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So, today, with both prominent liberals and conservatives now calling for Alberto Gonzales to resign, and with his numbers dropping in the polls, and when the entire Bush administration is being soundly ridiculed in the pages of the Washington Post, the question remains: what do "experts agree" about Gonzales?
Whatever happens, some folks will be happy with the results, and others will not. That's a certainty. What may come out of these experiments is a push afterwards to lessen the chaos by instituting some intelligent presidential election reforms. There are many good proposals to do this, but two of the most sensible directly address the primary calendar problems.
The first I have previously written about. It was proposed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker in their blue-ribbon commission report on elections. It essentially says: let the early states continue to go first; but instead of having one national primary, divide the country into four regions. All the states in each region would vote on the same day, and each region would vote about a month apart. Whichever region goes first in each election would rotate to the back of the line for the next election, cycling all the regions into first place (once every four elections).
The second idea would be to just give up and have a national primary.
I have limited this article to examining declared non-frontrunners in the Democratic race, as you will have noticed. I refuse to take the bait from prominent Democrats toying with the media by playing the "will he or won't he run" game (paging Al Gore...). Tom Vilsack was briefly a candidate, but then pulled out when he realized that "favorite son of Iowa" wasn't going to raise him enough money. And Senator Russ Feingold has already disappointed me (he was my favorite) by announcing that he is not going to run. So I have examined the field as it stands. If the field changes, perhaps I'll revisit the issue.
In conclusion, I hope I have done what I can at this point to help make this a true race of ideas and positions, instead of just the usual beauty contest and money race. I think it's a shame the way elections are run in this country for our most important job, and I wish it were different (I'm a personal advocate of free television ads for all as a way to remove the influence of money from campaign politics). But in the world we live in, and with the soapbox I have here at Huffington Post, I'd like to think I have done what I could to help the "underdog" candidates (like many Americans, I'm a sucker for underdogs) get some valuable free media exposure and, by doing so, get their message out to the voters.
So, in the hopes that their names don't completely disappear from the media's radar, I hereby present a rundown of the "second tier" of Democratic presidential candidates. The way I figure it (barring any huge surprises), this may be the last time any of these candidates are taken seriously by anybody, before they slowly disappear from the American voter's consciousness.
I think it's a shame (in general) that campaigns aren't run about ideas, but about money. So I am doing what I can to counteract that by examining ALL the Democratic candidates that the mainstream media are ignoring in the race. Of course, I have limited resources, so I have to rely on media reports and the candidates' own web pages in order to do so. I have tried to be fair, and present the campaigns as I see them after spending a bit of time looking at each one.
While some in the media are holding out hope that the White House will sit down like adults and work with the congressional conference committee to agree on language that Bush will actually sign, it must be said that this is deluded and wishful thinking. Because Bush wants to veto this bill -- for several political reasons.
So forgive me for wanting to change the channel when I hear DiFi (as she is familiarly know to her California constituents) waxing indignant over Gonzales' actions on television news. I would much prefer to hear a more consistent and believable Democratic Senator. Like Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy (D-VT), for example.
Now consider the following:
* The French monarchy had Justinian law, which clearly stated: "Rex solutus est a legibus" ("The King is released from the laws"). George Bush had legal advisors John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales insisting on the concept of a "unitary executive" (basically, "the executive, especially in times of war, is absolute and must not defer to the other branches of government").
We have lost more helicopters in Iraq during the past three weeks than during any period of the war. Details are sketchy, but we've lost either six or seven helicopters in the past few weeks (sources disagree on the total number, and on how many of these were military choppers and how many were civilian contractors'). Nobody seems to be sure if this is due to: (a) new tactics by insurgents with conventional weapons (heavy machine guns); (b) insurgents getting new weapons such as shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (SAMs, or MANPADs); or (c) just a statistical anomaly.
Picture this:
[GOP POLITICIAN:] "Bloviate bloviate BLO-vi-ate, bloviate the Democrat Party position on this subject is bloviate blovi-ATE..."
Or, perhaps, the following:
[FOX NEWS "JOURNALIST":] "Spin spin SPIN. Spin SPIN spin spin Democrat Party spin spin SPIN!!!"
Now picture this response to such provocation:
[DEMOCRATIC POLITICIAN'S RESPONSE:] "Well, if you insist on referring to my party as the 'Democrat Party' then I'm going to have to use President Bush's own term 'Republic Party' to respond to that. After all, if my party's name is too hard for you to pronounce, then I'll have to follow Bush's lead and use 'Republic Party' in order to get it down to the number of syllables you seemingly are able to pronounce."
