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.

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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.

In 2004, President George W. Bush launched a TV ad campaign against rival John Kerry that contained a video in which Kerry explained that he voted for a particular bill before he voted against it. This strategy took advantage of the fact that most Americans are unaware of Senate processes. In reality, Kerry’s actions were perfectly appropriate. However, the rouse worked.

In 2007, in the same debate, Barack Obama stated that his plan for Iraq calls for immediate withdraw, and then later declared that he plans to send in more troops. Contradictory and confounding, yet no backlash from any campaigns, republican or democrat, or from the media, ever surfaced.

Obama’s stances on any other issue facing America isn’t any better. In fact, all of his answers can be boiled down to one word: “change.” Obama’s message is that he will simply change everything; he will then state the desired outcome, though he does not have a plan to do it. Sadly, this methodology invokes strong emotions in democrats that silence their thinking and reasoning abilities.

Sometimes, as with his Iraq plan, Obama makes the attempt to appear as if he does have a multistep plan, such as withdrawing troops, but no explanation as to how. That’s not a plan, it’s a wish.

The truth of the matter is that Barack Obama is the recipient of the most positive and the least negative media coverage in print, on the radio and on TV that any political has ever had, according to a recent report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an non-partisan organization. In fact, the study showed that even on conservative talk radio that Obama had less negative coverage that John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani.

Such anomalous findings may stem from the candidate’s African American heritage. In a climate were Don Imus was forced off of radio, Dog the Bounty Hunter forced of TV, and even Joe Biden was accused of making racist remarks when he used the words “clean” and “articulate” to describe Obama. It is therefore understandable that members of the media are afraid that their criticisms will be classified as racism.

With the application of logic, reason, and thinking to an Obama candidacy, any and all ideas of legitimacy evaporate immediately. This is a Senator who may one day be presidential material, but for this inexperienced politician, that day far off.

Who should Democrats vote for?

With a rather wide field, Democrats do actually have some good candidates with strong ideas who are willing to express leadership. In fact, every other democratic candidate is better qualified to lead the country that Hillbama.

In alphabetical order:

Joe Biden – The most experienced candidate in either party in terms of foreign affairs, he is also the only politician in the world who has a workable plan for a victory in Iraq that will leave behind a stable government. He’s also the one man frontline in the current Pakistan crisis. For voters concerned with war and terrorism, Biden should be the first choice.

Chris Dodd – With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, Dodd is by far the most liberal candidate running today, but most wouldn’t know it, and most might not even realize that he’s running. He’s also the only candidate who is actively fighting to repeal the catastrophic bankruptcy law (BAPCA) passed in 2006.

John Edwards – The ‘Two Americas’ campaign has never stopped. Edwards recognizes that his is the last generation that had the opportunity to be born into poverty, but succeed in the workforce. On healthcare, education, labor, and poverty, Edwards has the best domestic policy plan of the entire pack.

Mike Gravel – He may not be a serious candidate to some, but he vows to end the Iraq war, and his plan of filibustering in the Senate may work as well for Iraq as it did when he ended the Vietnam conflict. He’s also the only democratic candidate advocating the abolition of the IRS Though he’s virtually unelectable, voters who share his beliefs should support him, and not the person who might be “most electable.”

Dennis Kucinich – Like Gravel, Kucinich will never reside in the Executive Palace, but his pro-labor and education views are only rivaled by Edwards. Lending support to Kucinich is to lend him a louder voice to express his opinions. Politics is not only about winning.

Bill Richardson – The New Mexico governor likes to talk about his resume a lot, and why shouldn’t he? He’s served in Congress, as a governor, and as a diplomat to the UN, he’s negotiated with Saddam Hussein, and more. By experience alone, his is a more qualified candidacy than that of Hillbama. 

Decisions, Decisions…

With a wide range of presidential choices, democrats (particularly those in Iowa) need to spend these last few weeks analyzing all of the candidates’ stances on issues that they care about, and then make a decision based on reason, and austerely reject Hillbama’s emotional appeals of “change” or “inevitability.”

If either of Hillbama’s personas are nominated in 2008, then the democrats deserve the ensuing four more years of republican control of the White House under President Romney or Huckabee.

Authors Website: www.revrob.com

Authors Bio:
Founder of "The Rev. Rob Times," (www.revrob.com) Rev. Robert A. Vinciguerra has been a longtime student of journalism. From Phoenix, Arizona.