Debate Time
The first Democratic debate is starting in five minutes. Turn to MSNBC or go here to watch it. I can’t wait to see if Hillary or Obama are able to live up to the hype.
UPDATE : Well, that was fun. Listening to the C-Span feed, here are my thoughts on the candidates so far :
Clinton : She did well, but didn’t wow me. I’ve always gotten the impression that the public thinks they know Hillary, but don’t really know much about her beyond the fact that she was Bill Clinton’s wife. With that in mind, I’m interested to see how her debate appearances help or hurt her.Obama : Great, but I wasn’t the reincarnation of JFK the hype would have you believe. I look forward to seeing him in more debates as the field narrows. He used one of my favorite lines of the night, noting that “The confederate flag should be put in a museum. That’s where it belongs.”
Edwards : Still my favorite, though he seemed to be caught off-guard by a couple of the questions. His best lines have a tendency to become cliches, but I still love his insistence that Americans should be “patriotic about something other than war.”
Richardson : I was looking forward to hearing more about him, but he didn’t do so well with the question about supporting Gonzales because he’s Latino.
Biden : He’s a blowhard and had some great moments in the debate, but c’mon.
Dodd : I think his audition for VP is going pretty well so far.
Gravel : Wow. I was thinking before the debate started that it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without Sharpton around this time. I was wrong. He called Biden arrogant to his face? I love this guy.
Kucinich : Oh boy. Here we go again. Damn shame the one guy who can say definitively that he was right when everyone else was wrong is such a douche. Also, note how the “most liberal” candidate danced around the question about whether he’d have a Roe v. Wade litmus test for Supreme Court justices. I’m with Kos on this one. Ugh, indeed.
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Damn shame the one guy who can say definitively that he was right when everyone else was wrong is such a douche.
Well, now I see why we can’t possibly vote for him, with him being a “douche”, and all. Well argued, Greg!
Comment by SteveB — April 26, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Gravel was a lot of fun. It’s nice to have someone who brutally honest,just to stir things up. We still like Edwards too. Gave him $1OO yesterday.
Comment by Becky — April 26, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
Steve, I assume Greg must have read your comment, then quickly gone back into the post and deleted the sentence “Steve can’t possibly vote for Kucinich now!”
Comment by briantologist — April 26, 2007 @ 10:15 pm
John Edwards is still my favorite, but I laughed out loud when Brian Williams asked him the simplest of questions about Russia (friend or foe?), and he launched into a long soundbite without even coming close to answering the question. I guess that’s why I love and hate the debates. Of course, I think we should do this Idol-style and just start narrowing the field of candidates weekly.
Comment by Earnest — April 27, 2007 @ 6:54 am
In 2004, I initially supported Kucinich because I thought (correctly) that he was the “most liberal.” Sadly, I also assumed (incorrectly) that he was “not crazy.” Greg’s characterization of him as a “douche” may be crude and glib, but I think it captures L’essence du Kucinich quite aptly. If you don’t agree, just research him, and if you still disagree - well, then we’ll just have to disagree. It’s unfortunate that once again the “most liberal” candidate (and one who Greg points out was right all along, like many of us were) is such a train wreck.
Comment by Bugsy — April 27, 2007 @ 9:36 am
OK, so besides being a “douche”, Kucinich is also “crazy” and a “train wreck”.
And Hillary’s “shrill”, Edwards is a “faggot”, Kerry was a “flip-flopping frenchman”, and Gore was a “robot” and “serial exaggerator.”
And remember that screamin’ crazy Howard Dean?
You’d think, after being on the receiving end of this sort of content-free personality-driven crap, Democrats might be reluctant to engage in it themselves. And you’d be wrong.
When political discussion is reduced to flip assertions about the candidate’s personalities, it’s not just marginal candidates like Kucinich who lose, it’s the entire Democratic Party that loses. And loses.
Greg’s post purported to be a review of a Presidential debate. If Kucinich proposed policies or ideas that lead Greg to think he’s a “douche”, then let’s hear about them.
Attacking the person instead of his or her ideas is a time-tested Republican tactic, because they know that they can’t win a contest of ideas. What’s your excuse?
Comment by SteveB — April 27, 2007 @ 2:04 pm
If you insist :
1) I don’t trust him when it comes to Roe v. Wade. At all. He was 100% anti-choice right until he decided to run for President in 2004. I’m sure the timing is just a coincidence. That’s why I pointed out the way he danced around the yes/no question of whether or not he’d have a pro-choice litmus test on Supreme Court justices. For more, read about it at The Nation.
2) He’s a new-agey loon :
3) The fact that he participated in a “Win a Date With Dennis” contest is pathetic. I want a little more seriousness from somebody who’s trying to run the country.
Comment by greg — April 27, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
Greg:
Wow, I’m impressed! Only 34 minutes after my post, you had ctrl-c ctrl-v’d up enough material to put me firmly in my place.
But, impressed as I am with your trip to the Kucinich archive, I don’t see how it responds to this:
If Kucinich proposed policies or ideas that lead Greg to think he’s a “douche”, then let’s hear about them.
When I wrote: “If Kucinich proposed policies and ideas…” I didn’t mean, “If Kucinich proposed policies and ideas some time in the past seven years….” I meant, “If Kucinich proposed policies and ideas in the debate…” (Remember the debate? The one you were reviewing when you called Kucinich a “douche”?) Anyway, sorry for not being clearer about that.
