Every candidate should be able to sound at least as presidential as Bob Hargis. He states his positions confidently and none of his positions are too idealistic to be plausible. In spite of that, Bob Hargis is not prepared enough for my endorsement.
Charles Maxham isn’t really running for President – he’s running to make a protest that our political system is an established system. He is right that the system is heavily tilted in favor of people within the system, but he seems to think this is a result of some evil conspiracy. The fact is that it is a system which has developed over time so that there is a certain equilibrium and a huge amount of inertia that makes change difficult. I won’t argue that the system is perfect, or that it should just remain as it is, but it is normal. If you want a system that is more responsive you must have a smaller system.
If Charles Maxham wants to change our country he should start with something smaller so that he understands the system better. Perhaps he will come to appreciate how natural our current political reality is and will be better prepared to make changes to it.
I can’t figure out what is motivating Jon Greenspon to run for President. Nothing that I can find suggests that he has anything to offer the country except his willingness. If somehow he were to become President I have no doubt that he would not be the one running the country. That’s no way to get endorsed.
There’s nothing average about 9 years of endlessly campaigning to become President, especially for a guy who has no monetary wealth. Joe started running for President in 1998 and has never really stopped since. He declared his candidacy for 2008 the day the 2004 elections were held.
I have no reason to doubt his sincerity in wanting to become president, but I see nothing about Joe Schriner that suggests that he is actually up for the job, except that he obviously has nothing else demanding his time. Though his campaign style is intriguing it certainly does not merit my endorsement.
Among the many places I get political news and information is the new York Time Political blog, The Caucus. Unique among those sources, The Caucus displays a tag cloud which shows the tags they use on their posts with the tags displayed in a font size proportional to how often the tag is used.
It is no surprise that 2008 is the largest tag (most common), but Hillary always seemed to be disproportionally large compared to other candidates. I always dismissed that as a result of the fact that her full name is spelled out and thus takes more space. After seeing the cloud so many times I finally got curious to see how much the various tags were really used. The result revealed an unspoken bias at the blog.
The top two presidential candidates for the Democrats have as many stories as the top 3 presidential candidates for the Republicans (548 in each case). John Edwards is tagged 146 times for the Democrats as well. Following to lower tier candidates the coverage of Democrats makes further gains despite the fact that there are more Republican candidates. Interestingly even President Bush receives fewer tags than either Hillary or Barack. The most telling statistic for me however was the fact that there were 62 posts carrying the tag “CONSERVATIVES” (yes, all caps) and not a single post with a tag for liberals (all caps or otherwise). I guess the reader can decide if that is because they don’t cover liberal stories, or if it is because they don’t consider anything to be liberal.
I am not complaining that there is a bias here. My feeling is that every information source is biased, even good, scientific data , but it is better once the bias is recognized publicly. If anyone wants to see the raw data I used they can download it – I have added some tags for sorting between candidates, parties, issues etc. – or they can go to The Caucus and view the page source to get up-to-date data.
Wayne Root is an idealist. If he were president he would try to remake the face of our nation and our government. many of his ideas have their place, but if he were to be elected his single term would be marked by radical inaction and broken promises as everything he talked about failed to materialize. Admittedly this would not likely be cause by a lack of effort on his part.
I can’t endorse a candidate who is doomed to disappoint even himself.
Learning about Alan Augustson turned out to be much less pedestrian than I had expected. I anticipated that I owuld find a candidate like so many other unknowns. I found instead a person who has some very good ideas that are not being shared as widely as they should. I found myself debating about whether he should be endorsed. In the end I realized that, while his ideas deserve a wider audience because our political discussion of issues is often too narrow to be useful, he would not be able to lead the country.
We need a broader discussion that would come from some more obscure candidates getting more public attention, so this is almost an endorsement, but we also need a President who can get things done, and the current political climate would not allow Alan to do that even if he were elected.
Update 7/3/2007: Alan has decided to abandon his presidential bid in favor of running for the Fifth Congressional District of Illinois.
I did not have high expectations when I began investigating Governor Huckabee. I knew he had been a governor, but before I started actively looking at him as a candidate I had the impression that he was just another aspiring politician who lacked the media advantage of the more well known candidates. I was totally surprised by what I found. After more than a decade as governor I could expect him to have sufficient political experience to be President, what I could not anticipate would be the way that he presents himself. He comes across as approachable, knowledgeable, and willing to serve the country.
Because he lacks the media appeal of other candidates I am confident in predicting that the media will, unfortunately, not give his candidacy the attention that he deserves. I endorse Mike Huckabee for President.
It’s that time again when I review my current status on candidate endorsements. In the last month I manage to finish the whole list of candidates plus one who was not on the list a month ago. Despite all my work, the list this month is as long as the list last month:
The sad thing is that once you consider that two of the candidates on the list last month should not have been on the list (one was not running for president and I forgot that I had already covered the other one) you find that the list is actually longer at the end of the month than it was at the beginning. I have quickly glanced at all the candidates on the current list to make sure that they are all supposed to be on the list. Based on that quick review I am hoping that I can cover a large number of these candidates in a short period of time.
I’d like to get done with this soon so that I can review the endorsements and give some clarification on my positions with regard to the candidates. Not all my endorsements are equal and I want to get through all the candidates before I try to explain who I think are the best candidates and not just who is qualified enough to deserve votes.
The current voucher mess illustrates a sad low point in public discourse. The course of events reads like the script of a soap opera. Our legislature passed two laws to implement a voucher system with the expressed intent of giving citizens a choice in educating our children. One of the two bills is now up for a ballot referendum in November which casts a cloud on the whole situation. The second bill stipulates that the State Board of Education should implement vouchers this summer but the chairman of the Board of Education, an outspoken critic of vouchers, has refused even after the Attorney General has told the board to comply with the law as written. Of course the whole thing has gone to the courts for “clarification” but no matter what the courts say we will still have dedicated people on both sides of the debate who will push their respective agendas. Now we have the Attorney General revoking the status as “special assistant to the Attorney General” of two attorneys working for the Board of Education.
It boils down to the fact that the Board of Education is refusing to comply with the law when they are not elected either to make law or to interpret it. On the other hand, the legislature managed to pass two bills that are largely redundant and forcefully opposed. They have done this in such a way that neither the ruling of the courts nor the ballot referendum will necessarily settle the issue. This sounds more like the work of a handful of powerful partisans than the result of honest efforts by 104 people (the combined size of the House and Senate) trying to represent their constituencies and bring about the best resolution to a high-profile issue.
People on both sides of the issue have called for a special session as the means of clearing up the two existing bills and paving the way for the issue to be resolved. Those who advocate for this approach are likely the most intent on finding a solution rather than just pushing an agenda.
Whatever the outcome of the whole thing, I fear that the final effect on education will be to provide a striking example of how our system of government can be manipulated and hobbled by any minority that is determined enough about what they are trying to accomplish or prevent.
UPDATE: The state Supreme Court ruled that if the citizens voted against vouchers on the referendum in November it would be binding on both bills.