I decided to go to the district polling station before it opened to-day, in the hope of avoiding a line. My thinking was that, while I would be waiting for it to open, I would spend less time in line, for a net savings. In the event, there was already a significant line when I got there, but the line grew dramatically behind me. I might have reälized more savings had I got there five or ten minutes still sooner. On the other hand, there may be times later to-day when the line is much shorter (yet before the polls close).

As per my previous declarations, I did not vote in the Presidential election. I remain persuaded that none of the candidates was adequate to hold so much power. I am convinced that the next President is going to prove a very great fool or a very great knave or quite likely both, and that the next two or more years are just going to be a rolling disaster.

It bothers me that some of my friends have become so obsessed with the inadequacy of one of the two major party Presidential candidates that they seem to have quite lost sight of just how inadequate a President the other man can be expected to be.

There is no good choice on the ballot, and I expect greater national despair by the next mid-term elections. (We'll see whether, at the time of the next Presidential election, the other party, whichever it may be, offers a better candidate then, or decides that, in the context of their rivals' failure, they can push the envelope of opportunism, of lunacy, or of both.)

The media is buzzing with the meme that Barack Obama has chosen or is on the cusp of choosing his Vice-Presidential running-mate.

I think that Obama has taken far longer than was in his interest to make this choice. Although it developed that there would be a second-choice advantage for the two major-party Presidential candidates in their selection of running-mates, each had to make a selection before or during their respective conventions, and the Democrats had already scheduled their convention before that of the Republicans. While there may have been some tiny hope that the McCain camp would toss-away the advantage, the principal effect of Obama's delay has been to allow Hillary Clinton to hold onto attention that would otherwise have gone to his choice of running mate (on the assumption that it were not her). And the Clintons plan to exploit the Convention as much as possible for their own aggrandizement, not-withstanding the costs to the Obama campaign in particular and to the Democratic Party more generally.

Hillary Clinton might be Obama's running-mate. Certainly, if he delays until the convention is under-way, the Clintons will do everything in their power to make it seem as if she has a sort of right to that spot. But Obama will look even more like Just Another Politician if he selects her. Perhaps the buzz about him nearing announcement of a running-mate comes from an awareness on the part of his camp that he needs to head-off the convention.

He has been encouraged to select a Yeehaw as a running-mate, the notion being that this would balance the ticket; I think that it would be a major mistake. A integral aspect of Obama's appeal is that he's not a Yeehaw.

Part of the reason that the Democrats have been comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy is that they want to look past the last three Democratic Presidents — Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a sort of forced nostalgia for Bill Clinton, but once Obama came over the horizon, Democrats became more willing to look critically at Clinton and at his Presidency; Jimmy Carter was an even more incompetent than is the current President; and Johnson is largely remembered for the Viet-Nam War. Looking past those Presidents to Kennedy is looking past three Yeehaws (the most distant a Cowboy-Yeehaw) to a Yankee. It doesn't do much good to point-out that Kennedy chose a Yeehaw as his running-mate, 'cause that running-mate was Johnson, later one of the Democratic Presidents past whom these Democrats now want to look. And the highest profile Democrat Yeehaw under some consideration this time was John (Epic Fail) Edwards.

Meanwhile, for the last 14 or more years, the public faces of the Republicans have been largely Yeehaws — men such as Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and of course G.W. Bush. (Karl Rove is arguably a faux Yeehaw, but he manages to sound like one.) Democrats are alienated from these Yeehaws because they are Republicans, and Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are alienated from these figures because by a great many measures they have been very great failures. When Republicans look back, it is to Reagan, a man who liked to play the Cowboy, but who was raised in the Midwest and rose to importance in California.

As far as balancing the ticket goes, Obama isn't in a great spot. While many Yeehaws really themselves don't want a Yeehaw, they also don't want their nose rubbed in the political mess. Obama might do best to choose a Cowboy, as Yeehaws tend to blur the distinction (hence, for example, the conflation of American country music with that of the Old West), though the rest of the country doesn't place Montana or Arizona in the South.

