Although I am a registered Republican, I am first and foremost a capitalist. So much of the last ten weeks of my life has been developing and managing an online outreach campaign on behalf of one of the Democratic presidential candidates.
While I have learned a lot about the internal divides within the Democratic Party - and at times wondered how we Republicans ever lose elections to these people - I have also gotten an insight into the American voter on a state-by-state basis. I've come to one conclusion: a good number of Americans still don't know who Hillary Clinton is.
In purchasing Google Adwords, I have gotten a behind-the-scenes look at what people are searching for, and the numbers are staggering. In Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than two-thousand people per day misspelled Hillary Clinton's name; In Indiana and North Carolina, one out of six searches for Hillary Clinton have just one "L" in her first name. Another five percent are looking for Hillary Rodman Clinton, who apparently served eight years First Lady of the NBA Bad Boys Club.
It's not as if Hillary Rodham Clinton weren't First Lady of the United States for eight years, or that her first name were not printed on her campaign materials - the signs and placards at all her events let you know which Clinton is running: Hillary! Yet people who own computers and are researching the candidates still don't seem to know her yet.
Unfortunately for those people who do not yet know who Hillary Clinton is, Googling her isn't going to tell you much. The first page of results yields her official campaign website, her Senate website, the White House website and her MySpace profile, all of which will tell you what she wants you to hear. The rest of the links - CNN, Washington Post and the New York Times, for example - only give information on the candidate from a media-filtered perspective. The only "independent" source is Wikipedia, and I imagine the Kossacks will get to that page at some point.
Perhaps more interesting from my perspective is who advertises to the Googling masses for each candidate. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made a point of "owning" their search pages. Search for either candidate and their own website is the sponsored link that returns - at a cost of somewhere near $3 each time someone clicks on the link, a fortune in click-through ad rates. Go try it and come back, while the folks in Mountain View ring the cash register. Somewhere there is GOP experiment that might be called "Spend Obama's Money Experiment" waiting to happen.
When I Google Clinton, an ad for Time Magazine shows up, and when I Google Obama, I get the Chicago Tribune, along with an ad saying Obama gets an "A+" on Middle Class Issues, but when I click on it, he really has an 80% rating, with 50% absences. That website must be grading on a curve!
The role of the Internet in politics continues to evolve. While the blogs were all the rage back in the 2004 campaign, segmentation and specialization in readership and editorial has made them little more than an echo-chamber for preaching to the choir.
With contextual advertising - buying ad depending on what the reader has called up on the page - it is possible to do some very elegant micro-targeting. Look up the MySpace profile of a veteran of the Marine Corps, as I did a few weeks back, and see an ad from John McCain, targeted directly towards service members and vets. But this is also a risky strategy because such ads could also end up on less-than desirable websites using similar keywords - "service" and "men" in their contexts. For my editor's sake I won't link to them here, you will have to use your imagination.
With search marketing, there is the prospect of reaching persuadable voters, who for whatever reasons are going online to look for information about the candidates. And right now, a well placed search-marketing ad campaign can be done efficiently if targeted to the right search terms and geography.
But as more political consultants and interest groups realize that they, too, can end up on Hillary Clinton's search results - and get a decent click-through rate - it may be that the real winner in this primary and future elections is neither Clinton nor Obama. It's Google.
Friday morning, short on time, I decided to take my car down to the post office to check the company's mailbox. As I turned on to Santa Monica Boulevard and looked in the mirror, I got something of a surprise. On my car, between the drivers'-side mirror and the door there were cobwebs!
Since returning from Washington, D.C., more than a week before, I had not touched my automobile. I either walked wherever I needed to go, took a taxi, or relied on the good graces of good friends to get me home for bedtime.
So when I hear President Bush say there is no magic want to control fuel costs, or Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the mainstream media moaning over the cost of gasoline, I find it difficult to have sympathy. If I can reduce my need for buying gasoline to practically zero - living in Los Angeles - so can most Americans. And, I've found, you don't need to buy a Prius or Smart Car!
In 2000, when gas was less than $2 a gallon, I drove more than 24,000 miles a year. Commuting across the San Fernando Valley to work, going to the gym in Santa Monica and visiting my brother in the Fairfax district added miles quickly.
