I guess I admire Paul Hackett, the Iraq War veteran from Ohio who almost unseated his rival in one of the redder districts of Ohio, for both his moxie in fighting in a war he didn't believe in and his moxie in contesting a basically unwinnable district.
I guess my problem is I overwhelmingly fear the prospect of failure and death. But this is the sort of fear that paralyzes but does nothing to prevent those consequences. In the end the paralysis makes you a failure, and times passage kills you.
But I wasn't about to sign up myself, despite a reasonably able body and a capable if not entirely sound mind. I don't trust people all that well, but in particular I didn't trust George W. Bush.
Reagan has been described as enigmatic, perhaps unknowable, despite his significant charisma and charm, and I think George is similar. George's father was not like this. As a child, I could sense his discomfort on television. I think being telegenic is meaningful on some level. Modern TV politics is basically Coke vs. Pepsi- not in the sense that the parties are similar. They aren't. The Republican Party is significantly more evil.
Things that happen on the other side of the television aren't real. I got that when I was a toddler. Even when they tell the truth, they aren't real. GHW Bush, it seems to me, didn't have the horse sense to be unreal for the cameras, to slip into the same oblivion as we find on a soap opera.
I think this is why Howard Dean made so much sense to me, and why Bill Clinton, on some fundamental level, didn't. When I was first introduced to Dean I was really shocked. I had never seen a politician talk like that. It was kind of coarse and real and amateur. Not like hearing a well-then common-sense fave outside-the-beltway politican type do that irritating simulacrum of realness, the rhetorical equivalent of a geriatric Wal-Mart greeter (Is there some reason why these folks are always 85 or in wheelchairs and seemingly deserving of a peaceful retirement?). Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was that very kind of genuine. Only the insincere can truly persuade you of their sincerity, and though I thought he was a damn good president after an unbroken string over the previous decades of incompetents, radicals, dickweeds or some combination of above, he was undeniably slick.
The presidency in the US remains pretty imperial despite the corrective which should have come, in a big way, as a result of Watergate. And, you know, I have some faith in the American people, but not so much I expect them to see George W Bush and see the petty, slimy, self-impressed wimp I see instead of some great protector. (Has there been a historical figure outside of a totalitarian state who was lionized so far outside of what is credible? Those sages over at Powerline, without a hint of irony, just ascribed