With only weeks to go to the January 3rd Iowa causes, can it be true that Democrats are about to nominate either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, their two worst candidates? It could be true.
The 24 hour news cycle that America has become fixated with over the past decade has led to coverage, not of issues and political views, but of horse races and celebrity. In turn, the news organizations are a slave to ratings. If the most popular candidates receive most of the coverage, then the rating will be higher, or so their logic tells them. As a result, they’ve invented a “Hillbama” persona that is mass marked to the country every night.
Seldom have democrats stopped to think, “Maybe Clinton and Obama aren’t the best choices.” The few who have realize quickly that any of the other national candidates are better for America, for the world, and are better qualified to perform the duties of the job.Why Hillary?
In Hillary Clinton, some democrats see a return to the prosperity and peace of the 1990’s, when her husband, former president William Jefferson Clinton, balanced the budget, produced a surplus, and oversaw a swift military victory in the Balkans.
An objective analysis of Sen. Clinton’s service in the Senate shows another story. Since she was elected in 2000, she has meticulously positioned herself on a number of issues to appeal to liberals, conservatives, and centrists all at the same time, including one saga where she joined forces with Joe Lieberman and took the wrong side on a bill that attacked freedom of speech, which had to be ruled unconstitutional before she backed down.
Clinton’s intent behind a number of conservative Senate votes was simple; when she did eventually make a run for the White House, she could point to moderate positions and appeal to independents in a general election.
This pattern of behavior illustrates that Hillary Clinton is more calculating than she is cautious. She is more cunning then she is convicted, and she is more concerned with winning than she is with leading. Without convictions, a leader is only as good as the advice of those who he or she follows, and in the United States, we don’t get to elect the advisors.
The argument can be made that a leader should be beholden to the electorate. After all, it is we who put the leader into office, so why shouldn’t our leader follow the will of the majority? To do so would be to forfeit freedom to the tyranny of the majority which would in turn obliterate the equal rights of the minority – a principal that all founders of this country knew and understood.
Unfortunately, Clinton doesn’t seem to view that as a problem. Unlike the First Lady that the world was introduced to in 1992, Senator Clinton has driven to the middle of the road as an attempt to gain power through pandering. What she doesn’t realize is it’s a long line, and it’s painted yellow.
Nevertheless, her celebrity status and air of inevitability, that her campaign manufactured from an assortment of secrecies and distortions, has left most voters unwilling to probe her candidacy for substantial answers to pivotal issues such as social security, for which she has a plan that is secret, the war in Iraq, for which she has no plan, immigration, where she has demonstrated her uncanny ability to pander to both sides of the issue, healthcare, which she has plagiarized from John Edwards, and the greater war on terror, to which she has no answer.
Why Barack Obama?
As former Vice President Al Gore gracefully illustrates in his most recent book, The Assault on Reason, Americans have become less thinking and more emotional than any other populous anywhere in the world, and at anytime. It is this recession of reason and logic combined with America’s obsession with the things that we call news (O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, Scott Peterson, et al.) that has allowed the celebrity of Barack Obama to be thrust upon us as if he should be considered a legitimate candidate for the office of the President of the United States.
The ongoing feud between Obama and his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, has been covered extensively, which the issues that any candidate stands for have been completely and utterly ignored. When one gets a word in edge-wise in a 5th grade schoolyard display of swapping insults, the other (and the media) claims that there has been a victory of some kind.
Barack Obama is only barely qualified to serve in his current capacity as the junior senator from Illinois. Still in his first term in office, he is a man who actually points to his work in the Illinois state senate as justifiable experience that lends to his alleged ability to lead the country.
In one debate, Democratic Joe Biden Republican hopeful and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is the least qualified person to be running for president. That makes Obama the second least qualified.
Issues of experience aside, Obama’s stances on various issues are about the same caliber as those of Mrs. Clinton; non-existent and not thought-out. On Iraq, Obama has repeatedly called for the immediate withdraw of all troops, despite receiving counsel from experts who point that such an action is impossible.
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