Apologies for my absence

Alas, I have been away from writing for too long, but work, that “real” work that allows me to pay the mortgage and other bills, has been too busy the past few weeks. However, I should be facing a welcome lull for a bit, so I promise to get back to you, dear readers, with the various thoughts I’ve put off blogging about for these past weeks.

Here are a couple of quick notes, first political, then spiritual (or at least quasi-spiritual):

Clinton was within a few points of Obama in the most recent Wisconsin polls, yet Obama won the state by 17 points. That’s an enormous butt-kicking (and no, I’m not implying anything about the size of Hillary’s posterior), and it also shows the continued predilection of the pollsters to be utterly confounded this year. Next up, March 4 featuring Texas and Ohio. The polls (for what they’re worth) are already showing Obama inching close to Clinton in Texas, and the system there seems to favor him, as 2/3 of the delegates are chosen in a day-long primary, while the other 1/3 are chosen in evening caucuses. Yes, as a Democrat in Texas you really can vote early and vote often.

Apparently while I wasn’t looking, some of my prior commentary found its way into the letters section of the Wall Street Journal. Check out this missive to see my name in print, and thanks to my spouse’s Aunt Nancy and her husband Rex for bringing this to my attention (yes, I really wasn’t aware I got in).

One of my spouse’s mentors/gurus said recently that she believes we’re on the cusp of entering a new era, that the vibrational energies of the universe are all a-twitter in anticipation of some significant breakthrough. Yes, said mentor/guru is into what we like to call that “woo-woo” spirituality, but she’s not completely wacky and is usually quite prescient. More on that idea later.

I’ve taken up vegetarianism for my Lenten discipline this year, and let me tell you, it can make eating out bloody well impossible. I’ve only had to completely transgress once so far (not that I complained much about the she-crab soup and the seared ahi tuna), but I’ve been surprised to realize just how meat-centric even the less traditional restaurants can be. Oh, and don’t worry, you can serve me whatever you want if you invite me over for dinner – that’s one of my caveat rules: Graciously eat whatever your host puts before you.

More anon, especially on the idea of the universe’s vibrational energies shifting.

Political potpourri

Having a few varied comments on the current state of political events, I thought I’d use this entry to share those random thoughts.

Issue #1: Politicus interruptus

The past two weeks have seen a bevy of withdrawals from the Presidential race. Fred Thompson’s was not particularly surprising, after his dismal showing in South Carolina. Rudy Giuliani’s was a little more surprising, if only for the heights from which he had fallen earlier in the campaign - remember when he was the inevitable front-runner, and prognosticators (including yours truly) expected him to roll to the GOP nomination? His endorsement of John McCain could be somewhat helpful, but I don’t think that brings a huge block of voters to McCain who would have otherwise supported one of his remaining opponents. And I would be remiss if I didn’t note Dennis Kucinich’s withdrawal. So there, it’s noted.

Perhaps the most surprising was the sudden announcement yesterday by John Edwards that he would be suspending his Presidential campaign. Now that word “suspending” is a bit of legal jargon, and I believe he used it rather than “withdrawing” or “abandoning” so that he can continue to receive federal matching funds for the quarter and pay any outstanding debts. I think he does plan to release his delegates, however.

Edwards’ withdrawal surprised me because I expected him to continue on to the convention, collecting delegates here and there in an effort to become a powerbroker at a split convention. Now that he’s out, that leaves only two candidates, but surprisingly that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will have a clear winner by the time of the convention. Why? Because on the Democratic side, there are a whole bunch of “superdelegates” chosen not by the electorate but by virtue of their standing in the Party. These superdelegates can vote for whomever they choose, even if they’ve “pledged” themselves to one candidate ahead of time.

I can now invite my friends and readers who have been ardent Edwards supporters to come over and join me in backing Barack Obama. Edwards did not endorse either of the remaining candidates in his withdrawal speech. Would his endorsement make a big difference? Perhaps, but perhaps not. It might help Obama more than it would Clinton, because of Edwards’ strength with labor unions. In this regard, Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama earlier this week might have as much influence as Edwards’ would. Which brings me to…

Issue #2: Whither the Gore-acle?

