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Debate thoughts
By adamg on Tue, 09/21/2010 - 8:08pm
What did you think?
My big takeaway was that Jill Stein seemed like an afterthought; she was the only one who didn't really get to enunciate what it was she stood for, besides not being one of the other three. Still not sure if that's because she wasn't able to do so or because she seemed to get a lot less opportunity to talk in the first half of the debate.
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Comments
Good Debate
The Gov is a masterful debater. The more the merrier. He's like a guy with 3 dance partner. Verbally moving them around the floor, interacting, listening to them interact and using what they say to his advantage. Baker was well prepared with rebuttals to the Big Dig financing everyone knew he'd need but I am so reminded of Weld I get the impression he just dusted off the ole playbook and it's back to future for us. Cahill is very likeable but as far as I'm concerned a company guy with a party line. Jill Stein is Jill Stein, above having a message, a look or an image so she comes off as nobody to take seriously but having her heart & head in the right place.
Maybe people should take
Maybe people should take candidates whose head and heart are in the right place more seriously?
Jill Stein
Back in 2002, I thought Jill Stein was the better of the candidates for governor, but I voted Democrat to oppose Mitt (Carpetbagger) Romney--that turned out well. This year, I'm voting for Jill Stein: I know what the odds are, but I feel she is the best candidate. And if we don't vote for those who offer something beyond the Republocrat non-choice, we have no-one to blame but ourselves when we just get more of the same.
Libertarian For Stein
If you're in the habit of reading my lengthy political screeds, you know most of my views are not those of Jill Stein or her party. As a matter of fact, I'm diametrically opposed to much of her philosophy. Still, I expect I'll be casting a vote for her come November.
A vote for Stein is the only true protest vote in the race for governor. It is the only vote, aside from a write-in, that will send the message of my being tired of the Demopublican status quo.
I'll be voting for taxes to be lowered or repealed, on the ballot questions, but I'll also be casting a vote for Jill Stein for governor.
Massachusetts politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
The morning after
John Carroll recaps:
Jill fell down the hill
Of course, I have my own rants and niggles on the not-really-a-debate.
I agree with you about Stein's non-role. I think she trivialized herself. Her biggest chances came when she could question another candidate and went with smug delivery of a small point. She seem to want the right things but does not know how to get them. Pity.
more Jill Stein
My politics are more in line with hers than the others. The Republocrats, Demublicans, status quo duo, whatever you want to call them (Corporate apologists and egomaniacs?) will be (as George Washington warned) the downfall of this country, but one thing many of them have is political acumen. This is not necessarily a bad thing (try going to a proctologist who doesn't have it).
Jill doesn't seem to have enough of it. You have to be aware of how other people might perceive of you and then try to subtly alter that perception not just by having great ideas but presenting them appropriately. I think she fails in that department and this contributes to the whole "head/heart appropriately located" view of her. Being "right" is not enough. It gets you no where. If the past 8 years and now the Tea Party "movement" proves anything it's that being "right" means fuck-all. Ferchrissakes even Castro is coming out and saying "nope. don't work."
As far as the rest of the debate, Patrick has got to be loving it that Cahill is putting up a fight. Were it just Baker and Patrick right now, I think he'd be sinking (barring any fatal gaffes on Baker's part).
Jill Stein ALL THE WAY, for democracy
Look, I get the critiques here of Stein's performance. But I'd like to point out one little difference. While Patrick, Baker, and Cahill have the luxury of running multi-million dollar campaigns, Stein is working her ass off on a bare-knuckles grassroots effort, scrambling even to meet a game-changing public matching funds threshold of $125,000 in qualifying contributions by this Friday's deadline.
Patrick, Baker, and Cahill are running well-financed campaigns because they are swimming in money from vested business interests who are buying influence. This legalized corruption is the at the very core of what's wrong with our pay-to-play political system.
Stein, on the other hand, refuses that tainted money and is raising dough only from the ordinary people out there... ordinary people who happen to bearing the brunt of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression. And because she refuses that tainted money, and is accountable only to the people of the Commonwealth, her campaign isn't a self-indulgent, shallow-fringe afterthought... but a very critical opportunity for the people of the Commonwealth to have THEIR voices heard over the noise noise noise noise noise noise we're getting all over the place. We, The People get to decide who our governor will be, but the Boston Media Consortium says it should only be someone who can raise lots of campaign cash. 3 radio debates excluded Stein -- the exposure of which would have had real financial value to her campaign and would have gotten her that much closer to the matching funds threshold... and you better believe that the likes of Todd Feinburg, Tom Finneran, Margery Eagan, Jim Braude, Dan Rea, WRKO-AM, WTKK-FM, and WBZ-AM would make such an anti-democratic, exclusionary decision BECAUSE of that.
