The picture above with the caption, We are on our way to Boise was supposed to be posted last Saturday. Somehow it wasn’t and we are now back. Maybe the fact that it didn’t post is good because the picture is way more dramatic than the actual drive. Here is a more typical scene.
To be continued.
Watching the debate with an even more fervent Obama supporter than me, what I saw was pretty much the above. That is clearly not what most people saw, what most people saw was this:
A Presidential debate is not like a baseball game or a car race with their clear, arbitrary, rules for defining a winner: in a debate, the winner is who the most people think is the winner. That was Romney and, as a card carrying member of the Obama Team, it has brought up all sorts of swirling emotions in me. From denial through anger, from bargaining to acceptance.
With acceptance – although it may be bargaining – I am trying to see how Romney’s debate victory will play out and I have come to the conclusion that it did not mean much in that it will probably not change the election. Although Intrade differs, saying that Obama’s odds fell from 71% to 67% because of his weak show. (The odds do seem to be going back up as a result of today’s jobs report.)
In a way, the odd thing about the debates – the odd thing about news in general – is how ephemeral it is. The debates end and are a big deal: the next day they are gone.
But what I am still left with is how easily Romney seems to be able shapeshift. Or, if you prefer, lie. It is not that he has changed what he believes, it is that he has always believed the new pitch. I remember firing – a job I don’t like as much as Romney – a guy who just flat out lied about something he had done. I don’t remember the details but I do remember him looking me right in the eye and saying something like It couldn’t have been me, I was in Queensland at the time. It was stunning and I was completely flustered.
I think that Obama was flat, he looked tired, he was down; but – I suspect – he found it hard to cope with a guy who can say My health plan includes the elimination of pre-conditions. (It doesn’t for those who haven’t been keeping score.) Obama could say No it doesn’t – and he did – but Romney comes back and says Yes, it does. and there is no place to go except get in a He said, he said, argument or move on. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out next Thursday. .
Lewis Hamilton is one of the best drivers in the world today. Like Obama, he is half black. Since he has been thirteen when McLaren signed him to their Young Driver Support Programme – love that spelling – he has been racing, either directly or indirectly, for McLaren. Yesterday, he left to go to Mercedes. I think it is a great decision.
McLaren, in many ways, has been his family – his mother left when he was two and his father was his manager until about two years ago – so, in many ways, he is leaving home. I think that is part of the reason going to Mercedes is a great decision. At some point we have to leave home to become an adult and I think that this is that time for Hamilton.
But more importantly, McLaren just doesn’t seem able to win a championship (although Hamilton won a championship as a driver) . They have been second for much of the 2000’s but don’t seem able to turn the corner to first. Mercedes have been much worse and will probably finish in fifth place this year. But I think that it might be easier to get to first from fifth than from perpetual second. In second, the temptation is to do the same thing as last year, only harder. In fifth, everybody knows that there have to be big changes.
This ad is sponsered by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, and was on the front page of TheGuardian. Noobody is in Kansas anymore.
In the ealy 80’s when the Niners were battling the Cowboys for the best team in football – or, atleast, the NFC – I was, of course, a Niner fan. I had my reasons; good reasons. Among other things, the Niners were just a better group of human beings. At some point, somehow – I don’t have any idea of the circumstances this was about 25 to 30 years ago – I got a Dallas newspaper and I looked at the sports section. (I think I expected to read about how great the Niners were from Dallas’s point of view.)
In the Dallas paper, I was shocked to read about how much better the Cowboys were as people. They had their reasons, good reasons! In detail. I always thought of Landry as an uptight jerk, but the Dallas paper had an article about what a great humanitarian he was and another article – or, maybe, the same one, it was long ago – talked about how uptight, how stiff, the Niners defensive coordinator, George Seifert, was. I had never thought of Seifert as uptight. Maybe a little quiet, formal, but not uptight. (I was truly taken back and – maybe unfortunately – never saw George Seifert, or the Cowboys, the same way again.) It seemed as if the Dallasonian world was completely backward from my San Franciscan world, at least as far as football goes and, I suspect, alot more. I was opened to another point of view.
I am a fervent believer in The allegory of the Cave Theory of Life in that I do believe that there is a Reality and we can only see imperfect shadows of that higher Reality. I’m a Democrt and, more importantly, a democrat. I think Obama is terrific. That is my reading and what I project on the shadows of a higher Reality. I see an Obama that is a centrist pragmatic trying to dig us out of a very deep financial and ecological hole that we have dug ourselves into over, at least, the last 16 years. That may be the actual Reality. Or it may only be my distortion. What I am aware of, is that there doesn’t seem to be a Dallas-newspaper-analog that presents a reasoned, other, view of Obama.
I got an email, today, from an acquantance who said “Hopefully, the Marxist, Central Planning and Control Obama will wind up in his ‘Elba”; while riding with a friend – who seems conservative to me but refers to himself as moderate – about a year ago, he referred to Obama as a Trotshyite and, when I asked Tell me why you say that, he answered That’s just how I feel, I have a right to feel the way I feel ; after Obama said – in a speach at the UN – that The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied, conservative commentator Erick Erickson said In his speech to the United Nations general assembly today the president of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians. What? Where? How? Oh, right. He just feels that way.
And so it goes.