Watched what passes for political discourse in the United States last night, and walked away without vomiting on the sofa.

 

Obviously, it starts as a sham considering that the debate disincluded three other presidential candidates - Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. This trio have all qualified for enough state ballots to mathematically have a chance at enough electoral votes to capture the presidency. That they weren't included casts the entire exercise as a charade.

 

That McCain and Obama both thanked the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates, the allegedly not-for-profit but very partisan body in charge of the debates, goes to show they are corrupt, too.

 

Pundits say Obama won, and I tend to agree with Sean Penn, that we all lost. No mention of Palestine, as Penn said. I'll add to that list Saudi Arabia, Bagram, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib.

 

How Obama could debate McCain and not mention the Keating Five is beyond me. The year of the Keating Five, 1986, was clearly in play, as the first question from Jim Lehrer - the terriblest moderator ever - rang up a quote from Eisenhower. Then McCain mentioned 1983 and plenty of other dates from his history.

 

I felt like I was watching Obama as a character inHarrison Bergeron,content with the handicaps placed upon him by a mad society. It was like Obama had NASCAR restrictor plates on his Constitutional Law professor mind. Or maybe he really does believe all the crap he was peddling.

 

McCain and Obama both suffer from visions of empire. When they talked about Iraq, they talked about casualties in terms of 4,000 American lives. The "We don't do body count" ethos has permeated this debate, and there was no mention of millions of dead and displaced persons around the world harmed by this "War on Terror."

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Without demanding something, you get nothing.

 

If you’re a Zen Buddhist, perhaps that’s a great way of looking at life.

 

But shoot, not even Buddhists can find their nothing in modern America, which is why we must makes demands on the political power structure.

 

From local land use boards to the state Freedom of Information Commission to the presidential election, citizens must make concrete demands of those in power, lest they do nothing at all.

 

Last year, the Newtown Planning and Zoning Commission stopped the local Cambodian Buddhist Society from building a temple on land it owned in town. The Buddhists appealed, the superior court ratified the town’s decision, and the state Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling.

 

Not far behind is the Meriden P&Z board, which denied a mosque a permit. Now imagine the Hartford P&Z rejecting the application to build Grace Lutheran Church or Asylum Hill Congregational Church, and then getting the highest court in Connecticut to stamp such religious bigotry with approval.

 

I can’t fathom it myself, but Dred Scott happened to, so it is not so far-fetched.

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The funny pages have not been the same since Berke Breathed quit the daily Opus routine almost 20 years ago.

 

I wish I could see what story lines he would cook up around the Obama-McCain campaign. McCain talking into a dead cell phone line for 18 minutes the other day takes the cake for me.

 

The Sunday-only version of Opus or Outland or whatever Breathed calls it now lacks the daily wit and topical humor of the old Bloom County.

 

Take, for example, this prescient cartoon panel from 1988, when Frank Jones, the father of Oliver Wendell Jones, accurately predicts the political leaning of the first black American president.

 

Did Frank think it would be two decades before America saw a black man even come close to the White House? Who knows the recesses of Berke Breathed's imagination?

 

In 1988, Obama has just entered into Harvard Law School. He was just beginning his storied rise to the top of the law review to community organizer to U.S. Senate seat. But did he know he would someday be an American dauphin? As a conservative?

 

If I am a liberal, then Obama looks more and more like conservative. I wouldn't expect any other analysis of him at Counterpunch, especially from a civil rights attorney whose son is three-time national Ralph Nader presidential campaign staffer.

 

Yet when the Nation goes after Obama's economists, and the critique is reprinted at the Huffington Post, Obama's rightward tilt isn't a figment of the leftist imagination:

The economic advisors who are assisting Senator Obama's campaign are helping him stake out a position on the subprime lending crisis 'to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.'

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Mail Call! The spam filter works exceedingly well on the e-mails, but I still find plenty of strange items of communication in my snail mail box.

 

I've gotten one magazine subscription too many, and they sold my name to various lists. And so I get address labels garnished with orangutan photos, letters from Walter Cronkite pitching drug legalization and flat Earth brochures arguing against Copernican heliocentric models of the galaxy.

 

The information delivered by the postman is sometimes utilitarian, like the Hartford 2000 meeting minutes (they always thank Joe Barber for bringing refreshments!). Other times, I see sophisticated messaging, like the Americans United fundraiser stumping for a separation of church and state.

 

The most consistent mail campaign, after the credit card offers, is the onslaught of print materials from the Democratic Party. First, Al Gore sent me a plea on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We must not fail in that mission" to save America from the clutches of evil Republicans, Gore beseeched in the first graf.

 

"On November 4, we must end this assault on reason," Gore wrote, underlined. Sorry, Al, you had your chance to oust the Republicans eight years ago, but that’s another bag of apples.

 

Then the money ask envelope fell out, and while, I don't trust the senate to do anything of import, I sent them a little note back that said war creates greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s end it now.

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Ed. Note: This is my print column, written on Feb. 5, run on Feb. 6 in the Hartford News.

