And we're back!

Barack Obama is a prohibitive favorite to become our next President.  He has run an impressive campaign, particularly in his ability to bring in masses of eager volunteers and use them productively.  Given the early returns, it seems that the result is going to be a very high turnout across the board for Obama supporters, which given Obama's lead in the polls may result in an Obama landslide.

The election has had its share of mudslinging, and as someone living in a "battleground state," I feel that I've seen far more ads telling me why not to vote for Candidate X than ones telling me why I should vote for Candidate Y.  This is precisely why I long for a viable third party - it's much more difficult (and more expensive) to go negative against two other candidates; instead, candidates would be forced to run on their own merits much more.  Plus, it might encourage greater independence in platforms as the bases of each party become smaller and less important in winning the election.  Of course, it will take a perfect storm of events and personalities for a third party to overcome the opposition Democrats and Republicans will put up against any rising third party.  Ah well.

To a more practical point, then.  Obama will win an election that has had more than its share of negative campaigning.  He has absolutely inspired a lot of people with his positive campaigning - after all, one cannot create the sort of organization that he has all over the country through negative campaigning - but the relationship between the two parties seems as bitter as it has been through most of the Bush presidency.  Obama's challenge will be do what every candidate always claims he will do - create an atmosphere in Washington in which there is no stigma attached to crossing party lines, an atmosphere in which the first reaction is not to blame the opposition.  The first step he can take is to choose a bipartisan cabinet (which means more than a token Republican as Secretary of Agriculture) - bringing back Colin Powell as Secretary of State would be a good start (and then listen to him!).  Powell is still one of the most popular figures in American politics, and he has endorsed Obama.  To go a step further, I wouldn't mind someone like Mitt Romney in the cabinet as well, and I'd even like to see Obama keep around a neo-con or two (if perhaps not in a cabinet post) - I think they've been a bit too aggressive in their foreign policy under Bush, but they still represent an interesting and valuable point of view that should be taken into consideration by any administration.  Obama's weakness is a lack of experience in foreign policy, but he has a chance to turn this into a positive if he gathers a diverse and intelligent group of advisors around him to provoke greater thought and analysis of each situation.  Isn't this why schools and colleges around the country are embracing diversity - because a diversity of background leads to a diversity of thought that stimulates intellectual growth?  I feel that we have a chance to emerge from 8 years of intellectual stagnation in the highest offices of the country; here's hoping that Obama has the wisdom and courage to end that trend.  And in the very unlikely event that McCain wins, let's hope he's "maverick" enough to break from the party policy of Bush and Rove and do the same.

Dragged back in

Last Saturday and Sunday, I went to the Dodgers-Phillies games.  Saturday, while the Phillies took an early lead, by the top of the 5th it was only 3-2, and anything could happen.  Then, with runners at 1st and 2nd and none out, Matt Kemp lost a routine flyball to center in the sun and missed it by 40 feet.  Ryan Howard then doubled on a 3-0 count and the game was effectively over (it ended 9-2).

Sunday, the Dodgers were outhitting the Phillies around 10-5, but only took a 2-1 lead into the 9th.  Still, they had two outs with a runner on second and Andy Tracy at the plate, a 34 year old journeyman with no MLB at-bats since 2004 and only 263 for his career; he's also got a sterling .153 career average as a pinch hitter.  Four straight balls and a Pedro Feliz single later, and it's a tie game.  Still, the Dodgers had not exhausted their ability to disappoint - in the top of the 10th, they loaded the bases with none out, but an all too predictable 5U-2 double play and strikeout ended that threat.  When the Pedro Feliz cranked a 2 out, 3 run homer in the 11th, I gave up hope for the season.  Teams that lose games like this are not playoff teams.

Monday to Friday only confirmed my conviction - 5 losses, including a sweep by the horrific Washington Nationals and a loss in the opener of their series with the division leading Diamondbacks.  The Dbacks lead was a solid but surprisingly low 4.5 games, due to their own bad week, but my hope was as good as dead.  I was so depressed about the Dodgers that I didn't even bother checking the pitching match-ups for the final two games; a good thing, since they would only have deepened the despair - the Dbacks had Haren and Webb lined up, two of the top five NL Cy Young candidates.

It's two days later, and apparently there was a hidden glimmer of hope all along which has now been fanned up significantly.  The Dodger bats woke up and beat both Haren and Webb, and 2.5 games with a fairly easy closing schedule and three games still to play against the Diamondbacks, in LA, seems a reasonable amount to overcome.  And this, I think, is the greatness of sports, and baseball in particular.  Each game builds your hopes repeatedly, often just to dash them.  But the more they are dashed, the more rewarding it is when that hope is fulfilled.  Likewise, over the course of the season a fan's hopes rise and fall continuously - unlike any other sport, literally with every day.  There are disappointments; for most of us, there are more disappointments than rewarding moments (after all, only 8 of 30 teams make the playoffs, and only one wins it all), but they just make the good moments that much better.

