No More Incumbents Blog

It may not be nepotism when someone hires only the people they know, but it is similar and doesn’t necessarily demonstrate an organizational maturity that you might expect from a campaign that has been running for 2 years and has raised close to a billion dollars.

Obama again decided to choose a person from a group of people very close to him.  He opted for Valerie Jarrett, a former Daley chief of staff and a former employer of Michelle Obama.

Before joining The Habitat Co., Jarrett served for eight years in government for the city of Chicago, Illinois. She was deputy corporation counsel for finance and development, then deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley and finally became commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development.

Jarrett met Barack Obama when she hired Michelle Obama for a job in the Chicago mayor’s office years ago and has been very close to the two ever since.

Obama, Biden appoint advisers - CNN.com

Let’s hope the Obama team shows the ability to actually execute a successful hiring process sometime soon instead of just picking from the people in the next room.  They do deserve credit for getting him elected, but that doesn’t mean they know beans about running a country.

Bill Clinton was soundly thumped in 92 and 93 for picking Arkansas cronies that like Obama’s team didn’t know much about the White House.  That culminated in giving power to the Republicans in Congress to check a rookie White House team.

America is in more dire straights these days and we really need to see Obama pick something closer to the dream team right from go as opposed to selecting everyone that ever did him and his daughter’s mother’s mother a favor by referring them to a New York Moving Company back when a certain piano needed to be moved from x to y to z  .. . . yada yada yada. 

Obama needs to get his transition team to actually do some interviews as opposed to agreeing amongst themselves on a plan to split the spoils of war.

This video is a video created by John McCain. I do not support John McCain at all, but this video does resonate with me.Barack Obama does not connect with me because he speaks as if he is not a corrupt politician (the two words being an oxymoron).

So when he preaches to me, it raises the hair on the back of my neck. Not because of his race, but because 1. I don’t like to be preached to by anyone and 2. he’s a politician and politicians are either corrupt or on their way to becoming corrupt.

Its been my experience that a politician that preaches the belief that they alone are not corrupt, are usually the most corrupt.

Hillary Clinton tried something very similar in to the tactics in this video when she was running against Obama. But back then I only saw her ridiculing his naivety.

But as I view this video, I think I actually am starting to see the weakness in Obama. He might just be buying his own Bull Shit, and when you start preaching to everyone that you can clean up Washington because you are the one, that’s politics. When you start believing that you only you can do it because you are the one, that verges on a Messiah Complex.

If we Americans elect a person with a Messiah Complex, the severe problems we have encountered under George W Bush are going to seem like Child’s Play.

All that said, I’m not saying we should go vote for McCain. he’s probably a traditional ‘devil that you know’ kind of politician. However, Obama despite his youth and intelligence seems to have a flawed belief system. Possibly even more flawed than GW’s and his is compounded by a born again to avoid alcohol rehab syndrome.

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I have not yet finished turning all of the original articles of impeachment for George W Bush into audio, but there has been some progress made.Nancy Pelosi now wants the Judiciary committee to take action on the impeachment of George W Bush. This is one of the most positive flip flops I’ve heard of in recent times and very welcome change of mind given the abundance of new facts about transgressions made by the Bush Administration.

Here’s a quick interview also from Dennis Kucinich who has come out with a refined and more focused single article of impeachment to possibly move Congress past a tipping point of for Impeachment.

— interview follows - — -

HILL: Why do you think that it may have a chance? I understand you brought 30 articles of impeachment last time — just one this time. What happened to the other 29?
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KUCINICH: Well, this article that — I just came from the Florida House so — where I introduced it. It is very narrowly focused. It’s about the communication that the president made to the Congress, a specific message asking for Congress to pass an authorization for the use of force, in which certain representations were made that would induce Congress to vote for the legislation. And categorically, the key representations that were made were false, I stated so, and provided the sources for my article on the floor of the House just moments ago.

HILL: So did you pick the article you thought was the strongest and then just decide to go with that one this time?

KUCINICH: Well, I’ll tell you what — yes, let me tell you what the title of it is. It says that Article 1, deceiving Congress with fabricated threats of Iraq’s WMDs to fraudulently obtain support for an authorization for the use of military force against Iraq.

So what I said is that all of the talk about weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons, biological, chemical weapons — they were false. And the White House had information that indicated that they knew that they were false and they proceeded anyway, so there has to be an accounting. We have to protect our constitution. This country must rely on truth in our communications to the people. And so this process of impeachment will, hopefully, help produce the truth.

