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23.8.08

Not the kind of Joementum you were hoping for

I hadn't been planning on voting for Obama, but this seals it. (And before you start wailing about how McCain is worse, remember that I live in Arizona. If Obama is doing well enough to make even the AZ race close, he'll have a landslide even without our 10 electoral votes. Incidentally, while I'm generally in favor of discarding the electoral college, the shelter the current system gives for pure conscience votes in uncompetitive states is a -- sadly underutilized -- positive feature.) Although it should make my mother-in-law happy, since she was an early Biden fan who ended up as a precinct captain for Obama in Iowa.

7 Comments:

Blogger fancycwabs said...

Bah. You discount the need for a president to actually, you know, get stuff done. Some sort of ultraprogressive weenie could conceivably had his ass handed to him by powerful senators (e.g. Dan Quayle), whereas someone with Biden's street cred (the street being K street) knows how to get an agenda through congress. A weak vice president (or nonexistent, in the cases of Calvin Coolidge and Grover Cleveland, where the office was vacant for an extended period) only leads to a president who's a lame duck the day he gets into office.

2:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I still think "conscience votes" placed while you're not doing something to change the system smacks of some sort of privilege I can't quite define. It's the "look at me conspicuously on the sidelines preserving my ideological purity while doing nothing to either destroy the two party system or advance my causes within it."

Mind you I haven't done a whole lot of shoe leather work this cycle yet for the Dems. When I do, I'm going to be far more invested in the local races- maybe I'll do some work on the House race (and yes, I'll hold my nose and make those calls because you know how I feel about our likely Dem contender,), but the top of the ticket- unlikely.

Perhaps I'm making a false correlation between abstinence and apathy or perhaps I'm dismayed I can't keep my household on message.

2:28 PM  
Blogger rabi said...

I also find myself underwhelmed by the choice of running mate, but there wasn't anyone on the shortlist that seemed GOOD. did you have an alternative in mind that would have made you more likely to vote for obama?

3:33 PM  
Blogger Alon Levy said...

Something's telling me that if Biden had supported federal funds for abortion but opposed VAWA, Shakespeare's Sister would be bashing his record on violence against women while mentioning his record on choice in passing.

On another note, Biden regularly commutes to Washington using Amtrak. This suggests he'll be friendly to public transportation, which is surely an important component of environmental policy.

5:07 PM  
Blogger Stentor said...

Christina: The privilege is conferred by the uncompetitiveness of the state, -- a privilege which I explicitly acknowledge in the post -- not by my choice of how to cast my meaningless vote. And while casting a non-major-party vote is not doing much, it's not like voting for Obama is going to change the system *more.*

rabi: Of the publicly debated short list, I was rooting for Kathleen Sebelius.

Alon: To be progressive on women's issues you have to fund abortion *and* support VAWA, so I don't see how it's hypocritical to slam someone for the one of those they fell through on.

10:32 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I was rooting for Sebelius among those most mentioned, but prefer Biden over Bayh, and in any case none of the VP choices was going to alter my intention to vote for Obama (or, heck, any of the Dems who had won) over McCain (or, heck, any Republican who was likely to have gotten the nomination).

California's supposed to be solid Obama, but I have no intention of chancing a third party vote. I do those, when I do them at all, for smaller down ballot races where I think my vote might actually help build a Green Party in California.

10:43 PM  
Blogger Alon Levy said...

I'm not complaining about Shake's attack on Biden's record on abortion; I'm complaining about how she's focusing on the bad (he's against federal funding for abortions) while only briefly mentioning the good (he sponsored VAWA).

It seems like every liberal blogger is making an effort to portray Obama as too conservative, so that if he trips, it'll be easy to say that he would be performing better if only he appeased the base more. Amanda Marcotte's been doing that for years.

8:12 AM  

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