Hillary supporters to get behind McCain?

The Washington Post reports about a poll that “more than a quarter” of Hillary Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain instead of Barack Obama. That is a very interesting result. It is important to note that the poll was conducted before Clinton dropped out and endorsed Obama.

Based on some of my previous blog posts, I think there are more registered Democrats than Republicans nationwide at this time. Because of McCain’s similarity to Bush in some ways, I think those Clinton supporters who said they’d vote for McCain will eventually change their mind. I predict we’ll see the percentage of those switching to McCain drop dramatically before this race is over.

I think what that means is that this race may come down to the independents. And this is where I hope the last seven years of the Bush administration and his low approval ratings will swing things to Obama.

At this point I think nothing is certain and I’m expecting to see a lot of nastiness thrown in Obama’s direction. It is going to get very ugly. Perhaps not directly from McCain but from Republican-backed 527 organizations, emails, blogs and various other methods. In the end, though, I think Obama stands a very good chance to come out on top. This is going to be a very interesting campaign and election…

The Michigan and Florida Democratic delegates

The effort by some states to move their primary elections earlier and earlier was downright silly. The Democratic Party was 100 percent correct in it’s decision to strip disobedient states of their delegates if they held their primaries in January.

The overly competitive and greedy drive to be first is a prevalent theme in our society. It’s part of our “win at all costs” culture that twists the old adage into “the end does justify the means.”

Deterrence without enforcement is absolutely meaningless. The party must remain firm and not seat those delegates.

Did you know that Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Florida? So of course Clinton won the Democratic primary election there. It was 55 percent to Clinton and 40 percent to “uncommitted.” Hardly what one could call a rousing mandate. In fact, that is kind of a pathetic performance when running in a state your top opponent chose to skip.

Obama and other Democratic candidates were pressured by the party to skip Florida and did the right thing. Clinton decided that Florida shouldn’t be punished for breaking party rules.

This situation is so clear cut it amazes me how it can even be up for debate. Forget the delegates and move on already.

Appeasing those waffles

As far as I know, no evidence exists to show who changed their mind more often: George W. Bush or John Kerry. Yet the Bush campaign was able to brand Kerry as someone who “waffles.” Even though I can think of obvious examples where Bush changed his mind, like making a campaign promise that he’d cut carbon dioxide emissions then reversing that pledge within his first 60 days in office. Was any great effort expended to label him a “waffler?” No.

The reality is that there were instances of both politicians changing their mind. Kerry’s position was reasonable, namely changing his mind about an on-going war. But he expressed himself poorly giving the opposition a fluffy lob that they smashed with all the elegance of a thermonuclear device. Bush, on the other hand, broke campaign promises yet was the one to jump up and down yelling, “waffler.”

Funny, eh?

The sad part of this is that the “waffler” distraction was so artfully done that it actually worked on the American people, even though it was basically meaningless.

Now it is 2008 and we’re at it again. The effort is underway to stick the candidates in little boxes of labels. Barack Obama is an “appeaser” and McCain is a “double talker” or “lobbyist guy.” Do sweeping generalizations like these help our democratic process in any way? Do they help the voters make better decisions? Are they accurate or do they do little more than deceive as they seek to gain traction as a method of manipulation?

Pharmaceuticals give me a headache, guess I need a pill

We all know the high price of drugs charged by the pharmaceutical companies is due to the high cost of research and development, right?

You might want a second opinion on that.

Science Daily reported that in 2004 the pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% on promotion versus only 13.4% for research and development. Perhaps without advertising the price of drugs could be reduced?

But wait. We don’t want to hurt the profitability of the pharmaceutical industry, do we? No need to worry. According to The Everyday Economist blog, the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable one, beating out banks, high tech, telecomm, food and beverage and even oil. The graph shows that profit for pharmaceuticals is almost 20% in terms of profit per dollar of sales.

It pays to advertise, right? Did you know that pharmaceutical advertising is banned in over 30 industrialized nations? Only the United States and New Zealand currently allow it and New Zealand is currently considering a ban.