Today, with gas prices well above $4 a gallon in my neighborhood, I fill up my tank less than once a month. Here's how I did it.
The first thing I did to reduce my commute. I moved closer to work, then got a job closer to home. Eventually, I worked it out so I could have a home office. That has the best commute of all: the walk home from Starbucks at which point the "home" becomes the "office". The hill is pretty steep, but I can make it.
Step two for me, was to learn to love walking. Sure it doesn't burn as many calories as running, and it is not as fast as taking the car, but most of the places I need or want to go can be found within walking distance. Gym, dry cleaners, grocery stores, pharmacies, and countless forms of evening entertainment, are within a mile radius of my house, which are but a leisurely twenty-minute walk.
My biggest challenge was to learn that the bus doesn't bite. Sure a subway would be nice, but this is L.A., so subways really aren't an option, yet. There should no longer be a social stigma to taking the bus for trips of a mile or more, and at a buck-twenty-five, it is cheaper than the gas and parking fees it would require to take a car for a similar trip. I just wish Los Angeles' bus system were more reliable. Some days I can wait for a half hour only to see three busses stacked up one behind the other!
The final thing I have learned from this eight year journey is the value of friendships! Yes, sometimes that mile-long walk be fine on the outbound, but getting home, it can seem daunting. My liberal friends, supportive of my car-free lifestyle, have no qualms giving me a ride when I want one, and the conservative ones who offer, well they're just heaven-sent.
So my challenge to America is to stop complaining about the cost of gasoline and start making better personal decisions. At some point you will no longer care if gas cost $4 or $14 a gallon!
In the meantime, anybody interested in a low-mileage 2006 BMW 325i? I'll brush off the cobwebs.
Although Pennsylvania's "decisive" primary decided absolutely nothing, Democratic Party leaders should learn a few things from the past seven weeks. Senator Hillary Clinton is not backing down and is finally willing to fight for the nomination. Barack Obama can outspend his opponents 3-to-1 and still not shift enough voters to win an election. And, most importantly, if Clinton can win in Indiana and Puerto Rico, the party's leaders will face a tough decision in August not between two candidates but about the future direction of the Democratic Party.
Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton can win their party's nomination on pledged delegates alone. The decision will come down to two groups of party leaders - the infamous super-delegates and the much-less scrutinized Democratic Party Credentials Committee, which will decide whether to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan.
Led by Alexis Herman, James Roosevelt, Jr. and Eliseo Roques-Arroyo, the Committee is made up of three representatives from each state's slate of delegates, and they will end up deciding whether Florida and Michigan's delegates and each state's superdelegates will get a vote in Denver. Whether or not Florida and Michigan count could well be the deciding factor between whether Clinton or Obama has a lead in pledged delegates, the popular "vote", or in both.
Obama supporters have their talking points at the ready for this fight: their candidate is a once-in-a-generation leader who has brought new voters into the Democratic Primary. Turn them away with what might be seen as backroom manipulation of the "popular" vote - a decision to count Michigan and Florida after all - and they may never come back.
For any political operative, that is a seductive logic: rather than dividing the existing political pie between Democrats and Republicans, make it larger by bringing in new voters. But it's doesn't really hold up.
Here in California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger brought new voters into the California electoral process when he ran for Governor in 2003 and again in 2006 when he ran for re-election. The Republican governor carried 57 of 80 Assembly Districts in 2006. 22 of these were seats held by Democrats. Since 2002, Republicans have not picked up any state Legislative seats in California; as far as California Republican candidates are concerned, Schwarzenegger has no coattails.
The Democratic Party's last once-in-a-generation transformational leader, John F. Kennedy, remains a great inspiration to his party and to this nation. But how well have Democrats done since the Kennedy Administration?
Conversely, the risk to the Democratic Party of not seating the Florida and Michigan delegations is much greater. For starters, both Florida and Michigan are swing states, which if either is lost, could swing the Electoral College to Republicans.
More important is who actually voted in the Florida and Michigan primaries: people who took the time to go to the polls and cast a ballot they weren't even sure would count. Those are a die-hard voters.
