{"id":10741,"date":"2007-11-16T11:11:19","date_gmt":"2007-11-16T16:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/16\/10741.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:42","slug":"eight-heroes-or-at-least-six-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/16\/eight-heroes-or-at-least-six-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight heroes, or at least six, anyway"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There comes a point in the Presidential Election season where it is no longer early. I suppose we&#8217;ve hit that point. And yet, Your Humble Blogger has been strangely silent on the issue. Last cycle, I talked quite a bit about it, quite early. Not so much, this time. Why not?<br \/>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look briefly at the field, shall we? Alphabetically?<br \/>\n<ul><li><strong>Senator Joe Biden<\/strong>: Senator Biden has been a fairly good Senator, although he&#8217;s sided strongly with financial services business interests against, well, my interests. As a President, he would be like Bill Clinton without most of the good stuff he did. Most years, I would happily support him; if he somehow became the candidate, I would vote for him with satisfaction. His electoral strengths are &#8230; not obvious.<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>Senator Hillary Clinton<\/strong>: First, and to get it out of the way, it would obviously be <I>tremendously<\/I> inspiring to have my Party nominate a woman, and have her become President. She&#8217;s far more pro-business than I am (but who isn&#8217;t?), and more worryingly is far more hawkish. She would work very well with Democrats in the Legislature, and likely with the Governors. I&#8217;d be concerned about a Hillary Clinton presidency with a Republican Congress, though.<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>Senator Chris Dodd<\/strong>: He seems like a good guy, and a good Senator. He might make a good Vice-President. As his Senatorial constituent, I&#8217;m critical of some of his actions, but that&#8217;s to be expected. His inability to get any significant support in the primary, though, leads me to think he would lose the Presidential election, and we can&#8217;t have that. If he did become President, he would be nicely dull, and wouldn&#8217;t that be all right?<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>(former) Senator John Edwards<\/strong>: I find him inspiring, both as a speaker and as a person. His crusade against the excesses of corporate capitalism, within a largely mainstream framework, would have been perfect for a President anytime in the last twenty years (or a Vice-President in the last eight). If he becomes the candidate, I will find voting for him both moving and uplifting.<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>(former) Senator Mike Gravel<\/strong>: I barely know how to pronounce this fellow&#8217;s name. Seriously. If he were to approach the Presidency, I would have to find out.<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>Representative Dennis Kucinich<\/strong>: Rep. Kucinich is doing the country a profound service by strongly expressing most of YHB&#8217;s policy positions in the Presidential race. Sadly, it seems to me he would make a terrible President; his personal qualities, his management style, seem to be bad for that job (and good for the gadfly job he already has). That said, I wouldn&#8217;t really object to living in an America where a hundred and forty million people voted for Rep. Kucinich. Would you?<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>Senator Barack Obama<\/strong>: I find Sen. Obama only moderately inspiring. On the other hand, as said above with Sen. Clinton, I would <I>love<\/I> for my Party to select and elect an African-American. I think Sen. Obama&#8217;s heart is in the right place, and he&#8217;s obviously got brains, but heart and brains don&#8217;t always make the best Presidents. On the whole, I expect Sen. Obama would be just slightly worse than Our Previous President in most of the ways I care about, and that I would be happy about that, as I was happy with him.<\/li><br \/>\n<li><strong>Governor Bill Richardson<\/strong>: I&#8217;ve always had a soft spot for Gov. Richardson. I would be very happy to vote for him, in the primary or the general election. As President, he would very likely be wonderfully productive and progressive, and also embarrassing and gauche. Gov. Richardson would the Democratic candidate most likely to inadvertently cause a major international incident, and I think everybody knows it. I would have expected him to run a much better primary campaign than he did, though, which leads me to suspect that he isn&#8217;t a very good campaigner, and as I may have mentioned, I would like my Party to win next year.<\/li><\/ul><br \/>\n<p>I think that&#8217;s everybody, isn&#8217;t it? In sum, then, I like all the candidates. I like Sen. Biden and Sen. Gravel a bit less than I like the others, particularly viewed as potential Presidents. I have policy differences with each of the candidates, and I think each of the candidates has drawbacks both as candidates and as potential Presidents. That&#8217;s to be expected. But it&#8217;s also the most exciting and the best set of candidates of the last gazillion cycles. It&#8217;s all good.<br \/>\n<P>One more thing, and then I&#8217;d like any Gentle Reader who wants to make a case for or against any of the candidates to go ahead. The last couple of cycles, we&#8217;ve had available sets of policy quizzes that purport to let an individual find out which candidate lines up best with a set of policy preferences. I&#8217;m tempted to call these quizzes wrongheaded, but that&#8217;s too harsh. There is useful information to be gleaned from them. It&#8217;s very important to keep in mind, though, that a President is not a set of policy positions. A President responds to conditions, once in office, and so the candidates <I>instincts<\/I> matter more than their policies, their <I>priorities<\/I> matter more than their policies, and their <I>abilities<\/I> matter more than their policies.<br \/>\n<p>And, of course, before getting a President whose policies align with yours, you need to make a constituency whose policies align with yours. Democracy is not about who you would appoint, it&#8217;s who can derive legitimacy from electoral victory.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger looks at his candidates for President, and finds them terrific!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18168,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10741\/revisions\/18168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}