McCain, who has long positioned himself as a Cowboy, can more easily balance his ticket. Regionally, he can choose a Yankee or a Yankee-Midwesterner. He probably shouldn't choose a plain-vanilla Midwesterner, as then his ticket will be mocked as white-bread.

All right, now:

• If Edwards is not the father and ended the affair in 2006, then why did he surreptitiously visit Ms Hunter subsequently?
• If Edwards is not the father, then why did he feel the need to publicly admit to the affair, since his supporters and the mainstream media would have taken a negative paternity test for him (or a positive test for Mr Young) as pulling the rug from under the more general claim of an affair?

I think that Edwards is telling the truth slowly, which is to say that he has planned to admit to the affair and to paternity, but is now deliberately doing so in stages. I don't know how coherently he had previously thought about what he would do, but my guess is that at various times he has told himself that the affair and paternity could be indefinitely concealed, that they could be revealed after his wife dies, or that they could be revealed after he'd achieved greater acclaim in the office of President, of Vice President, or of Attorney General.

Meanwhile, spare a tear for Chet Edwards; his chances of being chosen as running-mate have been gravely injured simply because Obama will understand that there are a fair number of people who would confuse Chet Edwards with the guy who had that affair. (Obama would have been foolish to choose Chet Edwards in any case, but he might have been foolish.)

Year	Winner		Runner-Up
	Name	Affiliation	Name	Affiliation
1948	Truman	Yeehaw-Midwesterner	Dewey	Yankee
1952	Eisenhower	Midwesterner	Stevenson	Yankee-Midwesterner
1956	Eisenhower	Midwesterner	Stevenson	Yankee-Midwesterner
1960	Kennedy	Yankee	Nixon	Californian
1964	Johnson	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Goldwater	Cowboy
1968	Nixon	Californian	Humphrey	Yankee-Midwesterner
1972	Nixon	Californian	McGovern	Yankee-Midwesterner
1976	Carter	Yeehaw	Ford	Midwesterner
1980	Reagan	Faux-Cowboy Midwesterner-Californian	Carter	Yeehaw
1984	Reagan	Faux-Cowboy Midwesterner-Californian	Mondale	Yankee-Midwesterner
1988	Bush, GHW	Wannabe-Cowboy-Yeehaw Yankee	Dukakis	Yankee
1992	Clinton	Yeehaw	Bush, GHW	Wannabe-Cowboy-Yeehaw Yankee
1996	Clinton	Yeehaw	Dole	Midwesterner
2000	Bush, GW	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Gore	Faux-Yankee Yeehaw
2004	Bush, GW	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Kerry	Yankee

McCain has chosen to be a Cowboy, and Obama a Yankee-Midwesterner, though neither of them seems to have been raised thus. Nancy Pelosi is pressing Obama to accept a Cowboy-Yeehaw as running-mate.

Very simply, Bill Clinton felt that he and Hillary were entitled to be treated by the mainstream media as the media generally treat… uhm, Democrats. Instead, the mainstream media treated Barack Obama as they do Democrats, and treated the Clintons as they do… Republicans. Bill Clinton's conviction that Obama's campaign was able to foment charges of racism speaks to the relationship that has long existed between the Democrats and the mainstream media, through which the Republicans haven't been able to do much fomenting in the last half-century. (Republicans have only been able to foment by way of alternate channels, such as talk radio, Fox News, and the right-wing 'blogosphere.)

In a protected entry, an LJ Friend linked to Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com a couple of days ago. She didn't give her own assessment of the article, beyond saying that it was interesting. I've decided to make a few comments on it.

The principal thesis of the article seems to be that a significant source of support for Obama amongst social democratic (progressive) males is really founded in sexism. Now, I've seen plenty of hypocrisy amongst social democrats, but consider that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975 and their Prime Minister in 1979, and served until 1990. Do we really want to even suggest that sexism is going to be more of a determinant amongst Democratic voters in 2008 than it was amongst British Conservative voters in 1975, or than it was amongst Britons more generally in 1979?