On May 8, 2008, from a story in Reuters:

Rep. Bart Stupak, at a hearing to discuss specific ads by Pfizer Inc, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co Inc and Schering-Plough Corp, said television commercials in particular use deceptive techniques to push products to potential patients and increase sales.

“It appears that we need to enforce significant restrictions on DTC (direct-to-consumer) ads to protect American consumers from manipulative commercials designed to mislead and deceive for the profit of pharmaceutical companies,” said Stupak, head of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce investigative panel.

What’s wrong with advertising helping to get the word out to people about the medications they need? Well, do we really need them? According to CBS News, in the last five years Americans have had more prescriptions written for anti-depressants than any other class of drugs. We are we so depressed?

Is all of this medication treating something that was always there that was lurking beneath the surface? Or has pharmaceutical advertising created a treatment in search of an illness?

Something strange is afoot in the projected electoral votes

Curious about seeing a map of the United States decorated in red and blue, I went looking for electoral prediction maps. These are maps put together, based on polls, that indicate how the electoral votes might go if the election was held today. There is one for Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain, and one for Barack Obama vs. McCain, too.

The 2008 Electoral Vote Projection Page breaks down a Barack vs. McCain race like this:

McCain: 249
Obama: 237
Tossup: 52

Another web site, Election 2008, has Barack vs. McCain like this:

McCain: 248
Obama: 266
Tossup: 24

Lastly, that same web site has a page for Clinton vs. McCain:

McCain: 194
Clinton: 327
Tossup: 17

Interesting. I was a little surprised to see that apparently Clinton does better against McCain than Obama. I wasn’t expecting that. But I was also pleased to see that on one map, Obama has a lead or is within striking distance. Based on the polling data that built these projection maps, Obama clearly has a good chance of winning this election.

Quick to judge: Obama and the Soviet Union national anthem

There is a quiet hubbub brewing over a recent Barack Obama campaign rally that was held in Portland, Oregon on Friday, March 21, 2008.

The opening act was The Decemberists, a popular Portland-based rock band. It seems this band has, in the past, opened some of their performances with the Soviet Union national anthem. From Wikipedia:

“The band’s name refers to an 1825 revolt over the Imperial Russian succession (Decembrist revolt) It is not related to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Their name is also a reference to the atmosphere associated with the month of December. The band has used the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction at many concerts. Several anti-Communist opinion writers have attacked the Decemberists, pointing to the band’s use of the Soviet anthem as evidence that it endorses the Soviet ideal.^“

Curious about this story, I went to Google News and did a search for “obama decemberists soviet national anthem” and Google came back with four results. (Your results may vary over time.)

I couldn’t find any reports that the Soviet Union national anthem was actually played at the Obama rally. Likewise I couldn’t find any reports that the Obama campaign coordinated the band’s performance or knew in advance of their history of playing the Soviet Union national anthem.

Nevertheless, the game is now afoot. Obama critics are coming out of the woodwork with their take on this damning set of circumstances. No one seems concerned with finding out the actual facts – just let those assumptions fly. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out…

Do campaign promises matter?

In an earlier post I blogged about Dwight Ellis saying that he’d be a “one term” county commissioner yet is now seeking re-election. If voters based votes on that statement, at least in part, does that really matter?

In the 2000 presidential campaign, then candidate George W. Bush, who liked to describe himself as a “compassionate conservative,” made it a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide:

Sept. 29, 2000, Bush said: “We will require all power plants to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time.”

It only took him 60 days in office to reverse that pledge:

Mar. 13, 2001, Bush wrote: “I do not believe, however, that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act.”

Bush also made promises about “compassion” including:

• More than $8 billion during his first year in office to help social service organizations better serve “the least, the last, and the lost.”
• More than $6 billion was to go for new tax incentives that would generate billions more in private charitable giving.
• Another $1.7 billion a year would fund faith-based (and non-faith-based) groups caring for drug addicts, at-risk youth, and teen moms.
• $200 million more would establish a “Compassion Capital Fund” to assist, expand and replicate successful local programs.
• Legislation would ensure that reported government discrimination against faith-based social service organizations would end.
• A new White House Faith-Based Office would lead the charge.

