Stateside with Rosalea: Midweek Musings

Look what the mailman dragged in!

That munching sound you hear is me eating my words. Seems that the Nader 2000 Campaign did have my address all this time, because this week I got mail from its former campaign manager, who is “working with Ralph to explore whether he should run or not in the 2004 presidential election” and asking for $75 to help “reach supporters, pay for some staff and fuel our frugal road trips around the country.”

Sorry, but I spent the discretionary $75 in this month’s budget on a class about how to start your own business, to offset the likelihood that my job will be number three million and one down the tube this year. Don’t misunderstand me – it’s not that I’ve been at all persuaded by The Nation’s editorial begging Ralph not to run; it’s just that I never liked him much anyway. He’d be running as an independent, not for any party.

It all just confirms my impression that US politics is like one of those households where the kids are chained to their beds or locked in cupboards, and whipped with electric cords if they dare try to step out from under the thumb of Mama Dem and Papa Rep. Please Lord, one day, let there be some smaller but viable political parties in this country that aren’t just sullen kids dressed up in Mama’s too-big baseball cap and Papa’s outsize heels.

Hang on in there, Sharpton, Kucinich and Dean

“I talked to the Kerry people today and they desperately want this to end.” So said Stanley Greenberg on this very day that Kerry won the most delegates in Virginia and Tennessee. Greenberg was one of Al Gore’s advisors in the 2000 election, so I guess he’s in the know. But who knows? He was promoting his book “The Two Americas” so maybe he’d have said anything to get attention.

I guess the audience must’ve looked particularly green, because he said he was surprised that the voting in the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses was so strategic, instead of people voting for the person that they liked, which is what he’d expected instead. Yeah, right. As if the whole process hasn’t been manipuated by the Democratic National Kennedy from the get-go. Greenberg was already referring to the 2004 primaries in the past tense.

He is one of those folks who parse and re-parse focus groups and studies of voter patterns and demographics, selling their wheres and whyfors to political campaigns, which then create messages tailored to fit the focus groups. Obviously, people said they wanted to feel like they were part of the political process, hence this whole pretended surprise at voter turnout.

Correction

I’m thinking it probably won’t be the Chinese who have the most success on Mars after all. Somebody has already perfected an anti-gravity device and put it to use here on Earth. How else do all those vehicles with one driver but containing 500 pounds of explosives get past security checkpoints?

ENDS

© Scoop Media