I am sure there are plenty of people bored by the election spectacle. I am not one of them. Here’s a list and it explains everything.
1. Barack Obama → I like him. I like him a looottt. I’ll do a ‘why he is the awesomest’ post one of these days.
2. Hillary Clinton→ I am convinced she has lost her mind. Everytime she describes that waitress who works 60 hours a week, with 3 kids and who donated $50 to her campaign… I squirm. Watching a loosing candidate asking for more money from her poor/working-class whitefolk base, knowing full well she has no feasible chance of winning. It’s too ethically hollow to not watch.
3. “It’s so bad, it’s about to get good” — Jon Stewart, Daily Show→ It is pretty great to be excited about candidates again. And not in the spine-chilling, oh-my-god-bush-might-win way. It’s boring to be a hard-core Democrat. I am way too brown to vote Republican. I can’t be a pro-life/pro-Iraq war/anti-immigrant voter. The primaries are the only place where we must make a more-than-peripheral assessment of the candidate. And even then, usually by this time of the year, it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares that you still support Howard Dean. It’s Kerry we like now.
Obama was supposed to be the Wesley Clark of 2008. And he’s not. This rocks my world.
Despite what you might be hearing, it is very very cool that a state like West Virginia (tiny, poor, rural) matter (well, not really, but still). When has West Virginia’s primaries ever been covered?
4. Racism and Sexism → These two things are definately not cool. However, having race and gender be a critical component of the national election is. For far too long, it has been too easy for our presidential candidates to slip into platitudes and cheesy truisms when talking about black people, women, minorities.
The rulebook has been flung out the window. We have to watch Reverend Wright’s sermon, listen to white people discuss Black Obama and have talk show hosts call Clinton a whore… and be outraged, upset, amused. Whatever your reaction, they are no longer confined to university liberal arts classes, brown people, feminists, and the political correctness police. Everyone throws in their two cents. It’s all very very wonderfully messy.
5. Mathematics → Counting is cool again. Otherwise you are that 11-yr-old kid who sold his bike because he didn’t understand delegate arithmetic. I have learned the following pieces of information that I did not know before April. The rules for the Republicans and the Democratic primaries are different. Super-delegates don’t normally matter, but sometimes they do…which is why we have them? The democrats don’t have a “winner takes all”, it all depends on district or county or something. States can just decide to hold primaries whenever they want, as long as they don’t care if their votes don’t count.
6. Youtube → It’s like television you can type on.