There are a few revealing passages in the article that I think merit special attention:

Valenti continued, Because their friends were not being specifically sexist, or saying something that was tangibly misogynistic, they were having a hard time talking about the sexism of it. Valenti confirmed that this Feminine Mystique-y problem that has no name was familiar to her. I spoke to a guy friend who said, You're being ridiculous. I'm not not voting for her because she's a woman; I'm not voting for her because she's a bitch! He could not see the connection between the two things at all. Valenti said he explained away his comment by declaring, I mean a bitch in the sense that she's not good on this or that issue.

People use the word bitch to mean a number of things. But when Hillary's opponents call her a bitch, they don't typically mean that she is tough in a way with a peculiarly significant relationship to her sex (distinctive or inappropriate); they instead mean that she is sanctimonious, hypocritical, and vicious. (If you want a clear sense of these perceptions, then read The Tall Tale of Tuzla by Christopher Hitchens in Slate or the milder A Hillary Clinton Presidency by Carl Bernstein at CNN.)

A couple of paragraphs later,

Valenti continued, I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know. When it comes to feminism, she continued, so much proof is required to convince someone that sexism exists, even when it's explicit and outrageous. So when it's subdued or subtle, you don't want to talk about it.

Note the epistemology here. She cannot produce any evidence, but she's insisting that the attitude of these men must be sexist. And she acts as if the reluctance of some people to accept even the plainest of evidence is an excuse for making a charge with no evidence. I would suggest that if Ms Valenti perceives a difference of opinion whose cause must be sexism, and she cannot produce evidence of sexism on one side, then perhaps she ought to be looking for it on the other side.

The article is very right about one thing: A great many social democrats — and a great many people who are not social democrats — have developed unreasonable expectations for Obama:

You already see this idealistic longing projected on Obama, Bruch said. People talk about him as a secular messiah who will bring us political salvation. There's no sense of what is plausible.

Unless McCain makes missteps extraordinary even for a Republican, he will win the general election. And the sorts of domestic programmes and foreign policy that Obama has been advocating would bear very bitter fruit, in some cases very quickly, causing the nation to lurch to the political right.

I can offer a few theories as to why Ralph Nader has announced that he will once again run for President.

The first, and that to which I subscribe, is that he takes some sort of perverse pleasure in functioning as a spoiler. Whatever were his intentions in 2000, he was a spoiler for Gore, which resulted in the election of George Walker Bush. Nader had less of a chance to spoil things for the Democrats in 2004, and certainly less of a chance to move the Democratic Party to the political left, but he could and did spoil things for the Green Party, destroying them by running against their candidate. In 2008, Nader doesn't have a good chance of spoiling things for the Democratic nominee, but it's better than were his chances in 2004; McCain is not as loathed by the left as was Bush.

An alternate theory would be that Nader is trying to give Obama some center cred, on the presumption that Obama will indeed be the nominee. Seeking first the nomination of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Obama have each positioned themselves significantly to the left of where the last successful Democratic Presidential nominee, William Jefferson Clinton, did when he was running. McCain is a war-hawk, and a conservative on some issues, but he is a centrist or even to the left of center on other issues. To win the election, the Democratic nominee will have to seem more centrist than presently does Obama or Hillary Clinton. On top of some rhetorical restyling by the candidate, it could help if Nader provided apparent contrast.

Of course, Nader is more likely to function as a spoiler if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, because she has at times been a war-hawk, and there is less expectation that she would withdraw troops aggressively from Iraq than that Obama would do this. So it is possible that Nader has announced when he has in order to further weaken the Clinton campaign. In that case, we have Nader acting as a spoiler of some sort for Clinton (and possibly for the Democratic Party), and positioning himself to make Obama look more centrist should he gain the nomination.