Illinois votes

By Aziz P. -
It looks like CNN has stopped updating the delegate scorecard, which suggests that the impact of further delegates being assigned will indeed be significantly lessened. However, despte not really earning any additional delegates after Vermont, I think that the delegate campaign did have one success in that Kerry has clearly decided to try and utilize Dean as a visible spokesperson and part of the campaign - as Dean demonstrated on MTP on Sunday, he's good at it. Notably absent are Gephardt and Lieberman from similar roles, which means that the Dean movement retains it's influence. Tomorrow the focus will shift to the new organization, so I feel confident in finally dropping the active mantle of the delegate campaign.

One major event yesterday though was the primary victory of Illinois state Senator Barack Obama . Obama is an incredible candidate and will be one to watch. He makes for a natural Dean ally and I hope that Dean is able to assist him in winning the seat at stake in my original home state of IL. There's an excellent biography of Obama from the Washington Post that is a must-read - the man is an inspiring and principled candidate for office and he is exactly the kind of politician that can meet the raised bar of expectations of the Dean movement.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming...
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali...
Read more