| i think you have your donkey/elephant meter mixed up.. heh, or at least i didn't understand it if it was correct.
i think most of us wanted mccain in 2000... gotta love the dirty campaign game that bush (really - karl rove) played against him during those primaries.. nothing like a man who found a way not to fight in vietnam lambasting the record of a vietnam hero. but, that's bush's campaign style - and it doesn't seem to bother most of his supporters.
in retrospect, i wish dean did win the primaries.. at the time of the dems' primaries, i was just about ready to dump bush. i was part of the choir that blasted dean - purely for partisan (ego) reasons. (hey at least i can admit that, most partisans never do.) he was a deficit hawk, had a solid record in vermont, he was consistently against the war, etc... and - governors generally make better choices than senators. he would've made a much stronger candidate - primarily because he would've taken the gloves off throught the entirety of the campaign.
personally, i think the dems should return to the core economic fundamentals from the clinton years. balance the budget, pay down the debt. social security reform (i.e. the move to have private accounts) began with the clinton administration - they failed to maintain that issue after 2000. they do need to drop the gay activist agenda, but they should not be cowed into legislating bigotry. and they do need to continue to protect roe v. wade (and thank god that arlen spector also wants to protect it).
about special interests... they're an evil that will never go away. whenever you have democracy, you have interest groups.. well, at least beginning from the "league" in britain during the industrial revolution. even if we had publicly funded elections, special interests would still push their agendas. |