HILL: This is one of the times where that the goings on Washington baffle me — many times, they do. But maybe you can help me sort this one out. Last time you brought this up, the Republicans voted to bring it to the floor to actually discuss it. The Democrats voted to basically push it into the closet in a committee. Why?

KUCINICH: I think the Republicans were basically daring the Democrats to move forward with it, sensing that there were some in the Democratic leadership who, at the time, had no stomach for a real debate. But I think that’s changed, and I think it’s changed because the war grinds on. We have 160,000 troops there. We have — over 4,160 troops have lost their lives. Tens of thousands are injured. The cost of the war go over $3 trillion, and a million innocent Iraqis dead.

I think as people come to accept the enormity of this, they’re saying, “Wait a minute, maybe we should find out if that strip was necessary — if, in fact, the war was based on something other than the truth.

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Update - This appears to have just been an appeasement move by Pelosi to shut up Dennis Kucinich. If she and the other Democrats in Congress had acted, maybe we could have avoided the financial crisis that we are now seeing in September of 2008, and considering the potential of using the last few hundred dollars on our credit cards to pay for moving services, before filing bankruptcy and getting foreclosed out of our homes down the street to the bread lines.

As I look back over the Democratic Primary, I am struck by the lack of progress that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have made. We have a country at war, in financial crisis and approaching a very nasty recession and Democrats were only able to inspire about 10-11 percent of Americans to come to the polls and support them in the primaries.
Democrats have brought in (and spent -ergo its not available to spend now) record amounts of money and have brought in record quantities of voters, but from a percentage basis of the population we are not seeing something as remarkable as media hype would have us believe.
Democrats are preparing to go into the general election with two candidates that were the best at turning out the Democratic base, but also the two candidates with the least track record of achieving actual results. The party shuffled to one side more experienced politicians like Bill Richardson and Joe Biden and more.
Republicans in contrast have selected a politician that has one of the longest track records of achieving results, John McCain. I personally do not trust John McCain due to his political expedient decisions over the last few years and his current stance on the Iraq War, but that does not strike out his history of working to achieve results even on a bipartisan basis. Neither Obama nor Clinton have that kind of experience.
So as we head into an election where the American people are going to seek solutions to the massive problems we have, they are going to have to choose between a Democratic candidate that says inspiring words, but has achieved no results with those words other than political career advancement and another candidate in the Republican Party that achieves real results with his actions and words even when people do not like those words.
If Democrats actually win in November 2008, I think it will be a win despite themselves. Despite having pulled in $500 million dollars, despite having the opportunity to create an unprecedented historical ticket (those words are getting a bit annoying btw they are meant for the history books, but what they mean is that finally after more than 200 years American might actually put a man of African and caucasian decent and a woman into the White House on a joint ticket together. That is a major milestone for the country and could be a tremendous thing for bringing our country into the 21st century finally able to contemplate and envision the the actualization of equality as a country as opposed to pockets of people envisioning it alone. That will be a good thing, but it will be all for nothing if the people that cross that milestone are unable to solve the pressing and urgent problems of our present.
That milestone represents problems of Americas not very distant past. The milestone is long over due, but if America does not solve its time local problems of recession and war, then that milestone could easily be reversed either with the fall of the Democratic Party or possibly with the continued fall of America.
George W Bush has become the poster child of America’s fall and America’s mistakes. If Obama-Clinton make it to the White House they need to arrest that fall, or else they will only represent a new line of Presidents unable to save the United States of America.
To put it another way, if they actually get elected to the White House, their milestone will be an important symbolic milestone. Symbols are important, but those symbols might not even make it into the history books (if there are such things left) if the next President and Vice President do not achieve the result of stopping the fall and turning this country around.
Obama-Clinton will need to step beyond their historic milestone and start looking not at the manifest destiny of achieving the milestone but the immediate necessity of fixing the problems that impair this country from possibly successfully recording their milestone into the history books.
They say that all politics are local,and in this case Obama-Clinton might need to reawaken to the concept that in a metaphysical view of politics, politics may be local to this time and place as well. Fix the now, to preserve the accomplishments of the past and pave the way to the future.
Picking a VP isn’t like configuring your computer to get the states to line up with the right electoral votes. The right amount of laptop memory will not enable our country to reboot faster. I think that is even more important to consider when we look at the likely turnout for this 2008 election.

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