Who do you think will become president of the united states?

[Elok]

TBH, I'm not bothered much about it at this point. Whichever of the three serious contenders wins, s/he will be a massive improvement over W. Huckabee is the only one who seemed to be as bad or worse than our current dud. As long as we're headed up, I'm happy. I don't trust my judgment enough to say for sure whether Obama's brains will compensate for his inexperience, or if McCain will handle the Iraq mess at all reasonably. But things are looking up in general.

Personally I'm inclined to favor McCain just a liiiittle bit. I don't like the idea of continuing the Iraq war, but we seem honor-bound to clean up our own mess, and he might actually be able to root out the worst abuses. Plus he seems more honest than Clinton and certainly more experienced than Obama.

[rah]

My original thoughts were that as long as the Dems nominated someone that didn't piss off a lot of people they'd win by a landslide. Now I believe it will be a close contest. Not too smart in my books. Why do they keep giving the REPUGS a chance?

Especially now with McCain zoned in, he can keep sending a positive message and just beat on the DEM candidates while the DEM candidates are beating up on each other.

This election should have been a done deal.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Elok
Personally I'm inclined to favor McCain just a liiiittle bit. I don't like the idea of continuing the Iraq war, but we seem honor-bound to clean up our own mess, and he might actually be able to root out the worst abuses.

If anything we are honor-bound to abide by the wishes of the Iraqi people and leave.

[rah]

It all depends on which Iraqi people we listen too. There are quite a few that wish us to stay for awhile.
Since there's never been a real vote that just asked that question, I don't think we actually know what the majority want. To assume otherwise is just a personal bias.

[Elok]

I don't know what the right thing to do in Iraq is, but I'm not convinced that we're powerless to help them, and we've screwed them over pretty badly. We have to at least try to fix things in some way, not just pull out completely and let it all go to hell.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Elok
TBH, I'm not bothered much about it at this point. Whichever of the three serious contenders wins, s/he will be a massive improvement over W.

True.

Huckabee is the only one who seemed to be as bad or worse than our current dud.

And Giuliani?

[Elok]

Forgot about Giuliani. I've heard nasty things about him, but I never really thought of him as a serious contender so I didn't bother to look into them. "Hey, I was a big man on one day seven years ago, appoint me to run the country" just sounds too ludicrous. Others have even less executive experience, but they're not trying to run on leftover glory from way-back-when. He did well at first, but so did Fred Thompson.

I guess Huckabee might be eliminated by the same logic, but it's at least vaguely plausible that he get elected due to the power of the bible-thumper bloc combined with the power of rash populism. But we're not living in the shadow of 9/11 anymore, we're living in the shadows we created to escape the shadow of 9/11. We need a president who can appeal, however dysfunctionally, to current bogeymen.