 

Yep. I pulled the lever for Obama this morning. In the pouring rain, I moseyed to Grace Lutheran Church, filled in the appropriate bubble, and cast my vote for the freshman Senator from Illinois.

 

As I took pictures in the Hartford Civic Center Monday evening and listened to Obama, I was skeptical. I understand it is likely that Teddy "Camelot, Jr." Kennedy knighted Barack and brought him to the Round Table because of a personal grudge against the Clintons.

 

I understand that most of what Obama promises – affordable college, universal health care, regular raises in minimum wages, raises for teachers, an end to the Iraq War, an end to the War in Afghanistan, 40 mpg fuel standards - he may never deliver upon. But he's talking a language that isn't perpetual warfare, terror and fear.

 

I also understand that once the primary is over, and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party - the Democratic Leadership Council – assumes control of the Dems' platform, his rhetoric may change. Although Obama is not a member of the DLC, he has taken campaign contributions from them.

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Obama has just left the building. I'll have some thoughts on it later, but here are some pix for the time being.

Clearly, it was emotional, hopeful and uplifting.

And I hope this conveys some of the magnatude of the event. He rented the Civic Center, and more than 16,000 people showed up to see a presidential candidate. It was impressive. Families, children on shoulders, the elderly, the disabled, heck - I even saw one campaign volunteer on his way to emptying a bed pan, carrying a full little portatoilet across the floor of the civic center.

 

It was dedication and certainty, belief in something large. Barack's rhetoric is convincing. He says all the right things, like withdrawing the troops from Iraq, energy independence, funding education, etc etc.

 

I could sit here and nitpick with his policy proposals - I think college education should be free - he wants to make it affordable. Paul Krugman in the New York Times today said that Hillary's health care plan was better than Barack's. But Hillary is well funded by the health care industry she purports to regulate.

 

Nor does Hillary have a story like Obama's - child of a teenaged mom, raised by her and grandparents - and she died at age 53 of cancer. The crowd responds to that. He's one of us, or so it seems.

 

Hillary, on the other hand, spoke in front of a select audience at Yale today. Could she have filled the Civic Center? I don't know. It seems like she packed people into the Learning Corridor last week. But this was something different. Does she generate this kind of excitement? I don't believe so.

 

Listening to him talk about my country in terms like he employs - this language of hope, previously the domain of Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie - makes me want to like him, even if he is going to go back on his promises (some of them, for certain, which ones, it remains to be seen).

 

Obama's biggest applause of the night came not from talking about health care, constitutional restoration, 40 mpg cars, or ending the war, but about humanitarian intervention to end the genocide in Darfur.

 

I have been thinking alot lately about linear history and how we judge events too swiftly after they just happen. I want to sleep on this one, and think about how this fits in with what has come before, and what will follow it. Symbolically, how do we interpret this?

 

In the coming days, many will weigh in on it. I saw tons of journos there - everyone from John Murray at the Waterbury Observer to blogger CTBob, to Ken Dixon of the CT Post, Chris Keating, Rick Green and Mark Paz from the Courant, the Yale Daily News, and a ton of others. Ctnewsjunkie and the New Haven Independent will have stuff, too.

 

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W hat marks professional graphic design? A photo and text interplaying to convey trust and confidence in a particular candidate's ability to lead.

 

The designer did just about everything right here - Barack's million-dollar eyes face the text, a solid facial expression projecting "Constitutional Law Professor," and simultaneously says "Trust me with my finger on the nuclear button."

 

The photo screens out nicely for textual legibility. A subtle drop shadow highlights the red pull out box to the left.

 

Yet the combination of word and image here makes me a little uncomfortable, not like Dukakis-in-a-tank anxiety, but a kind of unacceptable incompetence, a misunderestimation, as it were, of mettle that residents of 1600 PA Ave. can't reveal.

 

With change being the central focus of the Obama campaign, couldn't they at least get the whole word on the page?

 

It's new, because on the front, a January 3, 2008 quote from Barack appears on the front, so I imagine they had thousands of images to choose from for this particular four-color piece.

 

It seems to be a national distribution because of the way the Connecticut for Obama online addreses are printed in. And of course, it features a union bug.

 

But would Hillary's campaign send out a direct mail piece with "C" missing from "Change"? I doubt it. I've gotten Hillary mailers. I thrown them out, but I've never seen anything so poor.

 

And no, I'm not making too big a deal out of this, considering the work that goes into stage managing the executive office. It would be like if the famous photo op said "Ission Accomplished."

 

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Hillary Clinton thinks I am her friend. At least that's how she addressed a letter to me the other day. "Dear Friend," it said.

I have no idea how she got my address (perhaps she bought a subscription database from some magazine, or maybe Russ Feingold gave her a list). I really don't want any mail from her either.

But since she thinks we're buddy-buddy, and she asked me what was important, I was honest with her. On the lines her campaign staff provided, I wrote that she needs to renounce her support for the Iraq war, that Bush needs to be impeached, and that AIPAC's dominance over Israel-Palestine-US policy demands to be challenged.

I sent her a small campaign contribution in the hopes that my thoughts will be taken more seriously because of it.

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