Super Wednesday Morning

So it's Wednesday at 1:40am in the morning and I'm listening to BBC reporters bantering back and forth about the Republican race with old Reagan crony Peggy Noonan who is sitting in a fur coat in front of a surprisingly modest view of the Manhattan skyline, and I've realized this is the Super Bowl for the rest of us.

There's a suggestion of a hint that McCain will not be able to push Mitt Romney (and possibly even Huckabee) out of the race, and that they will struggle along for the next 6-months, just as we know will happen in the Democratic race. So I'm staying up for basically no reason, but it's still semi-exciting.

The downside, and there is a downside, is that a line of discussion pointed out that America is obviously so tired of Bush that the Democrats will win the election no matter what. The reason this bothers me is that I remember hearing this exact word-for-word discussion 4-years-ago with Kerry being the "Anyone-but-Bush" candidate. After he lost, he was blamed for being insignificant and not getting people excited, even though the media couldn't push the point hard enough that he just needed to have a pulse and not be George W. Bush to be elected. They were horribly wrong in 2004.

Of course, Bush can't be elected a third time, although if he could I'm not sure he wouldn't. Do I trust Americans to make informed decisions in 2008? No. Not after 2004. I know that Europe tends not to blame us for re-electing Bush, but they're letting us off too easy. I just heard some 30-something woman in an NYC bar say another scary 2004 tag line: "It doesn't matter who I vote for because they're all the same person." Actually, this was a famous 2000 Election tag-line too and couldn't have been further from the truth then, when being spouted by Nader supporters about Bush and Gore, than it is this year.

There are real differences between John McCain and the Democrats this year and the fact that McCain is a moderate with a history of independence has been heavily tainted by his efforts to support Bush over the last 2 years and his unflinching belief in the Iraq War. So along these lines, I have to present VAJOE.com's 2008 Candidate Calculator. While you can question the inclusion of some issues and the exclusion of others, this is a great way to find out which candidates best fit your beliefs on a number of important issues. The way in which they score the candidate's stances on issues is probably overly simplistic, but the idea is great, and without this tool I would never have realized that former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel agrees with me on the big issues 77.78% of the time.