Doc, Doc … time to take a vacation, dear. And I don’t mean, get on another plane.

My sense of it is that it’s the demand side at fault. No one seems terribly interested in learning about the caucus process. The blank look that I referred to. ( I’m sure it’s not due to my endless droning

FWIW, the dems seem particularly ignorant of the process – in my state anyway (MN) this is probably due to the process difference – the dems can just walk in at any time during the caucus and vote in the presidential preference poll. On the repub side the preference vote is held at a moment in time, so you really need to be involved in the caucus to participate.

Of course the participation level (percent of population) at any caucus/convention is extremely low, so any coverage of it does not have a wide appeal. This year the participation was much higher than average, but still only 6% of registered voters participated (I’m estimating from my caucus).

I do find it interesting that it appears to be GWB’s blatant and arrogant actions that have triggered the relatively large involvement this cycle. Yet the overall policy is consistent with the last 50-60 years on average. So in that sense (awareness) GWB has been a cause of significant improvement! (tongue firmly planted in cheek). As I’ve stated ‘ad nauseam’ – my fear is that the consistency with 50-60 years of policy is actually going unnoticed.

Peace Out

I think you’ve hit on a big part of the problem. We need reporters to explain what’s happening and they either won’t, because they think we’re too dumb to pay attention or they can’t because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The people “vetting” our election haven’t been “vetted” themselves.

Try this thought on for size…

The reporters we knew and admired when we were young were educated in journalism and many of them served in the Army covering WWII. They invented broadcast news and had combat experience with average American soldiers all over the world. That experience gave them a keen sense of official BS and they weren’t afraid of the risks it took to get the story and send some truth home. They felt they owed it to the humble people they served to get it right. They knew how to tell a story.

See where I’m going?

This is an issue in all caucus states. (Texas it seems is combo primary/caucus situation).

Case in point: A friend just attended his county convention (caucus state). His county elected delegates to go the state convention – 27% of those delegates were Ron Paul supporters. This county only reported about 15% Ron Paul supporters in all the precinct caucuses – based on the presidential preference polls. This has turned out to be true in many caucus states – Ron Paul will get roughly twice the delegates that the MSM has projected. Not enough to make a real difference in the end result, but enough difference to potentially make a statement at the national convention – not to mention the potential to effect the party platform via the convention resolution process.

So I concur – the actual delegate count for a given candidate as reported by the media is simply mapped from the preferential polls numbers. How those delegates map out in the real world has a lot to do with the veracity of the folks backing the candidates. In the example given, Ron Paul supporters are much more likely to be elected as delegates than their opponents backers at the caucuses and conventions.

The caucus process in general is very complicated – and each state can be different. The mass media simply has no interest in attempting to inform the public – they would lose their audience in the first paragraph. I know – I’ve seen lots of blank looks as I explain this to folks.

Hillary won the Texas primary, right?

Not so fast…

NPR All Things Considered filed this story tonight:

Obama ahead in Texas Caucuses
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87961802

Clinton may have actually lost ground on Tuesday. But the news is all about her big wins, her new found momentum, how she found the key to blunting Obama and why Obama needs to go negative to keep up.

It’s all manufactured baloney. He may take a tougher line, but there is no real reason for him to do anything but continue to win.

The media is selling you the news. Facts needn’t get in the way of a good story. A bloody campaign will suit corporate media just fine.

Why I chuckle?

I can’t stand moderates. I’m not kidding. Our political spectrum is exceedingly narrow as it is. If someone can’t find their way to one end or the other, then they’re complete milktoast.

Of course talking of a ’spectrum’ is inaccurate at best – we’re dealing with multiple orthogonal facets, not a single linear space. Extreme left (talking way off our current spectrum) leads to small government and strong individual liberties (think classical liberalism). Extreme right leads to small government and strong individual liberties (think social libertarianism).

Coincidently, this ‘extreme’ location at both ends is where this country started out. All 3 candidates mentioned are 180 degrees from this starting point – the peak of statism. The reason all 3 are fighting to differentiate themselves is because they are all cramped in the minuscule universe of modern US politics and consciousness – and any moderate is simply standing on tiptoe at the peak.