If there is one political luminary out there whose endorsement would actually make a measurable impact on the race, I think it’s Al Gore. He has stayed out of the fray so far, and despite the pipe dreams of many Dems, I don’t think he’s waiting around to be chosen by acclamation at a brokered convention. What if Gore threw his support behind one of the two remaining candidates before next Tuesday? Given his demiurge status in the Party after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I have to think he could wield some influence. Much has been made of the acrimony between Gore and the Clintons, and it seems unlikely that he would endorse Hillary. That leaves Obama as Gore’s potential endorsee. How would Obama benefit from a Gore endorsement? I think Gore’s endorsement could sway some undecided voters, but more importantly I think it could firm up support about those who are leaning toward Obama but have lingering doubts. If Gore is going to make an endorsement, however, he needs to do so very quickly – announcing over the weekend wouldn’t have the same impact on the news cycle as would a weekday announcement.

Issue #3: Fantasy debate lines

The two remaining Democratic candidates, Clinton and Obama, have a head-to-head (I’m resisting using the phrase mano-a-mano) debate in California tonight, to be broadcast on CNN. Chances are that some of the exchanges will get a little testy, as it’s the last chance for either one to score rhetorical points in this setting before Super-Duper-Tsunami Tuesday.

If I were scripting a fantasy debate, I’d have the following tongue in cheek paragraph ready to go for Obama in response to any question that even remotely brings up the issue of Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign or in a future Clinton Administration:

This is a question that many Americans want the answer to: What role will Bill Clinton play in a Hillary Clinton Administration? With all that time on his hands, what will he have his hands in? Will he be involved in foreign affairs? Will he be involved in domestic affairs? Will he be involved in internal affairs? The voters deserve to know – what affairs will Bill get himself involved in if Hillary is President?

Alas, Obama will probably not go down that road, but it sure would be fun to see if Hillary could control herself if he did.

Is it vacation time yet?

I have tried to craft my work schedule in the model of Travis McGee, the star of 21 wise and entertaining novels by the late John D. MacDonald. McGee was a self-styled “salvage consultant” who lived in Fort Lauderdale (mostly) on a 52-foot barge-style houseboat won in a poker game (thus the vessel’s name, The Busted Flush). He was part old-school private detective, part knight errant, part philosopher, and part gin connoisseur.

McGee’s central work philosophy was to not save retirement for the end of his life, but rather to enjoy it in six-month (or thereabout) chunks throughout his life. On the flip side of the famous quote, “Youth is wasted on the young” (one of those quotes attributed to George Bernard Shaw but one for which I cannot find a solid reference), McGee apparently believed that retirement was wasted on those too old to fully enjoy themselves in it.

My work schedule can be like that at times, although I have yet to accumulate enough revenues or freedom from worrying about revenues to take a six-month break. I do, however, seek to minimize the duration of any given period of “real work”, preferring to take it in short bursts rather than in an extended, measured, balanced period. And yes, in college and grad school I was one of those students who would write papers the day (or night) before they were due, procrastinating throughout the semester and cramming for tests at the end. So far this approach hasn’t caused too much trouble for me, so I continue it out of inertia or habit.

Also, I really do like the idea of taking retirement now, rather than having to wait until I’m 65 or 70. Perhaps you might ascribe that to my reluctance to embrace delayed gratification; so be it. I prefer to think of it in Travis McGee’s terms, realizing that now is a better time for me to enjoy the pleasures of retirement rather than waiting until the end of my lifetime.

At the moment and for the next few weeks, I will be in one of those intense work times. My “day job” - what I “do for a living” – my “professional career” – is acceptable as such things go, but it is clearly not my passion-filled raison d’etre. That’s not as much of a problem when I’m only doing it on a half-time basis, but it does become a little more troublesome when I wake up early in the morning with several work-related thoughts and ideas bouncing around in my head and feel compelled to get up and work on spreadsheets detailing alternative scenarios for an upcoming trial in which I’m to be an expert witness rather than stay in a comfortably warm bed with my spouse and my cats. (OK, so the cats would wake me up to be fed pretty soon anyway; at least I could get back into bed after filling their food dishes.)

It’s at times like these that I reassure myself with Travis McGee’s philosophy of retirement as lifelong pursuit. And I suppose when I think about it with perspective, I am pretty fortunate to have been able to create that kind of work environment for myself.