David Kuo, who served in the White House for two-and-a-half years as a Special Assistant to the president and eventually as Deputy Director of the Faith-Based Initiative had this to say about those promises:

“It was more than a bunch of promises. It was a new political philosophy of aggressive, government-encouraged (but not controlled) compassion that simultaneously rejected the dollars-equal-compassion equation of the “War on Poverty” mindset and the laissez-faire social policy of many conservatives. It was political philosophy of the heart as much as the head.

“Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years. And new programs including those for children of prisoners, at-risk youth, and prisoners reentering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years–or approximately $6.3 billion less than the promised $6.8 billion.”

So, this begs the question: Do campaign promises matter? Do they have any meaning at all? I say yes, they do. These promises are offered at a time when people are deciding who to vote for. Campaign promises are part of that decision making promise.

It can get frustrating at the local level, like in elections for City Council, when many candidates don’t have official web sites and don’t take positions on the issues. This clearly gets them around the hassle of having to back up what they said when campaigning for office. This style of campaigning, flying under the radar without saying much, in my opinion, is an affront to our system of government.

To sum up, candidates should take positions on the issues and should be held accountable for their campaign promises. If we don’t have at least that much we might as well decide by flipping a coin.

Good news for Obama in Oregon

A McCain vs. Obama heads-up poll offers some encouragement for Obama in Oregon. Rasmussen says this:

5/7: 38 McCain, 52 Obama

“The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone poll in Oregon shows Barack Obama leading John McCain 52% to 38%. That’s a significant improvement for Obama compared to a month ago when he led the presumptive Republican nominee by six percentage points. In three consecutive Oregon polls, McCain has never received more than 40% support when matched against Obama. In the current poll, McCain attracts just 68% support from Republican voters in the state.”

To put a little perspective on this, in 2004 Oregon gave John Kerry 51.35% of the vote and Bush 47.19%.

When we look at Josephine County, however, the results were somewhat different. Bush got 62.1% of the vote and Kerry only 36.0%.

Josephine County Commission Position 3

How disappointing. In the race for Josephine County Commissioner Position 3 we are left to choose between Dwight Ellis and Jack “Auto Doc” Brown. There will be a run off election between these two top vote getters in November. Ellis was unable to win the election outright with a majority of the vote. This race ended up much tighter than Position 2. (More on that later.) Ellis won 31.84% of the vote and Brown 28.27%.

As a voter, this puts me between a rock and a hard place. John Makepeace, my preferred choice, just missed out by a hair, coming in third with 26.83% of the vote.

Brown has been endorsed by sitting commissioner Jim Raffenburg who also endorsed Paul Walter for Position 2. Uh oh. That is not a good sign. Brown is also chairman of the “Constitution Party of Oregon” and is a vocal activist in the fight against marriage and civil union rights for Oregon gays.

On the other hand we have Ellis, who ran for re-election after saying during his first campaign that he would only serve one term. (I don’t have a source on this. This is based on my memory. If you know of a source, please let me know.) When Ellis decided to run for re-election this year, he said the reason was because there was “more work to do.” (Again, this is from memory.) What a cop out. There will always be more work to do so that is a meaningless reason to go back on his word. I don’t know if Ellis saying he’d only serve for one term was a campaign promise or not, but either way, he should have stood behind what he said.

Based on the alternative, though, I’m left with no other choice than to vote for Ellis in November.

What’s missing in the political debate?

As our country grows more divisive, I think there is one crucial missing ingredient in our national debate. It’s the understand that all of us, liberals and conservatives, are on the same team. We’re together in this. We should be listening to each other, trying to find areas of commonality and agreement that we can build upon.

Sometimes it feels like one side or the other forgets that the vast majority of us truly care about our country and our opinions are honest and good faith efforts to try to get us there. When we call one side of a political debate “evil” we’ve just lost the opportunity to improve. When we accuse those with differing opinions than our own of wanting to destroy America we have hurt our decision making process to the detriment of the country we love so much.

When someone doesn’t agree with you on a political issue, try to really listen and remember that they care just as much as you. Wouldn’t it be nice to be back on the same team, be less divisive and start making better decisions?