If Stein had the kind of professional teams that the 3 Beacon Hill insiders do, do you have any doubt that her performance would be a little more polished?
The point is that she adds a fundamentally distinct offering to the table. It's called democracy, and it's in OUR hands, not anyone else's. I'm working on one clean-money funding mechanism to propel Jill's campaign to the next level. Check out DemocracyDays.com to help build the clean money tidal wave we need to have our voices heard clearly, professionally, and convincingly across the Commonwealth and beyond.
Nice thought...
... the US Supreme Court has already green lit massive, non-public campaign financing. You can work towards a return to the days of Mccain-Feingold, but it's going to be years and years prior to anything being reversed on that front. If you want change in state government, step 1 has to be turfing out people like Petrolati and his allies- people who's primary goal is to improve the lot of their friends and families vs. working for the betterment of the entire state. For example, I'm inclined to vote for a real Republican in Williams vs. a patronage hack conservative in Democrat costume like Mike Rush even though I would categorize myself as a moderate/liberal on most issues. As discouraging as it is, the roots of real change on Beacon Hill will be when machine party politics are eliminated and greater openness is brought to the running of the State House.
And Public Funding Of Political Campaigns Helps How?
By raising state budget deficits? ALL candidates can qualify for matching funds, so it's not like it benefits only those you or I wish it to benefit. Whatever cash Stein gets matched will likely be way more than equaled by the other three. Certainly, on a percentage basis it means more to her, but it isn't some panacea.
If you want to level the playing field, the ability of officeholders to benefit big business needs to be limited, not the ability of big business to benefit candidates. If you take out of the equation the incentives for big business to contribute, you will not find them contributing to anywhere near the extent they do now. And then you'll be closer to the voices of the little guys being able to decide.
It's more work, probably involving buttloads of legislation and maybe even some amending of the state constitution, but I have to believe it's a better, and more likely to last, solution.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
public financing on its own is neutral
but public financing of a real-deal people's candidate is no small thing. Public financing can be bad. In Tim Cahill's case, he's raised several million dollars from vested interests, using his position as our state treasurer. And now he's opted in to public financing which has no REAL limit because his opponents will out-spend his stated limit. So he can spend virtually unlimited money... raise unlimited money from corporate interests... AND use taxpayer money to add on top of all that. In my view it's a vile abuse of the system and should automatically disqualify him from being our next governor.
As an alternative to that... something that Stein supports... is the Clean Elections law that the voters supported by a 2-to-1 margin and then got dismantled by a totally unaccountable state legislature, who threw it out on a voice vote -- not even going on record. That's a VOLUNTARY system, where candidates agree to avoid big-money donations in exchange for public funding. It's incredibly cost-effective for taxpayers because we get rid of the corruption tax which is hosing us for billions every year. Just like campaign contributions in the tens-of-thousands are a terrific investment for greedy businesses, with orders-of-magnitude payback... WE THE PEOPLE can make the same kind of investment... investing in clean candidates and a clean political system... and avoid orders-of-magnitude cost overruns, sweetheart deals, pork projects and the like.
To respond to Vaughn, I basically agree, and I think the Green-Rainbow Party offers the best possible vehicle to combat the pay-to-play nonsense and hold our elected officials accountable. Right now the GRP has two great state rep candidates challenging incumbents in Berkshire County. If the party could start to field dozens of legislative candidates -- all the while refusing to take corporate money, and actually standing up for its stated values -- the unaccountable legislature and the rest of the Beacon Hill establishment will have a hard time gaming the system as they do right now, with bi-partisan handshakes, winks, nods, backscratching, and a lot of empty rhetoric.
Money in Politics
I'm always amazed that the one thing no one seems to talk about is where all this money ends up. We know that at a national level people like Karl Rove and other consultants get some major league salaries to run campaigns and of course that includes huge expenses in events, dinners and occasions to bring out the people who pay, the people who run the campaigns and the people being elected to get together and party it up. And then there are the technical consultants who produce videos, play ominous background music for attack ads, actors who sit at kitchen tables in suspenders looking anxiously at a pile of bills, etc...
But in the end the huge money is going to pay someone for ad time. Does anyone question the media outlets who are receiving the $$ for the ads and are the ones who are deciding who gets to go to the debates?? Whoops, it's the same people who are the ones asking questions and doing the "investigative reporting" who are receiving the ad $$ and making the attendance lists for the debates...how convenient!
But I've never seen anyone actually go after the accounting info from the recipients of all this advertising $$ to provide an overview of where all the money goes at that end of the chain. Given the collapse of network tv dominance with the rise of a billion channels of crap on cable, and print media's continual death due to the migration of advertising and classified dollars to the Internet, if you took away the electoral juice of campaign dollars I wonder what these media outlets would have left for revenue?