It’s been a quiet, uneventful week. Very quiet, if you discount the brick that sailed through my window shortly after the conclusion of the Super Bowl. The assailant left few clues, but I imagine it was a scorned ex-lover or her male counterpart – the scorned ex-bookie. Both are irrational and fixated on vengeance.
The anonymously thrown brick was wrapped in a cryptic note, scribbled on graph paper in an incomprehensible mix of French and German. I had the fear.
Many bookies were angry with me. My former lover was in town. She drinks and gambles and once lost her temper after a Red Sox game and shot a hole in my toilet bowl with a .45 caliber magnum. It was time for this football season to end. I didn’t even call my bookie to collect on the Panthers.
It’s time, it seems, to focus my full attention on politics. I’m glad that Joe Lieberman is out of the race for the Democratic nomination. I grew tired of his jowls, his moderation and the shrill sound of his voice.
General Clark has proven irrelevant. He’s strong on national defense, but it’s hard for him to seem human – -as if he wasn’t created in an underground Pentagon laboratory – because he doesn’t blink.
Howard Dean should be the next to go. It might sound clich? to say it now, but he was never electable. Bush would have delivered a savage, cruel beating in a race against Dean. Plus, any ardent Dean supporter will vote for whoever gets the nomination, so there’s no net loss.
This election could still get ugly if John Kerry can’t convince voters in the South that he is more than a Nantucket-bound Yale graduate who thinks the plains is the area in Connecticut between Boston and New York.
The disconnection between the East Coast and the South, whether real or perceived (its probably a little of both) is a factor in this election. Kerry’s trump card is that he is a decorated Vietnam War veteran. His patriotism can’t be questioned (unfortunately, also because he voted for the war in Iraq) and foxhole camaraderie transcends geographic misconceptions.
While George Bush was AWOL from the National Guard spending his daddy’s Saudi currency at Birmingham strip clubs, John Kerry was fighting for his country. I think voters in the South will recognize the disparity.
It’s foolish for Democrats to even consider ignoring the South. A few veterans’ groups in Alabama get talking about John Kerry and all of a sudden Bush has to spend money and time in a state he thought was a lock. Ignoring the South would be like a football team declaring prior to a game that it was only going to run the ball. They might have a bruising offensive line and an electric running back, but the illusion of the pass is the oil that lets the engine drive.
Kerry must be viable in the South.
This is why John Edwards should be Vice-President. Edwards has Southern charm and a Clintonian warmth that lets him connect with voters. If he can convince poor white people across America that voting for George Bush is not in their best interest – and its plain to see that, economically speaking, it is not – then we might have a serious ticket on our hands.
I also hope that Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich stay in the race until the convention.
It is not the year to throw away a vote on either of these candidates – I couldn’t help but indulge my progressive leanings with a vote for Nader in 2000 – but respectively each represents an important counter-balance.
Sharpton is clearly the best and most charismatic speaker in the race and his immediacy is sorely lacking in most of the other candidates. Hopefully, he can keep Kerry honest on race issues and consequently keep a significant number of black voters interested enough in the race to go out and vote for Kerry on election day.
Kucinich too is important. He is the only candidate with progressive ideas. He energizes the Nader-Democrats, and they too should go out and vote against whoever is running against George Bush.
In the end, John Kerry is just another politician, markedly better than George Bush, but no savior. He, like the rest of them, is largely beholden to the corporate-political mechanism that dominates Washington. If you play the game that long, I would argue, your uniform is bound to get dirty. This, however, is basically an irrelevant point. We need regime change.
Americans, I think, are starting to realize that there is something very troubling about this administration. That there is something bizarre about our secretive former energy executive Vice-President who dwells in underground layers only leaving to go duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as he prepares to hear a case involving Cheney’s own secret national energy policy meetings with Enron executives. People are starting to realize there is something disconcerting about John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld and men who can’t wrap their minds around the idea that two loving homosexuals should be allowed to marry. That there is something counter-intuitive about running up wild deficits by increasing spending, launching wars and cutting taxes.
Something is percolating, and it just might be a brutal upset.
Craig Giammona can be contacted at [email protected]