Who do you want as the next president of the U.S.? FG/CH/BS

Carnivore wrote: I like and will actually vote for Obama. If Hillary wins the nomination, I'll vote for her in the general election, but I'm still holding out hope for Obama.

what he said

I love Kucinich.
it's depressing that he doesn't have a chance.

Subject: Obama

I live in Clinton Hill and am supporting Obama.

Regarding 2nd choice, I'll vote Dem unless it's Hilary, in which case I'll write-in a 3rd party candidate. The first presidential election I was able to vote in was Bush 1988, and I feel well overdue for one that doesn't feature a Bush or a Clinton as a major party candidate. Let's move on, people!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!

Subject: Re: Obama

i have loved obama since i first met him, when he was a state legislator. i regretted then that i couldn't vote for him, and low and behold, i got to vote for him twice thereafter! i basically am okay with hilary, too, though i have some war-related issues with her. if you had told me 10 years ago, btw, that she wouldn't be my absolute first choice, i wouldn't have believed you.

piratesofwaverly wrote:
Regarding 2nd choice, I'll vote Dem unless it's Hilary, in which case I'll write-in a 3rd party candidate. The first presidential election I was able to vote in was Bush 1988, and I feel well overdue for one that doesn't feature a Bush or a Clinton as a major party candidate. Let's move on, people!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!

regarding political dynasties, did you see the awesome hendrik hertzberg piece in the ny'er on that topic? here it is, if you've got a minute:

Dynastic Voyage
by Hendrik Hertzberg October 29, 2007

Shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy for President last winter, Roger Cohen, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared that “a delicate problem confronts her that few people are talking about: almost two decades of dynastic domination of American politics.” Well, they’re talking about it now. “Forty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House,” a recent Associated Press story, by Nancy Benac, begins. “Talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate,” Benac goes on. “If Hillary Clinton were to be elected and reëlected, the nation could go twenty-eight years in a row with the same two families governing the country. Add the elder Bush’s terms as Vice-President, and that would be thirty-six years straight with a Bush or Clinton in the White House.” And a cover story in the Economist a couple of weeks ago, while noting that a woman President “would undoubtedly be a good thing for the country,” adds, ominously, “But there is a downside: dynasty.”

Ruling families are not supposed to be a big part of the picture in our democratic republic, whose very Constitution states firmly, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Even so, we’ve dabbled in dynasties from the beginning, when the Lee family, of Virginia, got to work spawning two signers of the Declaration of Independence, three governors, two senators, nine members of Congress, and four Confederate generals, including Robert E. (The Lees’ Washington, Randolph, and Harrison in-laws won some elections, too.) The New Jersey Frelinghuysens are well into their third century of political droit du seigneur, from Frederick (born 1753), a delegate to the Continental Congress and later a United States senator, through Rodney (born 1946), a current member of the House of Representatives.

If anything, the dynastic dynamic has picked up speed in the past half century or so. It reached a perfect storm in 1962, when Massachusetts voters filled the Senate seat vacated by John F. Kennedy, grandson of Congressman and Mayor John F. Fitzgerald and son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, when he was elected President—the very seat that, in 1952, J.F.K. had wrested from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who was a great-great-great-grandson of Senator George Cabot, a grandson of the Senate titan Henry Cabot Lodge, and a son of George Cabot Lodge, who, though himself a poet, married a Frelinghuysen. (Are you following this?) The 1962 Democratic nominee for senator was, of course, Edward Moore Kennedy, then thirty years old. His Republican opponent was—wait for it—another George Cabot Lodge, this one a son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a great-great-great-great-grandson of, etc. Nor was that all. There was a third-party “peace” candidate, too, a professor of European history at Harvard: H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, Chief Justice of the United States, and 1916 Republican Presidential nominee. During a primary debate, Kennedy’s opponent for the Democratic nomination told him that if his name were just Edward Moore his candidacy would be a joke. A real zinger, but it might have been even zingier if its deliverer, Eddie McCormack, had not been the nephew of John W. McCormack, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Teddy won. But even if one of the others had prevailed the result would have illustrated the point, which is that a country with such a plenitude of political patriarchies—not only Kennedys, Lodges, Hugheses, and McCormacks but also Bayhs, Browns, Cuomos, Daleys, Dodds, Longs, La Follettes, Romneys, Tafts, and Udalls (to say nothing of Bushes and Clintons)—cannot claim immunity from the apparently universal temptation to tug the forelock. On Capitol Hill, at the moment, there are five senators whose dads were senators before them; in the House, the legacy cases begin, but do not end, with the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whose father was a congressman (and mayor of Baltimore).

At the Presidential level, the Bushes 41 and 43 were preceded by the Adamses 2 and 6, the Harrisons 9 and 23, and, of course, the Roosevelts 26 and 32. The younger members of the first three pairs on this list—sons in the first two cases, a grandson in the third—all had the dubious distinction of winning the Presidency while being defeated at the polls, which suggests a certain thinning of the blood. The Roosevelts were more distantly related; Theodore was Franklin’s fifth cousin, as (once removed) was his wife, Eleanor—a spiritual and political auntie of Hillary Clinton. Which brings us to the women, who, in this country and elsewhere, have generally come to power as a result of family ties.

