Politics, part II.  I talked about Obama and Biden last time.  Now I turn my attention to McCain and Palin.

John McCain was, for many years, an honorable Senator.  He was not a doctrinaire Republican.  He could be counted on to make up his own mind, and speak it.  Then, in 2000, he decided to run for President.  He ran up against the war machine that was Bush/Cheney/Rove.  That machine ate him up and spat him out like a half-popped piece of popcorn.  It smeared him, badly, and since he either didn't have or didn't know how to mount a spirited defense, he was defeated.

I think that defeat hurt him deeply.  Hurt him so much that he vowed it would never happen again.  And so, when it came time for him to run again, in 2008, he embraced it.  Yes, he talked about his "Straight Talk Express", and how he was bringing honesty and -- dare one say it -- civility back to national political discourse.  But once the nomination was secured, even before the last primary was held, he began to embrace the machine that had once hurt him so badly.

John McCain will be 72 if he takes the oath of office in January, the oldest President ever, even older than Reagan.  He is a survivor of multiple bouts with cancer.  He knows that for all practical purposes this will be his last hurrah, his last race for the highest office.  He may even know that the odds are good he will never survive his first term of office.

So he embraces the machine.  He puts out ads breathtaking, even among Republicans, even for (if news reports can be believed) Karl Rove, in their scope of lies and evasions.  He reiterates his defining experience -- as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, four decades ago -- as a shield against all questions, denying the voters their chance to hear his positions on substantive issues.  He seizes totally innocuous comments by his opponents and blows them up into mind-numbingly trivial complaints (lipstick on a pig, anyone?).  And the so-called liberal media, the self-defined guardians of the public's right to know, fail for the most part to call him on any of his statements, even when after being proven as false he continues to repeat them.

If this was not bad enough, McCain the exemplar of "experience" as a prerequisite for the Presidency chooses as his running mate the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.  Palin's total experience consists of being mayor of the small town of Wasilia, and less than one full term as Governor.  She was not fully vetted until after McCain chose her to be his running mate.  Her political career contains no knowledge of, or dealings with, foreign policy or the military.  She appears to have been chosen because of her gender and her appeal to the Christianists (people who call themselves Christian who believe that politics must be subservient to religious doctrine).

McCain has not only shown himself, with this choice, to be at best unserious and at worst breathtakingly cavalier about who probably would be his successor (age and cancer, remember).  He has shown his decision-making capabilities to be woefully lacking for even the first decade of a new century.  And he has thrown away one of the few arguments against his opponent that do need serious consideration:  the issue of expertise in running that large organization known as the United States of America.  For if Barack Obama has to answer charges of inexperience in governing, how much more so does Sarah Palin have to answer for?

As for Sarah Palin herself, we find someone who is almost willfully ignorant of major political issues.  We also find someone who has been caught in her own repeated lies, most famously about her now-you-see-it-now-you-don't support for the "Bridge to Nowhere".  The simple statement, "You wouldn't ask her about this if she was a man," is for now enough to silence serious questioners.  And there has been no major candidate for either President or Vice-President who has refused press conferences by whimpering that she isn't being shown sufficient deference by the press corps.

There have been -- there are -- good, qualified Republicans in all levels of government.  People who are dedicated to the cause of the country and its people, above the calls for mere party loyalty.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are, I regret to say, not among their number.

Conventional wisdom.  Or, perhaps, just the wisdom you get while you're watching the conventions.  Anyway, both the Democrats in Denver and the Republicans in St. Paul are through with their quadrennial celebrations of themselves, in which many party leaders (plus a few up-and-comers) give speeches about just how good their party is, and just how awful the other party is.  This year was no exception, speech-wise.  But during the St. Paul coronation, there was a big surprise.  More on that later...

I went through the Toad Hall archives and found words that prove once and for all that I do not have the gift of prophecy.  Waaaaaaay back when, the Human Rights Campaign sponsored a "meet the candidates" night, televised on the gay cable station Logo.  I gave my impressions on the candidates' performances, and came down hard on Barack Obama.  I thought his performance that night was not up to standards.  But apparently he can learn.  His speeches all through the primary campaign got better and better -- not perfect, mind you, but much better than the HRC/Logo stuff.