In grassroots politics, these folks would be called "fours" or "fives" - meaning that they had voted in four or five of the last elections. As opposed to the "zeros" or "ones" who joined the Democratic Party primary process only to cast a ballot for Barack Obama, you can bet your money that these "fours" and "fives" will be casting votes regardless of who is on the ballot.
To deny the votes of the Democratic Party's most loyal voters in two critical swing states is a risky gambit. To deny their voice solely to appease "Obama voters" who have shown no previous support for the Party, nor evidence that they would were his name not on the ballot, is a sucker's bet - one that even as a Republican, I could not in good conscience recommend they make.
Editor's Note: Scott Olin Schmidt holds a significant financial interest in a corporation which is advising an independent expenditure committee on marketing of pro-Clinton websites. But that still doesn't mean he'll vote for her.
Last Friday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shocked a ballroom full of gay Republicans - and perhaps an entire state - when he announced that he would oppose a constitutional amendment to ban equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians in California. The religious right screamed "betrayal" from a governor who twice vetoed legislation to make marriage equality the law, and liberal Democrats were befuddled by what they saw as a shift of position.
Outside of California, the announcement to the Log Cabin Republicans was seen as a change of position, making the California Governor seem like the enigmatic maverick he has endorsed for president. But in reality, Schwarzenegger has never changed his position on gay marriage and gay rights; indeed he's signed into law more pieces of gay rights legislation - 19 in all - than any other governor. Instead, he has but slowly revealed how he feels about an issue mired in the complexities of California lawmaking.
Schwarzenegger's position on gay marriage comes from a wholly California perspective. As he sees it, there is a difference between marriage equality as a constitutional amendment versus a legislative statute or an initiative statute. That's why he twice vetoed legislative statutes granting marriage rights. But it's also why he said he would support an initiative statute if the people decided the issue at the polls.
Of course, given his record, it came as a shock when Schwarzenegger announced in 2005 that he would veto a bill from the legislature designed to grant gay couples the holy grail of civil rights: the right to marry. During the month that followed that announcement and his actual veto of the bill, gay rights groups led by Democrats thought they could win him over by comparing him to Governor George Wallace--an attempted scare tactics that in the end proved only to get the door to Sacramento's Horseshoe slammed in their face. He is, after all, The Terminator.
When he vetoed the marriage rights bill, Schwarzenegger was very forthright in his reasoning. Because the voters had passed Proposition 22, defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, the legislature could not, constitutionally, override the will of the people. Only the courts, or the people themselves with another ballot initiative, could do that.
Schwarzenegger subsequently said that if the people decided to make marriage equality the law, he would be for it.
So let's review the Governator's positions on marriage equality. He is against a legislative statute allowing it, acknowledges the fact that there is an initiative statute banning it on the books, would support a court decision or initiative statute making it law, and is against a Constitutional ban on gay marriage.
But until Friday, Schwarzenegger had not taken a position on whether gays and lesbians should have equal marriage rights. This is why there has been so much confusion. Early statements outlined the governor's positions on how the legal means used to grant such rights, not on their merits.
On California's November ballot, there may will be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage which would make the debate over legislative versus initiative statutes irrelevant. Governor Schwarzenegger said that he thought that such a measure would not only be "a waste of time" but that he would fight against it - creating room for a solution to the procedural problems that give gays the right to marry - and drawing rancorous applause from the Log Cabin audience.
It's not as easy as saying Schwarzenegger is "for it" or he is "against it" when it comes to same-sex marriage. And if Democrats weren't trying to score political points in their attacks, they might even call his positions "nuanced." The reality is that Schwarzenegger's position is as complex as California's government itself. A telling statement on the the governance of the state as a whole and why it can be so difficult to get anything done in Sacramento.
The Olympic flame is back in California, bypassing its usual destination, Los Angeles, for San Francisco in what's clearly one of the most controversial Olympic Torch relays since the idea was first hatched by the Germans 73 years ago.
