At this point, I'm honestly torn between the prospect of nominee Obama and nominee Clinton. My feeling is that today, at this moment, the idealistic vote goes to Obama, but the prudent vote goes to Clinton. Yesterday in New Hampshire, Clinton's victory served to ensure that Obama will, in time, become the prudent vote as well as the idealistic vote.
Follow me here. Let's assume Obama had won New Hampshire, effectively becoming the overwhelming favorite, requiring a miracle of sorts from Clinton to pull out the votes on super tuesday, Feb. the 5. This would allow Obama to keep walking around giving stump speeches about abstract ideals and may have actually, despite my facetious tone in the endorsement, started promising unicorns to Americans with enough space to keep them. What's gonig to happen now is that Obama is going to actually have to stand for something in order to get those votes. So that means he'll have had at least this extra month of January to hone his platform, explain why he doesn't want to require Americans to have health care, why he wants to have tea with Castro and Kim Jong Il, and how he's going to convince the Democratic congress to up the cap on the social security tax. (Ok, that last one was really my issue, but I'd like to see someone pick it up.) Bottom line, Barack needs this fight. If he's going to position himself on the Hugo Chavez side of center, then he's going to have to get ready for McCain (Mac is back!) coming hard with the Piggy and Samaneric conch busting, right leaning fire and brimstone.
A side note: I'm pretty pleased at the prospect of all 3(well 2.5) major Democratic candidates taking up the cause of universal health care. All of their plans are pretty similarly based on the Massachusetts model, with some alterations. Now this plan is flawed in the traditional Canadian/British model of universal health care, but it's I think the best we can do from where we are to where we want to get.
6 comments:
Chuck, I've been working on a formula used to determine a candidate's likelihood of promising voters unicorns (or UP, for unicorn-promising. Let me know what you think.
You pointed out three main factors:
1. The viability of one's opponent (V)
2. The length of time one has leftover after becoming the frontrunner (T)
3. The level of abstractness involved in one's other, earlier, less unicorn-level promises (A)
So therefore:
UP = [A / (V * T)] * 100
So if we can assign Barack an Abstractness factor of 87 (all factors are weighted on a scale of 1-100, 100 being highest), his opponent's Viability factor of 82 (which just shot up after Hilldog's victory), and a Time factor of 34 (this is, admittedly, pure speculation), then:
UP = [87 / (82 * 34)] * 100
Using my TI-85, I can determine that the likelihood of Barack Obama promising us all unicorns is currently...
3.12!!!
Yay math!
Chuck, you honestly wouldn't have been happier if he just flat out won New Hampshire?
Well, like I say, I'm torn between them. I want Obama to be something that he's not right now. I like the idea of Obama, but I'm not sure he's really got the substance.
Like her or not, you can't argue against Clinton's substance.
OB...what is your unit of measure?
3.12 percent? 3.12 unicorns per speech? 3.12 great ones per hour?
3.12 Yoda tears. I dunno. Something like that. We're talking about friggin' unicorns.
I want one.
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