Leaving the past behind, what do I think of the four candidates -- Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin?

Barack Obama:  It was Bill-the-Honeybear who first made me aware of Obama, way before the primary race started, when Bill heard him speak at a progressives' convention in DC.  I looked, I listened, and I was won over.  I'd not heard words such as his, defiantly hopeful, coolly devastating to his Democratic rivals as well as his Republican opponents, intellectual but with pools of deep emotion lying just underneath, since last I heard Ronald Reagan speak.  (And say what you will about the man, Reagan really could make a good speech.)

He did the same at the convention.  Granted, he kept out of the spotlight, for the most part, until his acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium (which is what old-time Denver people call Invesco Field).  He let the grand lions of the party -- ailing Teddy Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and many others -- take center stage at the start.  Then his running mate-to-be, Joe Biden, the Delaware Senator who takes Amtrak home each night and still remembers his blue-collar upbringing in Scranton, PA.  Then Michelle Obama -- wife, mother, tigress, proud and protective of her man and her family.

Finally, the man himself.  So what if the stage had columns that looked like leftover scenery from Spartacus?  You'd never know it from the camera angles; whenever the camera wasn't on the crowd at the stadium, or picking out a face in said crowd, it was tight on him at the podium.  And did he speechify!  Picking up the major threads of his primary campaign, giving a little more detail on how he planned to handle some major problems, and giving the Republicans (and the creators of their attack ads, with John McCain's "and I approved this ad") what for.

Joseph Biden:  The man most people figured would be chosen to run with Obama, was chosen.  For those who see this as some kind of betrayal of Obama's message of change, the truth of the matter is that Biden is the best fit for Obama's running mate.  He fills in all the perceived holes the Republican attack ads were exploiting.  Biden is solid, from a Catholic working-class background, with a strong record in the Senate for proven leadership and enormous expertise in foriegn affairs.  Think of the mix of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and how each of them made up for deficiencies in the other.  That's Obama and Biden.

I'll continue in the next post about the Republicans.

Where does the time go to? It's been nearly a year since I last posted here, so let me dust away the cobwebs and vacuum the floor...

First, education. As you may remember, long, long ago I took a class in event planning and meeting management. Not only did I like it, but I was good at it. Then along came June 2007 and with it the end of my consultant programming job at Ethicon. At loose ends, I decided this might be a good time to see if changing careers would be a good thing. So I enrolled myself back at Raritan Valley Community College, and (shortening a long story) on May 14, 2008, I got my certificate in event planning.

Next, work. Like I said above, I'm not at Ethicon any more. As part of my certificate work, I had to get an internship with a company that either did event planning or had a large event planning component. Fortunately, I got an apprenticeship (definition: an internship with pay) at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick. This lasted from the beginning of February to the middle of June, when the apprenticeship period ended. I'm now on the job hunt, which I'm hoping won't last too much longer. But it's, well, discouraging.

How's Bill? Thank you for asking. He's currently working Sunday thru Thursday for New Jersey Democrats. And he'll be doing some exit polling work for an outside firm on election day, too. And both are paying jobs. But as usual, there aren't enough hours in the day for him to do everything he wants to do in the way he wants to do it.

Anything else? I'm planning to take a long weekend around my birthday and travel down to Disney World. I'm still editing Challenge, the newsletter of the Gay Activist Alliance in Morris County (GAAMC). I'm starting to get active in another gay group, the Garden State Bears, mostly setting up events -- a small group of us went down the shore in mid-August, and there's a couple of informal dinner meets in September. Not much to start with (there's also a monthly beer bash in Asbury Park), but the potential is there.

What about Mensa? I'm not active in my local group, although I do get to their RG each year. I still go to the AG every year -- the last one was in Denver, the next one's in Pittsburgh. And I still participate in GaySIG. But I'm not as heavily into it as I was, and that's a good thing. I think members need to take some time to step back, especially if they are active in Mensa governance like I was.

Any comments on the political scene? OH, yes! But that'll be for another post...