The Olympics and its global torch relay, have almost always been an opportunity to celebrate global unity and the hope that there can be peace on earth - if only for a couple weeks. Unfortunately for the International Olympic Committee and the organizer of Beijing's Summer Games of 2008, the relay has been anything but peaceful.
While the Olympics are, on their surface, about sports, their international nature means that the events cannot be decoupled from global politics. China has been looking towards Bejing 2008 as its debutante ball on the stage of global superpowers, expecting to be welcomed with open arms like the toys it produces are welcomed at America's ports.
But in London and Paris, protestors disrupted the pomp, reminding the world of China's horrible record on human rights and the environmental catastrophe that the fast-industrializing nation has inflicted on its citizens and the world. It took the running of the Olympic torch to remind us that Tibet has not been free for the past seven years, nor have the Chinese people for that matter.
Today, San Francisco, a city not known to stand on the sidelines of global protest, is bracing for the worst.
I, for one, am glad to see the protests. Finally, the world is realizing that evil exists and that President George W. Bush is not at its root!
The contrasts between Paris and Beijing, between San Francisco and Shanghai, and between London and Lhasa, could not be greater. Here in California, we consider what we can do to fight climate change, we are asking ourselves why China should get a free ride. As California debates whether to grant marriage equality to all of its citizens, China is oppressing millions of its own.
The International Olympic Committee is now debating whether to ditch the torch relay altogether in order to avoid the embarrassment of further protests. That is the wrong move. If the torch relay has become a symbol of totalitarianism and oppression in 2008, it is not the torch relay's fault, it is Beijing's.
If the torch makes it all the way to Beijing, be prepared for the comparisons to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany - the folks who came up with the idea of the torch relay. Back then, apologists argued that the games should be about the sports, but the games were really a way to mollify the world into thinking that Germany wasn't so bad after all. That's despite the existence of forced-labor camps.
Hillary Clinton and other politicians shouldn't be calling on the world to boycott the games' opening ceremonies in Beijing, they should be calling on the Olympics to boycott Beijing. Sure it is late in the day but if the last week has been any indication, the IOC should consider moving the games to a more freedom-loving place, somewhere that has the experience to host the Olympics and be ready on day one.
I know: Let the Games Begin on 08.08.08...in Los Angeles!
Conventional wisdom in Republican circles and among the mainstream media is that the longer and hotter the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination gets, the better for our nominee, John McCain. Republicans giggle with glee at the sight of two Democrats tearing each other apart, with the same gusto as the media looks with horror.
But I, for one, am not quite convinced that a protracted nomination battle will be a bad thing for the Democrats in the end. While there is plenty of schadenfreude for Republicans watching Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wallop each other, the mudslinging between Democrats may work to their favor in the end.
My five year-old nephew would be able to see the allegory for the McCain campaign in an old children's tale, the Tortoise and the Hare. For those who do not remember the Aesop, the story goes like this: a rabbit and a turtle are in a race, the rabbit gets off to a quick start while the turtle plods along steadily. The rabbit decides to take a rest, but is overtaken and passed by the turtle and loses in the end.
The Republican nomination process felt a lot like that rascally rabbit this year. In 23 mere days between New Hampshire and Florida, John McCain went from also-ran to the nominee. It really wasn't much of a race. Since then, he has toured the nation, and the globe, but has he not really been in an all-out campaign mode - unlike both Democrats.
Before the 2008 Presidential Election began, neither Clinton nor Obama had ever faced much of an electoral challenge; let's face it, Rick Lazio and Allan Keyes are no John McCain. But just as a vaccination introduces a small but manageable dose of a virus into the system in order to build defenses against a disease, the Democratic mudslinging between Clinton and Obama could ultimately inoculate the eventual nominee from Republican attacks, whomever he or she may be. And they will have months of campaign trench-warfare under their belts by the time their party picks a nominee. That's more time on the road in campaign mode than John McCain has had in his nearly eight decades.
The names Tony Rezko or Reverend Jeremy Wright seem today to be road bumps to the nomination for Barack Obama. But by addressing these issues, and absorbing their impact in March, not October, the junior Senator from Illinois may be able to inoculate himself from these issues later on. Likewise, Travelgate, Whitewater, Monica, Bosnian snipers - and more - will be old news by the time that Hillary gets the nomination, should that come to pass.
