It's a big mistake to criticize Sarah Palin's qualifications to be VP. First of all, nobody outside of Alaska knows enough about her temperament and views on critical issues to form an INFORMED opinion. Based on the little I've been able to find out about her since the announcement was made, she sounds as though she has a helluva lott more common sense and judgment than McCain.
What's scary is that McCain doesn't seem to know much more than I do about Palin. Before making his choice, McCain spent LESS THAN ONE HOUR meeting with Palin and assessing her temperament, decision-making style and views on the major issues.
Contrast that to Obama's lengthy and careful VP-selection process. In business, no important job gets filled without many interviews and background checks. Most normal people spend more than an hour deciding what brand of refrigerator or dishwasher to buy!! What reckless arrogance! What intellectual laziness!
I've read that one of McCain's favorite passtimes is gambling (aides have to pull him away from the tables when he visits Las Vegas). This seems like the biggest gamble of all.
I've always thought that McCain's claim of more "experience" was nonsense. There's no particular life "experience" that qualifies somebody to be President. In 1860, an obscure one-term Congressman from Illinois had much less political experience than his rivals, but he proved to have the temperament and judgment to govern wisely.
What worries me most about the Palin selection is NOT what might happen if she succeeded to the Presidency. But what similarly reckless decisions would McCain make? Would he take us to war on the spur of the moment based on "gut feel", without thinking through all the unintended consequences?
I'm voting for Obama because the signs are that he's a President who will THINK before acting, and will NOT sacrifice the long-term good of the country in order to get short-term favorable headlines and a bump in the polls.
Does anybody in the campaign READ anything posted on this web site?
On August 10th, I posted a message describing a problem I had in making a matching donation. As described below, I tried TWICE to alert the campaign via the "Contact" form and to ask why my donation had not been processed. The first time, I got a canned message saying that due to "technical difficulties" all messages received from July 31 to August 4th were unreadable. The second time, after a 5- day delay, I got a canned message describing general procedures for donation.
Clearly, nobody reads the messages submitted by the contact form and the campaign does not want my money. I get the message.
There appear to be some persistent bugs in the BarackObama web site programming, and I've not been able to find a way to submit error-reports so that I get some acknowledgement that they have been received and thus may EVENTUALLY be read by somebody who can find and fix the problems. Here's what's happened to me in the last 10 days:
-- THURSDAY, JULY 31: I made an on-line contribution to the Obama campaign promising to match contributions from new donors. As best I could tell from the web-site screens, my contribution was processed completely and correctly.
I have made several similar matching donations in the past. Previously, when I have done this, within an hour or so I received E-mails that [a] thanked me for my donation, [b] identified the names and locations of the donors whose contributions I matched, and [c] optionally forwarded a personal message to me from the matched donors. This time nothing happened.
-- SATURDAY, AUGUST 2: When I continued to get no response (and no charge appeared on my credit card) I used the contact form at http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/contact2 to send an inquiry as to the status of my donation. I picked "A Donation Inquiry" as the topic for my message.
-- WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6: I received this automated E-Mail message from the Obama campaign:
“Thank you for contacting us from July 30 through August 4. Unfortunately, our email system experienced a technical malfunction during this period that made it impossible for us to read your message. We have corrected the error, but we sincerely regret that your message was lost. “Please find below a number of links to resources on our website. These links contain answers to many of the questions you may have. If you have additional comments, please contact us again through the web form linked at the bottom of this email. Barack is running the most open, transparent campaign in history, and we want to hear from you.”
I used the same contact form to send this E-Mail message:
“This is a repeat of a message sent on August 2. I received an e-mail stating that a technical malfunction in your E-Mail system from July 30 to August 4 made my message unreadable. “I was inquiring about a matching donation of $xxx which I made on line on July 31. As best I could determine, the transaction processed correctly and completely, but I never received a thank-you E-Mail and my credit card was not charged. I wanted to determine whether the transaction was lost (so that I need to resubmit the donation) or if it was still pending. Based on the fact that your web site had technical problems during the period when I made the donation, I will assume the transaction was lost and will resubmit it. “Assuming that the transaction goes through today, my total donations for the campaign should increase from $xxx to $xxx as of August 6th."
“Thank you for your help.”
-- SUNDAY, AUGUST 10th: As of today, the result of my resubmitted matching-donation on August 6th has been the same as the one on July 31st: nothing happened (no acknowledging E-Mails, no charge to my credit card). I have not received any response to my contact message.
I assume that the campaign MIGHT want to find and fix errors in the fundraising software. Anybody have any suggestions as to how to submit a bug report so that it might catch the attention of a techie who knows how to fix it? (Ideally, I'd like to get an E-Mail address where I could send additional technical information -- e.g details of my hardware/software configuration; snapshots of the particular screens I used -- that might help in diagnosing the problem.)
It's important that the Obama campaign has sufficient funds to aggressively respond to the disgraceful advertising attacks from McCain, and thus every donation (however small) needs to be processed completely and correctly.
