Tuesday, November 13, 2007

I Like Hillary Well Enough...

...but I wish she'd stop calling me at dinner time.


Bill Clinton made his very first campaign appearance for Hillary in Iowa City last July

For that matter, the daily email from John Edwards and Joe Biden are getting a little old too. While I'm whining, I'm tired of the two old guys in the barber shop talking about Dodd, during his commercial that runs during the 10:00 news. I'm even ready to snarl at the ubelievably earnest Obama volunteers who phone to invite us to picnics.

As a matter of fact, the only candidates not bombarding my family right now are Richardson and Kucinich.

I supported Kucinich at my local precinct caucus in 2004. We were viable! (arcane Iowa Caucus term that no one else cares about) This time around we will be in a new precinct. That should be interesting.

Our old precinct (Iowa City 20) had college student rental houses, senior citizen apartments, and a Catholic rectory all included in it's area, quite the diverse group. Our new precinct is the entire town of University Heights. Our county is HEAVILY Democratic. I think we Democrats get the biggest "public" structure in town, the Presbyterian Church. The Republicans will likely get a room at West High School, which is not located inside city limits, but is in Iowa City. In know that in 2004 the Republicans met at the elementary school that is inside city limits, but since people parked on the streets around it for more than the posted 1 hour time length, they all got ticketed!

One kind of cool spin off of the caucuses are the Iowa Electronic Markets. These are "futures" markets for political events. Here is the link to the Presidential 08 Market.

The two "futures" currently trading are the popular vote percentage for each major party (as of 11/13/08 Dem- .530 Rep. .493) and winner take all market (as of 11/13/08 Dem- .612 Rep. .397)

I am looking forward to January 4th. (The day after the caucuses)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to know that Kucinich was viable at some point, God love him (hey, anyone that can campaign across Iowa as a vegan deserves some points for tenacity if nothing else). No doubt the UFO thing will hurt him--but perhaps the dishy wife will partially make up for it.

We love to watch the C-SPAN coverage of the caucuses (especially after the official portion is over and they leave the mics open for the REAL politicking). See what you can do to steer the cameras to your precinct this year, instead of Mason City or some other quaint burg. It's time U-Heights had its time in the sun...though you'd better tell your ticket-happy Barney Fife squad that it's bad form to ticket the big yellow C-SPAN bus.

Anonymous said...

C-SPAN has cameras inside the caucus? I thought awhile ago that would make a good doc, but figured they didn't allow cameras. Whatta ya say Jimbo, wanna go shoot in Iowa in Jan.??

(by they way Mike, it only took you getting off the home improvement kick and into politics to inspire a comment from me!!)

Anonymous said...

A caucus doc would be really great. The only downside is it requires us to be in Iowa in January, and I think we both went coastal to avoid that kinda thing...I'm all up for 2012 though!