In contrast, John McCain has by and large managed to get this far without enduring many attacks. Outside of a below-the-belt article from the New York Times, the worst that McCain has faced was an ad by Mitt Romney which only referred to the Senator metaphorically as a Republican proxy for Hillary Clinton.
Between now and September, John McCain will be an afterthought in the national media, as newspapers, television and the websites large and small all focus on the merits of having either Clinton or Obama in the White House. Come Labor Day, McCain will be the political hare. He may need to be awakened from his nap!
So to my Republican friends, I must say, "be careful what you wish for," and to my associates across the aisle, I say, "simmer down," it's always darkest before the sun rises.
Over the Easter Holiday, as I listened to messages of hope and redemption, I was reminded not of my early years attending a suburban Texas Protestant church, but of the presidential candidacy of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.
The core mesages of Obama's campaign - hope and change - are at their heart, messianic. Weren't hope and change the virtues Christ himself was preaching as he led his followers to Jerusalem to overthrow the corrupt leaders in the temple? Obama's candidacy offers many Americans hope that one man can go into the temple known as Washington, D.C. and rid the place of its corruption, bring its inhabitants together and deliver us to a promised land - a changed land - of peace and prosperity.
Like others, I am somewhat troubled by the devotion of Barack Obama's followers. To hear Obama's supporters speak reminds me of some evangelical Christians in their devotion to the man and his cause. Such is the degree of faith Obama supporters are required to maintain that I'm reminded of a famous quotation: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."
I don't feel as though I'm exaggerating. Not too much, anyway. About ten days ago, I was chatting with two friends, one who has been on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton and one who is a reporter for a local news station. To protect his identity, we'll just say he's Not Backing Clinton. Here is how I recount the conversation:
"If you think the media is biased towards Obama, we are not. If we have a bias, it is towards the truth," my reporter friend started.
"Oh really?" was all we had to say to egg him to elucidate.
"See McCain and Clinton, they have long records of public service and public statements, and so we can check and see if they're telling the truth. But because they have records to contradict what they're saying, we have to report on it. Obama has no record to contradict what he says, so therefore, we must assume that everything he says is the truth. And so, if it seems we are biased towards Obama, it is because our bias is for the truth, and Obama is the Truth."
At that point, I had to get another cocktail.
The similarities between Obama supporters and Evangelical Christians are becoming clear: they are both based on a fundamental reliance on faith. Clinton and McCain supporters tend towards empiricism - basing their vote on a candidate's record and ability to implement solutions, Obama's followers must put aside their skepticism and have faith in their candidate's vision.
Because he has no record of, you know, actually doing things in the United States Senate, Barack Obama must ask his followers to believe in his ability to implement hope and change, just as the Bible asks its readers to have faith that the earth was created some 5,000 years ago.
So no, Barack Obama is no secret-Muslim Manchurian Candiate trying to infiltrate America's political system. Rather, Obama is exploiting people's need to believe in something and with soaring oratory has attracted a flock of believers.
With the rapid collapse of financial house Bear Stearns over the weekend, the collapse of the house of cards that Wall Street built atop America's housing boom is underway--despite temporary market rallies indicating otherwise. And while much attention will focus on how a company deemed solvent on a Wednesday could be belly-up by Sunday, America needs to come to grips with the fact that accountability for the current credit crisis is widespread.
When economic and financial systems are in crisis, the initial urge is to take action to mitigate the pain. But in mitigating the effects of the housing bust, we may only be spreading it out longer and delaying the time that we can recover. What is really needed is a full-scale assault to root out the causes of the housing collapse before we can begin the growth cycle anew.
The knee-jerk reaction in Washington - and on the campaign trail - is to do whatever it takes to keep people in their homes. This is admirable, and certainly a worthy goal but it should not be done with a carte-blanche for all Americans who are facing foreclosure or are struggling to pay their mortgages. Blame for the recession America seems to be facing, and inflation we are currently fighting, lies not solely at the feet of Wall Street, but at the front porches of hundreds of thousands - if not millions of Americans - whose action should warrant their being labeled nothing more than"Main Street criminals".