On Democracy

It has become common practice to praise democracy as the best form of government; it's something that Americans don't even think about anymore.  Frankly, this is an excellent example of much of what I don't like democracy - such a large proportion of the population accepts whatever they hear as absolutely true without taking the time to step back, to think about it, to analyze it.  Another example - as a NYTimes article recently pointed out, for the last 25 years, Gallup polls have consistently shown that nearly half of the adult US population believes the world and all creatures were created by God within the last 10,000 years.  This is despite, obviously, huge amounts of evidence to the contrary.

In the world of politics, one of the results of this inability to step back and think critically is a susceptibility to being swayed by charisma and rhetoric rather than by intelligence and the issues.  This is not to say that charisma and rhetoric have no value on the world stage - they certainly do - but they play a far greater role in the election than they should.  Likewise, so many people accept the messages of negative commercials without thinking or investigating.

Since this is a democracy, though, everyone has a vote and an equal say in electing our leaders.  Moreover, time and again we see those leaders acting more to satisfy the electorate rather than in the manner they believe best serves the country - after all, that's what protects their jobs.  They are more concerned with assigning blame than fixing the problem - again, it protects their jobs (or wins them a job).  If something's going poorly, and they can be portrayed as responsible for it, they are more concerned with putting a positive spin on it than figuring out how to turn it around.

I don't mean to say that all politicians are this way, but I do think that it's a significant problem that is endemic to democracy, and it all goes back to the inability of a major portion of the voting population to think critically.  I'm also not going to put forth a solution,* because every form of government has its share of problems.  The ability to change leaders is very important in any form of government because without it there is no check against tyranny.  Unfortunately, those forms of government that are more likely to achieve an aristocracy (using the ancient Greek meaning of rule by the aristoi, the best) - monarchy and oligarchy - are also the most difficult to devise methods of changing the government and thus preventing the descent into tyranny.

* The obvious solution, of course, is better education (and I am absolutely in favor of greatly increased spending on education); I certainly hope that this would improve the problem, but I can't say that I don't have some doubts.

VP choices and more

I never planned for this to be a political blog, especially as I've become pretty bad about paying attention to politics.  And yet, here we are with our third legitimate post, and once again, it's about politics.  In my defense, I'm trying to avoid partisan hackery.

John McCain has just nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his VP candidate.  Like most Americans, I'm sure, I had never heard of her before reading her name on CNN (and even after reading 3 or 4 articles about the choice, I still had to flip back a second ago to check on her first name).  The Democrats are already killing her for a lack of experience and qualification, playing up the fact that she's "a heartbeat away from the Presidency," which is particularly important (they say) because McCain is 72 and has had multiple bouts with cancer.*

* You know, McCain's health was not something I was terribly worried about, and it still doesn't bother me that much, but I just glanced through the stats, and he would be the oldest president at his inauguration by three years.  That's more significant than I'd thought.**

**Oh, I'm picking these "Pozterisks" up from Joe Posnanski, who coined the term for the random but very entertaining tangents in his superb sports blog.  Also a tip of the hat to Terry Pratchett, who has pretty much done the same thing with great comic effect in his Discworld novels for the last 20 or 30 years.

Anyway, I have to say that I don't like this argument; for me, experience is vastly overrated.  To my mind, Palin's lack of it does not make her a worse VP candidate, nor does Obama's lack of it make him a worse Presidential candidate.  I want a President who is intelligent (obviously), can think for him/herself, but also can listen and learn from those around him and is willing to bring diverse viewpoints into that conversation.  If you surround an intelligent, open-minded person with knowledgeable and diverse advisors, I would trust that person to make a good decision, regardless of his or her experience.

This brings me to one of the biggest problems I have with our political system - the primary system.*  All of the viable candidates tend to sell out to please the more radical base of the party, as it turns out in the greatest numbers, and the base generally wants to be rewarded for its support with like-minded advisors, cabinet members, and judges; more significantly, appointments of people with opposing opinions is viewed as a betrayal.  As a result, we tend not to get the well-rounded advisor group presenting many points of view, but instead nuances on one point of view.

* This is problem #2; problem #1 is that most people are, for lack of a better word, stupid.  We'll get back to that problem in a later post, though.

Given my druthers, I would do away with the primaries, which tend to turn into a mockery of democracy,* what with different states having different levels of influence based on the timing of the primary and having different procedures for voting and awarding delegates, not to mention the whole superdelegate issue.  I see a couple of possible replacement systems (granted, these are pretty radical and won't ever happen, but it's fun to theorize).  In both cases, all interested candidates would be free to run (as part of their party) in the general election; that would mean potentially Hillary, John Edwards, Romney, and Huckabee could still be on the ballot this year (and perhaps others).  Option one would give every voter a set number of votes (say, 3, for the purposes of this example) which could be used for any number of voters.  A big Hillary fan could cast 3 votes for Hillary, while someone who liked both Hillary and Obama might vote twice for Obama and once for Hillary.  Option two would allow a voter to check off every name that he or she approved of from the presidential candidate list.  Perhaps we'll go into the pros and cons of such systems later, but it's late and I'm tired, so that will have to do for now.