(At least the wall is listening).

This comes especially to mind when you say things like “much more sane Defense”. Feels like a Pro football metaphor and it’s not hard to imagine HST and McCain in the back of a limo arguing about the Patriots defensive line.

He likes the other two. A lot. For different reasons, but mostly as highly competent, high-integrity human beings who are both more than qualified for The Job.

Obama is a bit of a cypher.

I think there is more to his campaign than technique, more to his message than rhetoric, more to his substance than symbolism. But how much more is the question.

So is how well he can last against the man who will run for Commander in Chief, with more goods to fill those shoes than any president since Ike (though JFK, a WWII vet, deserves consideration there too).

My friend from yesterday is the only person I know who knows Obama and isn’t impressed. Since I hang at the Harvard Law School these days, you can imagine that Mr. Obama and I share many friends and acquiantences. So maybe I’m too close to the center of this thing.

And maybe I’m too much a child of the 50s and 60s, who longs to feel the true and necessary hope espressed by Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and who wants very real and now very old wounds to be healed. Here an Obama presidency would be more than symbolic. If he does a good job, his race will not matter. And that’s what needs to matter. Same goes for Hillary and her gender, by the way.

I actually have some hope for a McCain administration. I think he’ll talk right to get elected and govern center when he gets the job. I think he’s likely to nominate good judges for the Supreme Court, and not pack it like Bush did (with good judges, but still). I know he hates the military industrial complex as much as Ike did, and will likely run a much more sane Defense.

But we have some huge problems as a country, not the least of which is the myths that keeps on mything, not the least of which is the “War on Terrorism” that reduces its real causes to misleading simplicities. The biggest risk of “terrorism” in general — that too many people in the world hate us enough to attack us — is only exacerbated by continuing the Bush Doctrine and its expressions. I think Obama has a better chance of turning that around than either of the other two.

I could go on, but I’m busy with real work.

Lots to talk about in months ahead.

Short of armed insurrection, which I don’t have the stomach for and which has little chance of success, anyway, is there any way to break the hold the big money of the big corporations has (and has had for more than 100 years) over the government?

The big corporations control the mass media, so they get to suppress any candidate they think they can’t control. The alternative media, such as the internet, don’t reach enough people at the moment to make a difference. If the internet ever did begin to have enough influence, the big corporations would manage to block it one way or another (traffic shaping? reasonable network management? frivolous civil and/or criminal lawsuits? assassins?).

Is there a way out? What might do it? The best I can imagine is to devise a clever, very quick acting, last-minute approach to capture the public imagination behind the idea that we need a complete top-to-bottom replacement of EVERYONE in government (federal and state) at the coming election with people dedicated to fundamental reforms that would be effective in blocking the influence of big money, and actually have such a slate of candidates ready for write-in.

That might have a ghost of a chance of starting on the way out, if it could be pulled off. But write-in campaigns never work. We’d never get a full slate of true reform candidates on the official ballots. If we get past those two barriers and actually seat a set of reform representatives, the Senate is still 66% non-reform, and the courts nearly 100% non-reform, so even if we could get something past the Senate (and state equivalents of the Senate), the non-reform interests could hold things up for years, even decades in the courts. The non-reform forces still have control of the media, and so, effectively, of the elections, so the reformers wouldn’t last beyond one term. Nothing could hold the public’s attention on reform that long.

Okay, that won’t work. Change it a little. Could such a campaign be devised to capture the imagination of the people already in office and persuade them to pass effective reforms, freeing them from the control of the big money? Since there are far fewer people that have to be persuaded, that seems a little easier, but I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to persuade them to turn their backs on their traditional big-money base. And unless the courts could be won over, too, the big-money interests would tie up things in court for ages.

Welcome to perpetually Corporate-contolled America.

Begins to make armed insurrection look like the only way. (And just to be clear, all you FBI agents reading, I’m not signing up for that — I’m too old and too much of a wimp, so I guess I don’t deserve any freedom.)