Housing prices were able to inflate in America over the past decade not because Americans were becoming wealthier, but because many unscrupulous Americans defrauded the nation's financial systems.
I have no doubt that the FBI, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and - eventually - Congress will conduct investigations into Bear Stearns and whichever financial institution takes it in the chin next. But such investigations will only focus on the symptoms, not the causes, of America's current economic turmoil.
What we need now, are further investigations into how so many people got into homes they could not afford. Let's do some quick cocktail-napkin math. If at the peak of the housing boom, the median price of a home in Southern California's San Fernando Valley was $750,000, then that would require mortgage payments in the range of $4000-5000 per month. To qualify for such a mortgage, that would require an income close to $200,000, especially in such a high-tax state. And how many people are making that kind of money? Not even in tony Beverly Hills does the median income come close to those levels!
The state attorneys general need to go back to the work that they gave up after scoring some high-profile victories in their investigation of the mortgage industry. Mortgage brokers, realtors, and appraisers who profited unscrupulously need to be held accountable for putting Americans in a place of peril by lending money and encouraging those who couldn't afford big-ticket mortgages to buy - on little more than faith and wobbly credit.
But the investigation should not stop there. Before anyone benefits from a "foreclosure freeze" or other federal program to keep them in their homes, their mortgage applications should be reviewed. If anyone facing foreclosure lied about their income, assets or ability to pay, then not only should they not receive mortgage assistance, they should be prosecuted for fraud by the local District Attorney. These Main Street Criminals essentially robbed their bank with a pen, and not a gun. In many cases walked away with more cash than one could likely get from an armed robbery.
Every day, the rest of us Americans are paying for these excesses. We pay with our taxes going to bail out people in mortgages they cannot afford, and we pay with the billions of dollars needed to bail out Bear Stearns. We pay with inflated housing costs, we pay with each rate cut that sends inflation higher and the dollar lower, and we pay with soaring costs of commodities, every time we buy a cup of coffee.
From Wall Street to Main Street, everyone who contributed to the current credit crunch must be held accountable. Because the rest of us are paying, day after day.
The world is watching American elections like never before. After eight years of the Bush Administration, the prospect of change is palpable, especially in Europe, a continent that is clamoring to regain its relevance in the world. But the world should be cautioned: Be careful what you wish for.
On a recent trip to Europe, my suggestion that John McCain may well be the next president, drew pleas from Europeans that we Americans cannot let the world down. "It's time for a change," I was told, echoing the monosyllabic campaign message of Barack Obama.
Well, the biggest changes in foreign policy that Democrats are proposing come in the guise of economic policy. Both Clinton and Obama have threatened to pull out of the NAFTA free trade agreement unless their demands are met. That's foolish pandering and Republican nominee John McCain is right to criticize them for this: What message would that send to our allies around the globe about how we treat our two closest friends in the global community?
Globalism is real. Although some Americans may see other countries around the world getting richer and think that wealth is coming - literally - at their expense, that is the wrong lesson to learn from the global economy. Instead, the growing interconnectivity of the global economy means that we must all care about each others' well being and economic welfare because when anyone catches an economic cold, we all stand to suffer the sniffles.
In a speech to the Georgetown University Forum on Global Competitiveness, former Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar hit this point on the head when he pointed out the impact that America has on European economies through trade, investment and labor movement. The economic impact of the U.S. on Ireland is twice that of the impact in China. Anzar's observation that Europe can only be an economic power, not a military one, requires that Europe keep its borders open to trade, and that America do the same.
At the same conference, former Clinton Assistant National Security Advisor Anthony Lake - now and advisor to the Barack Obama campaign - came to a different conclusion from the same set of facts. He started from the basic premise that we should not attack globalism or praise it, we should accept it. That's refreshing coming from an Obama advisor but his solution seems to offer a return to the past, not a move forward.
Lake then spoke about the world's problems - from competition over scarce commodities such as corn or oil, to Global Warming to the War in Afghanistan - and correctly pointed out that no one country can "solve" these problems alone. But even if the United States has the willingness to say "Yes We Can" and change our approach to these issues, Lake worries that the rest of the world - Europe, in particular - lacks the institutional support to make change happen.
