Last night at Exeter High School, a democratic "forum" took place, with 11 candidates at the table.
It was hard to say who was in the audience: it may have been mostly campaign workers or maybe concerned citizens. There were some seventy somethings sitting near me, taking notes! What had been done to these folks that they grew up thinking they needed to take notes at a campaign event?
The candidates themselves ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime.
A self described "gamer" said he refuses to accept any money at all from anyone for his campaign. He reminded me, in some odd way, of the youth I saw in Hyde Park, London, standing on a soapbox proclaiming he refused to speak to any crowd numbering less than 500 people--the impossible pretext for success, which ensured no progress beyond the proclamation.
There were the two front runners who have all the money.
One clearly sees becoming a United States Congresswoman as a chance to be a superhero. She is all about the emotion. Every sentence is loaded with high emotion. The only time she struck me as straying toward a grounded reality was when she noted with all the money backing her, she is the most likely Democratic to be able to beat the Republican in District One.
Of course, I thought, whoever gets the nomination will be flooded with national money.
The other front runner is a smooth, careful, engaging man, but he is so careful, he will not endorse single payer health care; he wants, like Hillary, to "incrementally improve" Obamacare. He fears offending. The caravan has begun; why not simply add wagons to it?
And then there was Terence O'Rourke, who is a thoughtful radical, who wants to expunge the profit motive from healthcare, publicly fund elections, pack the Supreme Court and revamp the tax code to skew toward the Middle class.
But when everyone else jumped on the Kill ICE bandwagon, he observed ICE was founded after 9/11 to prevent drugs and various miscreants from coming across borders and it was not some innate venality of ICE agents which has gained them their Gestapo reputation but it is the people at the top, giving the orders, who have done that. We need borders, he reminded an audience which was clearly focused on blubbering about babies in cages. Without borders, there is no country. That took real courage, in that crowd, to not pander. But he constructed his argument, as he would before a skeptical jury, and I, for one, found him utterly convincing and brave.
O'Rourke favors banning assault rifles and other military weapons. He was shot at in anger in Iraq and thinks of an assault rifle as fundamentally different from a hunting rifle; different as a tiger from a house cat.
He told a gory story about a single action he led in Iraq, where no American soldiers were killed but several Iraqi soldiers were blown to bits. His point was, these stupid, ill considered wars launched by the martini crowd back in Washington get real ugly in the real world, and just because it may not be American boys or girls this time, it matters, because those Iraqi soldiers have mothers, too. As he put it, there would be empty spaces forever at the tables of those Iraqi families. His experience in Iraq changed him for real. The contrast to the moneyed candidate who was safe in the Green Zone and never had a shot fired at her in anger could not have been more stark.
He also doesn't like the ACLU much, as he has opposed that organization in court often enough. The ACLU opposes outlawing child pornography. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU. I have questions about child pornography, and I am still deciding whether the ACLU is correct about this, but O'Rourke is so forthright, it didn't matter. I may wind up disagreeing with him on this, but that doesn't matter.
He is clearly the pick of the litter, smart, informed, a policy wonk, unafraid to take unpopular stands, not intimidated by bullies.
But he will not win. That is the nature of our current system. He's simply too good for the people he seeks to represent.
It was hard to say who was in the audience: it may have been mostly campaign workers or maybe concerned citizens. There were some seventy somethings sitting near me, taking notes! What had been done to these folks that they grew up thinking they needed to take notes at a campaign event?
The candidates themselves ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime.
A self described "gamer" said he refuses to accept any money at all from anyone for his campaign. He reminded me, in some odd way, of the youth I saw in Hyde Park, London, standing on a soapbox proclaiming he refused to speak to any crowd numbering less than 500 people--the impossible pretext for success, which ensured no progress beyond the proclamation.
There were the two front runners who have all the money.
One clearly sees becoming a United States Congresswoman as a chance to be a superhero. She is all about the emotion. Every sentence is loaded with high emotion. The only time she struck me as straying toward a grounded reality was when she noted with all the money backing her, she is the most likely Democratic to be able to beat the Republican in District One.
Of course, I thought, whoever gets the nomination will be flooded with national money.
The other front runner is a smooth, careful, engaging man, but he is so careful, he will not endorse single payer health care; he wants, like Hillary, to "incrementally improve" Obamacare. He fears offending. The caravan has begun; why not simply add wagons to it?
And then there was Terence O'Rourke, who is a thoughtful radical, who wants to expunge the profit motive from healthcare, publicly fund elections, pack the Supreme Court and revamp the tax code to skew toward the Middle class.
But when everyone else jumped on the Kill ICE bandwagon, he observed ICE was founded after 9/11 to prevent drugs and various miscreants from coming across borders and it was not some innate venality of ICE agents which has gained them their Gestapo reputation but it is the people at the top, giving the orders, who have done that. We need borders, he reminded an audience which was clearly focused on blubbering about babies in cages. Without borders, there is no country. That took real courage, in that crowd, to not pander. But he constructed his argument, as he would before a skeptical jury, and I, for one, found him utterly convincing and brave.
O'Rourke favors banning assault rifles and other military weapons. He was shot at in anger in Iraq and thinks of an assault rifle as fundamentally different from a hunting rifle; different as a tiger from a house cat.
He told a gory story about a single action he led in Iraq, where no American soldiers were killed but several Iraqi soldiers were blown to bits. His point was, these stupid, ill considered wars launched by the martini crowd back in Washington get real ugly in the real world, and just because it may not be American boys or girls this time, it matters, because those Iraqi soldiers have mothers, too. As he put it, there would be empty spaces forever at the tables of those Iraqi families. His experience in Iraq changed him for real. The contrast to the moneyed candidate who was safe in the Green Zone and never had a shot fired at her in anger could not have been more stark.
He also doesn't like the ACLU much, as he has opposed that organization in court often enough. The ACLU opposes outlawing child pornography. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU. I have questions about child pornography, and I am still deciding whether the ACLU is correct about this, but O'Rourke is so forthright, it didn't matter. I may wind up disagreeing with him on this, but that doesn't matter.
He is clearly the pick of the litter, smart, informed, a policy wonk, unafraid to take unpopular stands, not intimidated by bullies.
But he will not win. That is the nature of our current system. He's simply too good for the people he seeks to represent.
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