Campaign new nuggets

The election season just keeps getting interestinger and interestinger. At least from the Democratic side. The only thing left to resolve on the GOP side is who John McCain will choose as his running mate. My suggestion would be for a female candidate of any race, or a male minority candidate as a way to counter the Dems' eventual choice of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. If the GOP is going to go with another white dude, then my suggestion would be Joe Lieberman. If that occurs, then he'd be the first running mate that was on the ticket for both parties.

As for the Dems, there have been more calls for Hillary to step down. However, she currently has no plans to, nor do I think she should step down. She's gotten this far, and she does have a large number of votes - not as high as Obama's of course, but certainly not chump change. I think she - and her supporters - deserve to see how far this would go. Let the voters decide, not the party hacks and bigwigs who are only concerned about wrapping things up in a hurry rather than settling things right.

It's also for that reason that I think the Dems should go ahead and have a re-vote in Florida and Michigan. It wasn't the voters in those respective states that caused the punishment to be laid down on them by the Democratic party, it was the party heads in those states. Thus, the voters in those states should not be punished for the actions of people that they had no control over. And besides, after the 2000 election, the Dems should have a problem "disenfranchishing" any voter - particularly those from Florida. I say let the re-vote happen, or we'll be hearing from Hillary and her supporters about it for years to come if she doesn't get the nod as the presidential candidate for the Dems.

Whoever gets the eventual nod, there is going to be a very large group in the Democratic party that's going to go away very unhappy. However, I think that this could eventually be a good thing. For too long, excessive political correctness has had an iron hold on the party, and it's way past time for it to let go. The party has been buckling under the weight of its own gnat-straining for decades, and their obsessive/compulsive behavior over not offending anybody anywhere has made them into a party of incoherent ramblers that is increasingly out of touch of what allegedly is their power base: the common man.

Once a candidate is nominated, then either the pillar of their black constituency or their feminist constituency is going to be yanked away, which would cause the party to buckle even more under the weight of their gnat-straining - hopefully to the point of collapse. I have been saying for years that the party needs to crash and burn to start over again. In the time that I've kept up with the political scene, I have learned that slow change from within isn't going to change the party in any meaningful way, so the alternative is for a quick and spectacular collapse so that EVERYONE'S eyes will be opened as to just how corrupt the Democratic party is.

In any case, either the black constituency or the feminist constituency will have their eyes opened, and hopefully that group will learn the lessons that I learned long ago: The party needs to start over - desperately. Right now, the party is rife with cronyism, and minute changes to how things are done are not going to accomplish anything meaningful.

And last, the issue of cross-over voting. Some election officials are so certain of crossover voting solely for the sake of altering the election results of the Democratic primary in Ohio that they are threatening to sue. Think about that: They want to sue people for voting! What a lovely way to crush any sense of civic duty to threaten to sue if the voters don't vote the way party officials want them to vote! They blame Rush Limbaugh and his "Operation Chaos: Rush the Vote" for this.

My response: Even if these voters did "crossvote" at the urgings of the big conservative blowhard - so what? Isn't it the right of voters to vote as they please? Rush didn't force those voters to "cross their vote", but it sure as hell looks like Ohio wants to force the voters to vote a certain way! I can think of little else so Orwellian as threatening to sue anyone over how they voted. Plus, if they sue Limbaugh, he's only going to milk it for all it's worth, so why make him a martyr? Bottom line: There is no way that suing voters is going to look good, so Ohio should just drop it. I also encourage both Obama and Clinton to tell Ohio to just drop the matter. All is going to depend upon how dense and short-sighted the Ohio officials are going to be about the matter. We'll soon see.

Stay tuned, folks! There's still more to come!