When you look at Europe's greatest institutional model - the European Central Bank - Lake seems to have a point. Since adopting the Euro, the less well-off countries of southern Europe have seen their economies flourish, but growth has come at the cost of inflation. Conversely, in northern Europe, the inflation that came after the initial adoption of the Euro has subsided, but they now suffer from the choke-hold of high interest rates and low growth.
My "Amsterdam Beer Index" - handy for the casual traveler trying to figure coss - show that the cost of a Dommelsch has gone from 2.95 Euros down to 2.50 and as low as 2.20 over the past three years, remaining steady in dollar terms, but also a clear (albeit anecdotal sign) of a slowing Dutch economy. Why? The ECB has chosen to forsake growth in order to fight inflation, at the cost of double-digit unemployment and growing unrest.
Militarily, Lake implied, Europe's institutions are even worse off and they must be bolstered if they intend to cooperate with the United States in NATO and fighting the war on terrorism. Europe, the potential future Secretary of State alleged, has gotten a free ride from the U.S. during fifty years of the Cold War and eight years of Bush unilateralism.
The only conclusion I can draw from that is that after pulling out of NAFTA, the Obama Administration would try to re-militarize Europe. As someone who remembers what he learned about the last time protectionism and militarization were the global norms, I have to say that sort of change - a change to the past, not the future - isn't exactly what we're looking for. Is it?
It has become a standard political axiom: when it comes to presidential races, Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. Regardless of whether the voters ultimately confirm this conventional wisdom, there's one bipartisan truth: breaking up is hard to do.
As a sizeable portion of the nation goes ga-ga over Barack Obama, we should remember that political love affairs seldom last as long as the break-ups. Here in California, we've seen just how difficult it can be when a political love-affair turns sour.
Former Governor Gray Davis was popular enough to win two terms in office, but when he cheated on Californians by lying about the extent of the budget crisis in 2002, the Golden State quickly threw the bum out with a special recall election less than a year later.
In dumping Davis, Californians fell hard on the rebound for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, developing what now seems like a co-dependent relationship.
We swept Schwarzenegger into office in 2003, on the hopes that he could shake up the broken system called California government. Two years later, we rejected each of his appeals to fix the state's problems, which sent his popularity plummeting. While many expected a break-up in 2006, Californians went back to Schwarzenegger to stand by our man for another four years. With another budget crisis looming, and the state looking once again un-governable, many wonder what kind of doormat the California voter must be to have Arnold walking all over them!
Likewise, across the pond, the French are rapidly falling out of love with President Nicolas Sarkozy. Although he was elected less than a year ago, his jet-set lifestyle and very public romance with Italian songstress Carla Bruni, the French have soured the President on their choice, like an uncorked bottle of Bordeaux.
With today's news, Democratic voters are no doubt having an inner debate between the attractive, smooth-talking Casanova or the practical fiancée who promises to put food on the table every night. Until Tuesday evening, infatuation had been winning over pragmatism.
But all love affairs must end, and with the candidacy of Barack Obama, the question is whether America breaks up with him before popping the question in November and meeting at the altar on January 20, 2009.
Obamamanics got a taste of what the break-up with Barack could feel like this week, when we learned of secret meetings between the Senator's advisors and a foreign government.
When reports first trickled out of Canada a week ago saying that Barack Obama's economic advisor had met with a representative of the Canadian Consulate and said that the Senator was really not a protectionist despite his rhetoric on NAFTA, the campaign denied that such a meeting took place. But when internal memos proved otherwise, the Obama campaign started backtracking. The lies, and the duplicity left many voters feeling scorned and made what should have been a coronation in Texas and Ohio into just another leg in this marathon primary. Kind of like Obama was cheating on his "wife" - the American public.
A marriage is a lifetime commitment, and one not to be taken lightly. Still, in politics and, more importantly governing, four years can seem like a lifetime. The wedding date is set for America's next love affair. But who will be at the altar? And will we still have butterflies in our stomachs?
