This isn't a confession.  I'm not ashamed of my choice and I'm not going to apologize for it.  But things have changed, and they've changed in ways that I don't know that I can fully articulate, though I think most of us know.  If I'd lived in a swing state, I probably would have voted for Gore, but in Vermont I had the luxury of making a protest vote.   The electoral college map wasn't going to change. Vermont was going to go for Gore no matter what I did.  If I'd lived in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico or New Hampshire, I would have voted for Gore.  I didn't have to make that choice.

After the fold, I'll talk a bit about the decision processes that go into this and why they're relevant to 2008.  For those of you in Vermont, the first few paragraphs will be familiar to you.  For those of you who don't, you'll learn some very strange things about the way we choose a governor.

I'm not sure why everyone is drinking the Obama Kool-aid since Obama sounds like Bush did in 2000. Bush said he was going to change the tone of American politics. He said he was going to reach across the aisle and work together. And he said he was a uniter, not a divider.

Paul Burka points out: "Just as President Bush failed to unite Washington, so Barack Obama will have to accept that conflict, rather than unity, is the natural condition of politics."

Here's Burka's article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/opinio n/12burka.html?emc=eta1

A reader alerted Democrat Taylor Marsh to the following statement Obama uttered while campaigning in Iowa today:

"I don't want to go into the next election starting off with half the county already not wanting to vote for Democrats, we've done that in 2004, 2000."

I was reading Jonathan Singer's front page post on the current state of the GOP being worse than Watergate.   Certainly, Republicans are in a heap of trouble right now as the Bush brand they so anxiously wrapped themselves in during the 2002 and 2004 elections has come back to fully bite them in the ass.  Things have gotten so bad in a short time that we went from the Republicans saying that the Democratic Party would be the permanent minority party following 2004 to losing both chambers and their President having one of the lowest approval ratings in history.  

Of course this is more because of their abuse of power and overall terrible management of the country rather than anything we as a party did (with the exception of the Dean 50 state, every district Congressional Election policy).  But either way, we reap the rewards and are poised to control the legislature and the White House for the first time since Clinton's first two years; and the goal of the mythical 60 votes is actually realistic in the next 4 years; something many of us doubted we'd ever see.

So that leads us to the question of the day... The Democratic Party is in its best shape in decades.  We are on the precipice of being able to pass some major achievements in legislation.  Would we be in this position had the 2000 election not been stolen?  Was it, in terms of the long term, the best thing to happen to us as a party.

In the wake of Al Gore's victory (okay, technically it was Davis Guggenheim's victory, but you get the idea) at the Oscars, I anticipated a wave of positive press about Gore's efforts to raise awareness of global warming.  What I didn't anticipate were the numerous comments from the press . . . about Gore's appearance, specifically, his weight.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Gore cannot run for national office until he drops some pounds, as he did in 2000.  In addition to being shocked that this topic would even come up in the wake of the seriousness of An Inconvenient Truth, I was also struck by how those critics (and Democratic consultants, including, not surprisingly, Donna Brazile,) don't have a clue as to how people respond to image in politics.
Let's assume Gore jumps into the race (as I certainly hope he will.) If I were advising him (not that he needs to get into the habit of listening to advisers, as that's a big part of what did him in in '00,) I would tell him not to lose too much weight. Right now, Gore looks avuncular. And, for a Democratic presidential candidate, avuncular is a GOOD THING!!!! Remember how the Rove smear machine was able to portray Kerry and Edwards as effeminate sissies (all those stupid jokes about them being gay because they hugged so much) partially because of their physical presentations? Kerry was slim, overly well-groomed, and was caught on film windsurfing. (The fact that he was from the state that had just legalized gay marriage, and that the Democratic National Convention was held there, to boot, certainly didn't help matters as far as this image was concerned.) The meme of Edwards-the-prettyboy is still alive and well today-- major political web sites and news programs have made reference to the very popular YouTube video that shows Edwards scrutinizing over his hair before going on TV (and whoever posted it on YouTube accompanied it with the theme music "I Feel Pretty.") An overly-attractive, too-well-groomed candidate reinforces the right wing smear machine's portrayal of Democrats as weak, effeminate sissies.

Obama has introduced legislation that sets US withdrawal from Iraq by March 31, 2008.

This certainly makes Obama the leader in US Iraq policy among the Democratic candidtates.

1. The only candidate to get Iraq right.

2. The only candidate to set a firm timetable for US Iraq withdrawal.

"The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close," Obama said in his speech. "It is time for us to fundamentally change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back."

In 1968, Richard Nixon committed the Republican Party to the Southern Strategy.  This has worked brilliantly on the electoral college level.  In both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush received every electoral vote from the 13 southern states (Kentucky, West Virginia, and the 11 states of the Confederacy), 162 in 2004.  The Nixonian ploy,was to use coded or veiled racism to induce the south's traditionally conservative white voters to abandon their traditional allegiance to the Dwemocratic Party and join a center-right coalition of national Republicans.  This conversion took longer on the legislative level.  The region's House delegation didn't swing Republican until 1994 (moving the House nationally into the Republican column).  In 2004, five southern Senate seats swung Republican giving the GOP firm control of that body for a brief time.

Nixon's southern strategy was far different (and more subtle) than George W. Bush's and Karl Rove's version.  Republicans remained competitive in the northeast and Great Lakes states and ran strongly in California.  The South was not running the show.  Party power brokers generally came from the Midwest (like Gerald Ford, Bob Michel, Everett Dirksen and Bob Dole).  The "religion" was Billy Graham and not Jerry Falwell.  Even Southern Republicans like Howard Baker fit more neatly into a national mold.

Nixon's aim to add southern white voters, traditional conservatives, to the center rightgroup of traditional Republicans succeeded.  That success has done more than give a temporary edge in the electoral college to national Republicans.  It has transformed the face and nature of Republicanism at the gain of only a partial payout.

According to politics1.com, Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) will run for reelection in 2008.

Stevens, who will be 86, will be running for his seventh full term in the Senate.  Having been appointed in 1968, he's the most senior Republican in the Senate.  Domenici, first elected in 1972, will also be running for his seventh term.  Domenici will be 76 in 2008.

Domenici's decision to run for reelection likely takes one potential pickup off the table for 2008.  With Domenici out, Democrats would have had a legitimate shot at taking a Senate seat in a true bellwether state (since statehood in 1912, New Mexico has voted for every Presidential popular vote winner except Jimmy Carter in 1976.)  While we wouldn't have a great chance of winning an open seat in Alaska, it's a better shot than we have against Stevens, who is as safe as they come.

So write off Alaska and New Mexico -- but we should still be good to hold the Senate.