After all, I’d guess that you don’t support Hillary Clinton’s proposal to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq after she’s been elected, a proposal she made only a few months ago, but that didn’t earn her the “douche” label, did it? Fair enough. She didn’t repeat this idea during the debate, so your review of her debate performance didn’t mention it.
But that is a bit of a double standard, don’t you think?
Just one more example: Democratic Presidential candidate K introduces legislation in the House to impeach Dick Cheney, while Democratic Presidential candidates C, B, and possibly O, think a pre-emptive strike on Iran, possibly using nuclear weapons, is an “option” that should be kept “on the table.” Which candidate will liberal blogger G call a “douche”?
Of course, your objections, mostly, have nothing to do with Kucinich’s politics. Sure, he takes all the “correct” positions (with the exception of right to choose) but still he’s a “douche”, you’d say. Kucinich, I think, irritates you and many other liberals because he’s almost a right-winger’s caricature of what a liberal should be (vegan, new-agey, Department of Peace, etc, etc). He embarasses you by his mere presence, because you worry that he’s helping the right wing to paint all liberals as being “like that.”
Sort of like the attitudes that some gay men have towards other gay men who seem to confirm gay stereotypes. “Why can’t they be less swishy? Don’t they see they’re making the rest of us look bad?”
Fortunately, the gay community has mostly left this “debate” behind. I wonder when the liberal community will leave it behind.
Comment by SteveB — April 29, 2007 @ 6:34 am
For the third time, Kucinich weaseled out of a question about Roe vs. Wade during the debate. I didn’t trust him on pro-choice issues before and certainly don’t trust him now.
Trust me, I’ve been annoyed by new agey folks like Kucinich long before I was politically active. The right wing will always find a way to caricature the left (like they did with a centrist like Howard Dean), so I can assure you that my objections to Kucinich are because I really do think he sucks.
The Cheney impeachment is a publicity stunt. I’m all for it, but if Kucinich honestly thinks it’s going to accomplish anything, I’ve got a bridge to sell him. He should take a cue from Henry Waxman and hold a few public hearings on Cheney’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” to build support for impeachment, not just throw it out there on the eve of a debate.
What’s more, if there was, god forbid, a nuclear Iran threatening the United States (far fetched, I know), I’d feel a lot safer with one of the “all options on the table” candidates than the “soul-light magic of the innermost life” candidate. The problem with “Department of Peace” candidates like Kucinich isn’t that they won’t consider all options on the table but their commitment to peace makes it seem as if they won’t keep any options on the table. War sucks, but sometimes it’s necessary (no, I’m not talking about Iraq).
Comment by greg — April 30, 2007 @ 5:36 am
Greg:
OK, I guess we just disagree. You and Hillary Clinton think that threatening other countries with preventive nuclear strikes is an “option” that should be “on the table.”
Dennis Kucinich and I, on the other hand, think this would be a bad thing.
Thanks for clearing that up.
And I now have a much better understanding of why you called Kucinich a “douche”. Much more concise than: “Kucinich, who is a douche because he supports impeaching Dick Cheney and opposes nuking Tehran.”
Comment by SteveB — April 30, 2007 @ 3:30 pm
So you decry the “politics of personal destruction” for political candidates but then engage in it yourself over the internet? Seizing on one word (”douche”) and extrapolating that this somehow makes those of us who dislike Kucinich craven Hillary/Obama apparatchiks is absurd beyond belief. I have my reasons for disliking them too, and if you must know, Edwards is my favorite right now; however, Kucinich is a deeply unserious person, and a deeply unserious candidate. He’s a joke, he knows he’s a joke, and he is playing this for all it’s worth. It’s not “personality-driven attacks” to dismiss him out of hand - it’s just summing up an opinion. You obviously disagree, and that’s fine, but you came to that conclusion on your own - please let us do the same. There are more than enough reasons to dislike him, but do we all really have to go over them each time?
Comment by Bugsy — May 1, 2007 @ 6:47 am
“Craven Hillary/Obama apparatchiks” is a great turn of phrase, but it’s not actually one I used in my comments. I wonder how it popped into your head. A bit defensive, are we?
But, speaking of Hillary, I must say I was surprised at Greg’s open-minded approach to the “option” of preventive airstrikes, potentially nuclear strikes, on Iran. Not the sort of thing I usually expect to find only one click away from “This Modern World.”
As for the question of “seriousness”, there is no word more valued among the D.C. elites we all despise. David Broder, for example, is a “serious” pundit, while Dan Perkins (to take us back to TMW) is deeply “unserious” (the man’s a cartoonist, for God’s sake!)
What you and the D.C. punditocracy have in common is that your judgments of “seriousness” aren’t based on the decisions the person in question has made on the most important issues of our time, but on how much money the person has, their personal manner, their place in the social order. David Broder was an enabler for the greatest foreign policy blunder in the history of our country, and Dan Perkins was a stalwart opponent of said blunder, but no matter: Broder is “serious” and Perkins is “unserious.”
And so it goes with Presidential candidates. Just think of the fundamental questions raised by the Bush presidency: Should our country engage in preventive war? Should the government be able to torture people? Should the President and Vice President be held accountable to the law, to Congress, to…well, anything? I judge a candidate’s seriousness by his or her positions on these very serious issues. Your approach to assessing a candidate’s seriousness is, in a word, “unserious.”
And, in reponse to your last question: no you don’t really have to go over your reasons for despising Kucinich “each time.” I apologise for holding a gun to Greg’s head and forcing him to take part in this tiresome conversation.
Comment by SteveB — May 1, 2007 @ 3:26 pm