I concur that Senator Clinton hasn’t really shown the kind of mass appeal that Senator Obama has, but I wanted to focus on the folk further back in the standings. Hillary and Barack get plenty of chatter on blogs, the radio, newspapers, magazines, and television as it is.

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jul/06/ron_paul_has_more_cash_on_hand_than_john_mccain

Substantively, the only thing I find appealing about Ron Paul is his position on the War and particularly his candor in exploring the motivations behind terrorism, rather than pandering to the they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms GOP nativist base. I wish the Democratic candidates would step up and denounce the entire rhetorical and philosophical basis for the so-called “war on terror” and propose in its place an intelligent foreign policy. The public knows this GWOT bullshit is harming rather than securing America, and the Democrats are in prime position to capitalize on that sentiment. The fact that they don’t is frankly quite baffling.

Barring these complaints, and despite their individual flaws, I find the top three Dems acceptable to me. Bill Richardson is clearly the most qualified on paper, but I highly doubt he will ever place better than a tie for third place in the primaries. Barack Obama has been criticized for being rhetorically elegant but substantively empty which is a fair criticism, but I hardly expect candidates to have fully-fleshed out policy plans at this stage of the election season. All they need is a position, and each of the candidates fulfills that requirement. Something else worth noting is Obama’s strong mass support. Not only did he blow away Sen. Clinton in fundraising last quarter, but he received the lion’s share of that money from small donors. That to me is undeniable popular (i.e. mass) appeal, something that Clinton has yet to demonstrate in abundance. At the end of the day, however, I think Clinton has a larger base of support than is apparent on the surface. My biggest complaint about her campaign is who she surrounds herself with. Democrats have shown an irritating inclination over the past decade and a half to take truly horrible advice from a class of permanent DC apparatchik political consultants that has led to inconsistency on policy. Ditching these overpaid cynics should be the first order of business for a Democrat hoping to build a formidable electoral coalition.

As for the GOP candidates, I find them all appalling. McCain seemed like a reasonable guy back in 1999/2000 but it is important to remember that he was the neocon’s preferred candidate because of his foreign policy positions and they only switched loyalty to Bush after Rove smeared McCain in South Carolina. And for someone who has a reputation for anger, McCain has been quite serene considering that he could have–perhaps should have–been the GOP nominee seven years ago. Now that he is pandering to the very forces who destroyed his chances back then he appears insincere and anything but a “maverick.” And that’s even before we consider his position on Iraq, which totally sinks him. I disagree with the observation that McCain “clearly stands against torture” because his vote helped make the Military Commissions Act of 2006 possible which, among other things, gutted the writ of habeas corpus and codified the administration’s immoral and illegal treatment of detainees. A similar phenomenon is happening in the Supreme Court where the two Bush appointees have maintained a consistent 5-4 majority that guts, rather than overrules, past precedent in favor of what are known as “conservative” positions. That’s how these people operate, by undermining the foundations of liberalism rather than attacking it frontally. When they do that, they fail (e.g. the Social Security privatization debacle of 2005).

Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson are beginning to look more and more like clones of one another. They repeatedly make allusions to authoritarianism in their hypothetical administrations, and each lack experience or even basic knowledge of foreign policy, on which they have been deemed “strong” by the pundit class of high school politics analysis. If any of these assholes are elected presidents, it will be because Chris Matthews (to cite but one example) finds them manly. Conservatism has become a form of identity politics, so it is hardly surprising that these three offer little more than an image to sell, particularly when they get a free pass on substantive issues from the afore-mentioned chattering classes.

This wasn’t intended to be long, but all of it needed to be covered.