* Now, I won't say that democracy is necessarily a good thing (again, more coming later), and so I'm not criticizing the primaries solely for being a mockery of democracy.  I criticize them because, for the reasons discussed earlier, I think they often can fail to choose the best candidate, and even when they do, they unduly influence the positions that candidate takes.  In the end, they are both an ineffective method of choosing candidates and are not particularly democratically fair - that qualifies as a failure all around in my book.

Georgia once more

According to the NYTimes, "The United States... has emphasized that Georgia's territorial integrity must be preserved.  Mr. Bush said Saturday, 'There's no room for debate on this matter.'"

This is in response to Russia's claims that Georgia voided its claims on South Ossetia and Abkhazia by invading South Ossetia.  I completely understand the US upholding the Georgia's borders excepting those provinces, given that there are very real worries of Russia annexing Georgia or turning it into a vassal state.  However, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have only been nominally part of Georgia for the past 15 years; effectively they have been independent and under Russian protection (hence the Georgian invasion that started this war).  Are we really willing to draw a line in the sand just to return them to that state?  Georgia will assert no control over these provinces regardless - why is it so important that they remain as part of Georgia's territory?  At best, it seems like an empty political victory; more likely, it will be yet one more embarrassing sign of how little the US can actually do in this conflict.

Follow up

Fittingly enough, I post, and within 10 minutes the evening news comes on, announcing a cease-fire between Georgia and Russia (which had been agreed upon earlier in the day).

Georgia - Russia (A Beginning v. 2.0)

Ok, so I never really got started when I set this up. Let's see if we can do better this time around.

As we're back in Richmond housesitting, I've actually been reading the paper in the morning (or early afternoon - my internal clock is admittedly a little screwed up at the moment), and so I've devoted some thought to the Georgia-Russia conflict over South Ossetia. First of all, Georgia has acted colossally stupid in all of this. For the great majority of Georgia's independence from Russia, it has not controlled South Ossetia, which essentially seceded successfully and has been under Russian protection. The attempt to recover the province reeks of nationalistic pride; from what I understand, it is a poor area that is unlikely to provide much benefit to Georgia even if they were able to recover it. The people of South Ossetia do not wish to be part of Georgia and were likely to cause trouble in the event that they were reconquered. Russia was certainly going to provide significant military opposition, and Iraq and Afghanistan have both shown what happens when a major power with relatively high-tech weaponry opposes a minor power. The cost-benefit analysis of this scenario is not particularly difficult.

The Georgian president has spouted the usual rhetoric about how this is an important test of the western world/US and that it has so far failed to live up to its ideology, etc. The simple fact is that there is little that the US et al. could do. Military assistance is an impossibility - besides the risks of World War III, it would be political suicide to open another military front with Iraq so unpopular. Trade embargos (always unpopular with the countries that do the most trade, especially when the embargoed country is as major a market as Russia) would take time to agree upon, then to set up, and even then to have an effect. As a result, we get exactly what should be expected - repeated firm calls for a cease-fire and international mediation.

Russia, I believe, is on the point of acting foolishly itself. They have demonstrated their military dominance and achieved the primary objective of protecting South Ossetia. They are in a position, in talks, to demand that Georgia permanently relinquish its claims to both South Ossetia and the other secessionist province (something with an A I'm too lazy to look up right now). Their initial actions opposing Georgia's attempt were defensible, given their history in the region and the longstanding preference of South Ossetia for independence or even Russian rule. However, if they do not agree to a cease-fire fairly soon, they risk a significant alienation of the western world, possibly worse than that of the US following the beginning of the Iraq war. The harm to diplomatic and trade relations Russia could suffer might easily outweigh the advantages of toppling the pro-US Georgian government or even annexing Georgia.

A final note - let us assume that Russia does agree to a cease-fire, withdraws its forces into South Ossetia, and that the result of mediation is South Ossetian independence. I would not go so far as to say that democray and the free market are in trouble in Georgia, but the current government is likely to be voted out in disgrace for their miscalculations. Anti-Russian sentiment is likely to continue to be strong (every day Russia waits before agreeing to a cease-fire will only make them more hated in Georgia); on the other hand, the lack of tangible US support (even if it was foolish to expect it) will do significant damage to the Georgian-US alliance. In other words, Russia is nearly as likely to topple a pro-US Georgian government by agreeing to a cease-fire as by continuing to fight.