In most cases, the tie has been broken by death. In South Asia, which seems to lead the world in female national leaders, violent death is invariably a factor. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, a total of four female heads of state have come to power in the wake of male relatives’ assassination; in India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, was herself assassinated, as was her son and successor, Rajiv. (Her daughter-in-law, Sonia, now heads the ruling Congress Party.) Burma’s imprisoned opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is the daughter of the assassinated independence leader Aung San. And the father of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s two-time and perhaps future Prime Minister, was a Prime Minister whose life ended at the gallows; her return to Karachi last week was marked by a suicide-bomber attack that claimed more than a hundred lives.

In the United States, the widow-of and daughter-of pattern has been gentler. Of the two hundred and forty-four women who have served in the House and the Senate, forty-six succeeded their husbands and twelve their fathers. The wife-of, as distinct from widow-of, method of conferring power has been a relatively minor theme, found mostly in the nether parts of the country—one thinks of Governors Ma Ferguson, of Texas, and, especially, Lurleen Wallace, of Alabama, through whom George ruled when term limits forced him out of the state house.

Senator Clinton is different, obviously. She is indisputably a wife-of, but it was she, not he, whom Life selected as an icon of their generation when she graduated from college. It was she, not he, who, as a young lawyer, got the coveted job with the House Watergate investigation. She would have gone far, maybe even this far, without him. However much she benefits from the dynasty factor, though, the Economist is right: there’s a downside. The downside’s name is Bush. If, as the voters in 2000 wished, Al Gore, son of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., had been granted the White House, things might be a bit easier—not just for Hillary Clinton but also for her main Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama. George W. Bush has been as poor an advertisement for “inexperience” as for dynasticism. It’s not fair, of course. Bush’s failure to learn much of anything for the past six years suggests a deficit of character, not of experience; his unwillingness to employ his father’s skills and advice on behalf of the nation shows a disrespectful disregard for a dynast’s biggest advantage. He has given both freshness and family a bad name. ♦

It's nice to see so many other Kucinich fans here, too, most of my friends don't take him seriously. I doubt that additional media exposure would have done him a whole lot of good, since he's tried for the presidency before with no luck. Which is a real shame, since he has one of the best and most detailed plans for an Iraq exit strategy that I've seen. I've been pushing for Kucinich over at Unity08.com, a group that's running their own ticket with one democrat and one republican -- Kucinich seems the most obvious choice for a progressive organization like this, especially with the Iraq war leading at slot three on the American Agenda (unity08's user-based issue vote). But that nomination will probably go to an upset candidate like Obama, should he lose the democratic primary.

It's funny, too, what you say about Rudy and New Yorkers, none of the people I know seem to like him either, and yet he's pushing himself as the New york candidate...

Clinton Hill resident, Chris Dodd supporter.

...Okay, I know, he's doing worse in the polls than a potato at this point. But I grew up in Connecticut, I watched his career with interest, and I kept Connecticut residency all through college so I could vote for him. Right now his biggest problem is that no one knows who the hell he is because everyone's watching the Hillary And Obama show.

I would rather think he would since those are no-nos in the Democratic party.

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of voting for Kucinich in the primary because I feel that ANY Democrat that wins the nomination has a damn sight better chance of getting elected than a Republican, so I may as well vote for who I really want in the primary and vote for the winning Democrat in November.

Does anyone know how I go about changing my party affiliation? I don't have any, but this is the first primary election that I actually want to vote in.

Carnivore wrote: [quote=queencallipygos]Clinton Hill resident, Chris Dodd supporter.

...Okay, I know, he's doing worse in the polls than a potato at this point. But I grew up in Connecticut, I watched his career with interest, and I kept Connecticut residency all through college so I could vote for him. Right now his biggest problem is that no one knows who the hell he is because everyone's watching the Hillary And Obama show.

He definitely won my respect with his filibuster against FISA renewal. He almost single-handedly (with a little help from Ted Kennedy) held off a vote on this until at least next year. Both Obama and Clinton voiced their "support" for the filibuster, but didn't stop campaigning to help out with it.

This is the kind of stuff he does a lot -- but he's just under the radar and few people know about it. There was a Democrat candidates' debate when Obama was asked whether he would consider meeting with an "enemy" nations' leader if he were president, to work out a diplomatic resolution to issues -- and I almost yelled at the TV screen, because they were asking the wrong person. Dodd not only would meet with such leaders, he already has. Back in 2005, when Bush trash-talked Hugo Chavez, Dodd went to Venezuela to meet with Chavez and restore calm relations.

There's a good summary of his political positions here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Chris_Dodd

He's much better as an active, actual politician and leader than he is as a whiz-bang, talk-myself-up, sell-myself-like-a-showman candidate, so people aren't looking at him all that much. But WOW are they missing out by not looking.

what, specifically, do you mean about her voting record?

i'm trying to make up my mind. the war vote pisses me off A LOT, but when i compare my views with obama's vs clinton's votes, i find myself agreeing and disagreeing with their votes in about equal measure. i admit, though, that i need to do more reserach.

What I like about Obama is that there is more consistency between what he says and what he does.

Clinton doesn't seem to have much in the way of principle.

I'm about evenly split between the two candidates. I still prefer Obama, partly because I think he has more integrity and also because he's probably more electable. I know Republicans and Independents who would vote for him. My dad, who's been a Democrat all his life, albeit a fairly conservative one, is nuts about him. If any candidate can bring people together, it's him. Clinton, not so much. I don't really know of anyone who would cross party lines to vote for her. I'd still support her in the general election, though.

I am not sure if anyone else noticed this while they were watching the debate… but CNN kept panning out to the audience and I actually thought for a second I was watching the Oscars… I mean do I seriously care what Steven Spielberg’s reaction to Hillary’s or Obama comments are?