Radical Georgia Moderate

The Iowa caucuses are today. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t been able to muster up some interest in the process by now. I think there are several reasons for this:

• The Republicans screwed things up so, so badly from 2000 to 2006 that it’s almost inevitable that I will vote for the Democrat for president. Even if the candidate was Giuliani or McCain, neither of whom I think are all that bad relative to Romney and Huckabee. Even if the Democrat was caught humping Ayn Rand’s corpse, promising to kill all the welfare babies.

  Huckabee would be another George W. Bush, with slightly less imperialism and slightly more money spent on crackpot programs like abstinence-only education.

  Romney speaks out three sides of his mouth, and he only has two. Ponder that.

  Giuliani at least won’t keep any promises to the theocratic wing of the party.

  And I can at least give McCain a little credit for his consistent position condemning torture. What a high watermark for the leader of the free world, huh?

  But I still don’t trust either of them not to fuck things up after six years of Republicans running things.

  And then there’s Ron Paul, who says things that perk my ears up sometimes. I occasionally fantasize about someone coming in and dismantling the entire federal government and starting from scratch. But if someone tried to do it in four years (and he would only last four years), it wouldn’t go very well. Which is to say that we’d need a new word because clusterfuck wouldn’t be strong enough. And his followers have a cult vibe that scares me.

• I think Bill Richardson would make a good president, but I couldn’t help him have a chance even if I wanted to. That’s because Georgia is totally irrelevant at this stage of the process, and seems likely to be totally irrelevant for the general election. Not to mention totally irrelevant to most national politics.
• Speaking of irrelevant… Why again did they move the caucuses/primaries so damn early? What’s the point of having a convention in July if the candidates have already been chosen by February or March?
• I have no enthusiasm for any of the other Democratic candidates.

  Barack Obama is a gifted speaker, but not much else to speak of.

  I had a serious case of buyer’s remorse after voting for Edwards in the 2004 primary. He’s an empty suit, and I don’t believe that a mindless application of populism will help things any more than the mindless application of free market dogma has been.

  Hillary Clinton? Bush-Clinton-Bush-No thanks.

  Joe Biden at least has proposed a substantive plan to try to make Iraq less of an RP (an abbreviation that will have to do until we can agree on a word with more magnitude than ‘clusterfuck’). But see the last point about Richardson.

  Kudos to Shelby for doing God’s work trying to help that campaign out. Speaking of Shelby, he’s in Iowa now, occasionally streaming live video.

  I don’t know much about Chris Dodd other than he seems to be getting no traction.

Somebody who isn’t an astroturfing Ron Paul supporter tell me why I’m wrong about their candidate. (I have seen the “I’m an undecided voter, and the only candidate who really appealed to me was Ron Paul” comments a dozen times already. Please spare me the fucking shit. Your spam will be deleted.)

SpaceyG is going to tape people watching caucus results for Insider Advantage at Manuel’s at 7 p.m. if you’re interested. I’m undecided. About Manuel’s, but also about the election.