Governor Palin had a very low bar to reach.  She made it over it, “God bless her”, but I don’t think that’s saying much.

I have no problem admitting that Sarah Palin seems approachable.  Her family certainly looks all-American as far as I can tell.  I think some of the folksy language is an affectation, and one that ought to be unnecessary, but that’s for the people to decide.  I don’t like some of the things I know about her: the book banning is un-American, and the firing of an official for not pursuing her vengeful motives is ugly, and bears all the hallmarks of our current vice president’s methods.  Ultimately it comes down to this:  I don’t think she’s smart enough.  (That isn’t a sexist remark; I’d think that even if she were a man.)  And I cannot conceive of voting for a person who is so apparently unsuited for the office of president of the United States, which, though I know is not the office for which she is campaigning, is one that, God forbid, a vice president is sometimes called to occupy.