Will they drink the Koolaid?

The media, which is to say Big Business seems to be doing its damndest to make Hillary Inc. seem inevitable, as no doubt is Terry MacAwful's plan. I have been trying to ignore politics and keep reminding myself that the front runner Last time was dead in the water before New Hampshire and we really won't know until the votes start coming in who they will actually be for. But it does seem like enough Democrats may drink the Koolaid that we will end up following Hillary off a cliff giving us 4 or 8 more years of who knows what awfullness.

But while I have been ignoring political news and blogs, our carnival on The Biggest Obstacle To Electing The Right Presidential Candidate has had a number of entries:


CapitaL eLs

It's Not Ron Paul and It's Not Hillary Clinton

capitalels.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-not-ron-paul-and-its-not-hillary.html


Techfun

Political Gossip Clouds The Issues

blog.techfun.org/political-gossip-clouds-the-issues


What's Wrong Around Us?

wherein Tiffany decries the media culture and voter ignorance


whatswrongaroundus.blogspot.com/2007/11/biggest-obstacle-to-electing-right....

The Thin Red Line

I reply to Tiffany's post

blog.libdrone.org/2007/11/librarians-as-anti-dote-for-media.html

Catholic Inside

Is "voting your faith" even a meaningful concept in today's political climate?

catholicinside.blogspot.com/2007/11/voting-your-faith-is-it-possible-in.htm...

Techfun

Single issue voters are a big part of the problem. This is partly in response to Tiffany's "Too many voters" point.

blog.techfun.org/sacrifice-your-issues

Along the Grey Path

Where have all the investigative journalists gone?

greytheory.blogspot.com/2007/11/he-who-asks-questions-answers-questions.htm...

Sub Lumen

A very in depth analysis of the question

www.sublumen.com/2007/11/biggest-obstacle-to-electing-right.html


After much discussion and much consideration, it has been decided to continue the carnival through the end of the year and plan to do publicity in early January. So if you have a political or personal blog, please do a post with Your take on The Biggest Obstacle and add your link to the thread or email it to me-- libdrone at gmail dot com.

It's Not Ron Paul and It's Not Hillary Clinton

When rockstories suggested we try something different and each blog our own take on

The Biggest Obstacle To Electing The Right Presidential Candidate

I figured this would be another slam-dunk kind of post to write. My first temptation of course is to name Ron Paul as the biggest obstacle. (Ron Paul is THE crack cocaine for authors of political blogs these days; the mere inclusion of the man's name in a post title practically guarantees a blogger a slew of new readers, a bunch of Diggs and a slew of comments both on the blog itself and on Digg and I am as susceptible as the next hack to the temptation to "give 'em what they want" and draw all those eyeballs to my words and ads.) But try as I might, I can not fashion a cogent argument that the Gentleman from Texas is any obstacle at all. America is not going to elect a Libertarian running as a Republican, no matter how many genuinely committed and Internet savvy supporters he can muster.

IMHO, the real effect of the Ron Paul campaign will be the political awakening and activation of those supporters, some of whom will no doubt go on to become involved with other more successful campaigns and perhaps become political players in their own right, in the manner of several currently prominent liberal bloggers who got their starts in the Howard Dean campaign.

My second thought was to cast Hillary Clinton as the biggest obstacle to electing the right President. I quite agree with techfun who has argued that electing Hillary would insure we have another four or eight years of deeply divided government that is primarily focused on political in-fighting and incapable of effectively addressing the myriad real problems we face as a nation. And I yield to no one in the depth and strength of my disdain for Mrs. Clinton. But if I am to be honest, I do not believe that Hillary is electable, and for all the copy she generates and all of the passions she arouses, both negative and positive, I can't honestly say I believe that Hillary is our biggest problem. (She is at most a symptom of the problem or obstacle rather than the obstacle itself.)

So having ruled out the easy and obvious answers, I'm forced to look deeper. I gaze into the mirror over the sink in my bathroom and realize the obstacle is staring me back in the face. The real obstacle to electing the right President lies with the citizens who will cast their votes this week next year rather than with any of the candidates they will blacken an oval or pull a lever for. The real obstacle I believe is that we Americans by and large have lost the ability to speak with and more importantly Listen To people we disagree with.

Whether we listen to Rush Limbaugh or Air America, watch Fox News or PBS, read The Nation or The New Republic and get our political news and world view from Red State or daily Kos, most of our political intelligentsia preach only to the choir and most Americans who care about politics pay attention mostly or exclusively to media (both old and new) that reinforce and re-affirm their convictions and beliefs and actively urge, if not outright require, that they see their political opponents only as enemies, to be fought and battled against and vanquished rather than as fellow citizens who care as deeply as they do about the country we all share and claim to love and want what's best for.

Whether Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton (or any of the other candidates) would make a great President or a terrible President is a question for another debate. But to my thinking it really isn't debatable that we will never be able to agree upon and elect the Right President until we learn again to talk civilly and substantively with people we strongly disagree with and learn to see again that all of us-- liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, red state-ers or blue-- are first and foremost Americans. Our inability to see that and use it as a starting point for trying to understand each other and find a common ground we can share is the biggest obstacle to electing the right Presidential candidate.

Al-Jazeera

Amid the universal refusal by all of the candidates we are told are "electable" to commit to ending the Iraq War debacle as a solid majority of Americans want them to do and the daily positioning and finger pointing and scandal du jour that has too often dominated so much political discourse of late, including I have to admit at times my own, that sometimes those of us who think and write politics lose sight of big picture issues.

Like the fact that 9/11 was caused by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and not by Iraq and Saddam Hussein. And that the Arab world remains a very troubled and troubling place and one which we Americans seem to pay insufficient attention to, busy as we are desparately defending civil liberties, watching our jobs and incomes off-shored and just trying to survive in Fortress America that the flurry of attention once gained by the then upstart Arabic cable news network Al-Jazeera has largely faded and much foreign affairs coverage related mostly to the posturing of politicians in Washington and Arab global neighbors ignored or treated as a football in the politicos' own complicated game plans.

Which made this 2005 history of the Al-Jazeera news channel that passed under my scanner today timely. A reminder that while we are making a mess of things in Iraq we have made pitifully little progress at coming to understand the huge chunk of the world for whom Al-Jazeera is a primary source of information, a base understanding which I believe is pre-requisite to any serious discussion of addressing the terrorism issue, which would benefit enormously by losing the hyperbolic "War" rhetoric and a shift to focus on effective law enforcement, reasonable rather than excessive security measures, and a serious effort at brokering a workable and lasting peace among the the diverse peoples of the Arabic world and their global neighbors.

It is worth pointing out that had the security measures that were in place and on the books on 9/11/2001 actually been followed, none of the four hijackings would have been successful. The fact that boarding an airplane is now very nearly as invasive and unpleasant an experience as being booked in to jail has made us no safer than had we merely followed the procedures we already had in place. But I will likely be accused of treason for saying so, and never mind that it is an obvious fact.

If you do not speak Arabic, there is an English language version of Al-Jazeera, although I was unable to find specifics about cable/satellite system availability and pricing. There is also an English language version of Al-Jazeera online. It is worth checking out from time to time so as to be aware of how global events are perceived and reported in the Arabic world. For similar reasons I also strongly recommend reading news of the United States in the International coverage of the UK Guardian.