Super Tuesday

Today is Super Tuesday with lots of primaries and caucuses happening. If you live in any of the following states,

Primaries:

1. Alabama
2. Arizona
3. Arkansas
4. California
5. Connecticut
6. Delaware
7. Georgia
8. Illinois
9. Massachusetts
10. Minnesota
11. Missouri
12. New Jersey
13. New Mexico (Democrats only)
14. New York
15. North Dakota
16. Oklahoma
17. Tennessee
18. Utah

Caucuses:

1. Alaska
2. Colorado
3. Idaho (Democrats only)
4. Kansas (Democrats only)
5. Montana (Republican only)
6. West Virginia (Republican only)

go out and vote for Obama.

Georgia is also voting today and we are supporting Senator Obama.

Since the opinion polls on the Democratic side show a close race and the delegates are awarded to candidates proportionately, I expect Senators Clinton and Obama to divide the delegates almost equally. Hence the Democratic nomination battle will go on.

On the Republican side, Huckabee should be able to do well here in the South. McCain is expected to do better overall since he has a huge poll advantage over Romney. Also a number of the Republican contests are winner-take-all which is expected to help Senator McCain.

Let’s go over the candidates still in the field.

Barack Obama is a great orator. I admit sometimes his poetic flourishes leave me high and dry but at other times he’s really good, for example, his speech at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. As for Obama being all talk and no substance, that’s not true at all. Read Hilzoy and Katherine as they write better about their support for Obama than I can and I agree completely with them. I also admit that I like wowing my Pakistani friends with Obama’s full name: Barack Hussein Obama.

Hillary Clinton is an okay candidate and she’s definitely much better than the Republicans. However, her concept of executive power is closer to Bush than I am comfortable with. Plus she has never really explained her Iraq war vote and I am all for punishing politicians for wrong votes. She has also surrounded herself with the hawkish elements of the Democratic foreign policy experts, all of whom were dead wrong about Iraq. As for her argument about experience, that’s just wrong. Let’s face it, if we wanted to vote for an experienced candidate, we would have voted for Biden or Dodd. The three Democratic frontrunners all don’t have much experience.

John McCain wants to stay in Iraq till hell freezes over and I ask is he senile? McCain also thinks that generals decide policy. May be as President, McCain will be working under General Petraeus. McCain is for war and for surges. All of that repels me a lot. On the other hand, McCain is the only Republican against torture and for immigration.

Mitt Romney was a moderate governor of Massachusetts. Then he saw an opportunity to be a real conservative for the Republican Presidential nomination. Now nobody knows what Romney stands for. My guess is if Romney becomes President (very unlikely), he’ll rule like the technocrat that he was in Massachusetts, but I might be wrong.

Mike Huckabee sounds like an average, decent guy. You can at least see some humanity in him. And his populist talk, though not backed up with any policy plans, is good too. But then he wants to bring the constitution in accord with the laws of God. And Huckabee is really ignorant too, with no policy shop in his campaign and no knowledge of international affairs at all.

Ron Paul is batshit crazy. He might be right about Iraq, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but he sees conspiracy theories (Trilateral commission, NAFTA superhighway, etc, etc) everywhere. And then there are the racist remarks in his newsletters in the 1990s. According to Reason, Paul didn’t write those newsletters. But his associates that did are still with him even now and Paul raised a lot of funds on the basis of these newsletters which went under his name. While in the debates Ron Paul has talked about the Iraq war and the constitution, he has campaigned a lot more like a conservative, focused on immigration, abortion, etc. See his anti-immigrant ad for example.

Go vote for Barack Obama!