The Obama campaign has allowed Clinton to win the spin war about the Rules Committee decision on FL/MI and the "popular vote". At this point, it doesn't matter what Obama and anyone who supports him may say about why the ruling was fair and what the correct "popular-vote" math is; Clinton true-believers just won't listen.
This allows them to continue in their delusion that Clinton really "won" (according to the special rules that apply on Planet Clinton) and to nurse a grudge against Obama because they think that somehow he "cheated" her out of it. This has caused all sorts of nasty actions by Clinton supporters. (Reportedly, Rep Jim Clyburn's office received so many nasty, threatening calls from people who claimed to be Clinton voters that the person answering the phone was reduced to tears.) If this myth is allowed to grow, it will cost a lot of votes in November.
The only way to minimize this stuff is stop letting Clinton's narcissistic propaganda go unanswered. (For goodness sakes, the woman is 60 years old and bragged for over a year about how tough she is. Why is everybody allowing her to indulge herself like some sheltered Victorian maiden? She is an embarrassment to older women like me.)
Suggestions:
-- Privately make it clear to Clinton that if she says ONE MORE WORD about how she really won the popular vote and/or that she's the best candidate, she will not get a penny's help with her campaign debt. (Don't waste any time appealing to her better instincts to help her party and her country. She appears to be a selfish twit who only pursues good causes to advance her personal agenda.)
I would gladly contribute to a fund to retire Clinton's debt IF (and ONLY IF) it could be held in escrowuntil after the election. The funds would be turned over to Clinton ONLY if [a] Obama got elected and [b] she was not on the ticket as VP. Would it be legal to set up such a fund?
-- Get some respected figure who's NOT part of the Obama campaign to say that he's looking into what happened in FL/MI and that he's confident that the outcome was fair. Al Gore would be the ideal person, since he's a respected party elder who isn't angling for any job in an Obama administration, and who didn't express any public preference in the nomination contest. An interview in which he explained that the Rules applied to FL/MI were fair would be very helpful. Given Gore's crushing disappointment in FL in 2000, he should have a fair amount of credibility on the subject of stolen elections.
Perhaps there really is no way to stop the Clintons from trying to blow up the Democratic Party out of childish petulance that they didn't get their way. But somebody ought to make a better effort to minimize the damage.
The Obama campaign needs to take preemptive action NOW to shape the way the June 1 PuertoRico primary will be reported. Otherwise, the Clinton claim that she's winning the "popular vote" may grab all the headlines -- and make it much harder for die-hard Clinton supporters to accept that Obama's gonna win the most DELEGATES (and thus the nomination) fair and square.Based on the very limited polling that's been done in Puerto Rico, it appears that Clinton will do better than Obama, although nobody knows for sure. No matter how big a percentage Clinton wins by, there's no risk that she will overtake Obama in the delegate count. But turnout is expected to be very high (perhaps as much as 1 million votes). That's more than double the average turnout (as a percent of population) in the states which have had primaries so far.That means that in tallying the popular vote, Puerto Rico -- with a population of 3.9 million and NO Electoral votes in November -- will be included. But under Clinton "new math", the 15 states who conducted caucuses (AK, CO, HI, ID, IA, KS, ME, MN, MT, NB, NV, ND, SD, WA, WY) won't be included, even though they have a population of 33.9 million and 80 Electoral votes.This is NUTS!!But unless Obama supporters take pre-emptive action, getting out the word as to just how ridiculous this calculation is, the nutty Clinton "new math" may prevail. Let's not allow that to happen.
As somebody who wants to see Obama win not only the nomination but also the general election, I hate to see high-profile Obama supporters call for Clinton to quit before the primaries are over.
First of all, it ain't gonna happen, so why waste time? It just diverts attention from SUBSTANTIVE campaign issues.
More important, if Clinton DID quit now, it would most likely be a disaster for Obama. As I understand the numbers, it's still THEORETICALLY possible (although highly improbable) that if Clinton won most of the remaining primaries by huge margins she might edge ahead of Obama in pledged delegates and/or the popular vote. And if Clinton did that, she would have a legitimate claim on the nomination. If she quit now, while there's still a slim possibility of winning, a great many Clinton supporters would be enraged (about the same way Obama supporters would have felt if he'd agreed to quit in early February after Super Tuesday, when Clinton held a slim delegate lead).
The most sensible strategy is to keep campaigning, concentrating on making substantive arguments to voters as to why Obama is the best choice for President and to make good showings in all the remaining primaries.
When it becomes clear that Obama has in fact won the contest for pledged delegates and popular vote, then I think a great many reasonable Clinton supporters will agree that she lost a fair fight, and will not respond well if Clinton continues to seek the nomination via a "Tonya Harding" strategy. But until the Clinton side agrees that they can't win, there's no point in stoking their anger (and creating fodder for fund-raising letters).