I wouldn’t have arrived here without having taken some serious risks, though. I walked out the door of my previous job in April 2001, and I along with a colleague from there formed our own business. Had we known what the economy would be like in a few months, after September 11, we probably would have considered our new venture to be particularly ill timed. But we trudged onward, and in my household we got by on a blend of inexpensive food and cheap wine and credit card debt. Now that I can afford somewhat better wine and am paying down credit card debts, I can look back on those risks I took and realize that they really were worth it.

What about you? Are you stuck in a 9 to 5 (or worse) job that you feel is draining your soul? Do you define yourself by what you do, even when what you do isn’t who you want to be? Or have you found your life’s calling and are ardently fulfilling your vocation in your career? Or, alternatively, are you like me, realizing that your job is but a means to an end, working when absolutely necessary and structuring the rest of your life to live out your truer vocation? Wherever you are, I would encourage you to consider that now is the time to make the move you’ve been delaying. Follow your bliss, carpe diem, fortes fortuna adiuvat, and some other Latin phrases I can’t recall right now. Or, if you’d prefer a lyricist more contemporary than Virgil, try out this familiar U2 refrain:

You've got to get yourself together
You've got stuck in a moment and you can't get out of
Don't say that later will be better
Now you're stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it

Comments solicited – how have you managed to craft your life along these lines, or how are you frustrated in your inability to do so just yet?

More election stuff

For a great endorsement article bridging the generations, look at this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27kennedy.html

And if you want an inspiring speech, here's Obama's victory speech in South Carolina:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/CGxdg

Enjoy!

Clinton & Clinton’s stratagem

Identity politics has once again reared its ugly head in the Democratic Party. Wikipedia defines this concept as follows:

Identity politics is political action to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, gender, or orientation). The term has been used principally in United States politics since the 1970s.

Normally, one particular identity group (women, African-Americans, Hispanics, LGBT) rallies support to its cause by appealing to others of similar perceived identity. I say “perceived” advisedly, because this really is all about perceptions. There’s rarely one single issue, stance, or position that is universally shared by all blacks, women, gays, etc. However, this can be a very useful paradigm if you want to rally people to your side by persuading them that you’re on their side. [I’m reminded of the politicking scenes in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, when the competing politicians both campaigned as being on the side of the “little man” by having midgets on the campaign stage with them. But I digress.]

In the current Democratic Presidential race, however, the team of Clinton and Clinton has begun to inject identity politics with a nasty little twist. Here’s my analysis of what’s been going on the past couple of weeks, as race has become an issue in the campaign, and the leading candidates have been sniping back and forth about the legacy of MLK and other pseudo-issues.

Somewhere along the way, Hillary’s strategists realized that she could still outpoll Obama among women. I’m guessing this happened soon after she teared up in New Hampshire and subsequently surprised observers with a win in that primary thanks to an outpouring of support from women voters. At that point the Clinton campaign figured out that there are more women voters than black voters (even in the Democratic primaries), and if they could cast the election in terms of the “woman candidate” versus the “black candidate”, they’d have a larger natural base than Obama. So they sent out their surrogates (including the Surrogate-in-Chief, Bubba himself) to stir the race pot a bit, letting little innuendos and whispers slip here and there.

Here’s the key part of their stratagem: They didn’t care if Hillary got some negative backlash over the race issue, because in the end their bet was still that they could win the “women v. blacks” fight, especially if they could achieve some separation between the perceived African-American “identity group” and the perceived “Hispanic” identity group (which is how Nevada went down, essentially). They are more than willing to lose South Carolina, which has a huge black electorate in the Democratic primary, because their real target is the set of primaries on Super/Tsunami Tuesday.

And here’s the pitfall for the Obama campaign: If he engages Clinton on these issues of race, he loses the war even if he wins the battle. As long as Clinton can frame the debate in terms of herself as the “woman candidate” and Obama as the “black candidate”, she wins. The only way for Obama to defeat this strategy is to return to his original message, as he’s spoken about so often – only in this case, it’s his political opponents rather than the pundits who are trying to “slice and dice” the electorate into red states and blue states, women voters and black voters and Hispanic voters. Obama needs to transcend the entire issue and remind the Democratic voters that there isn’t a female Democratic Party and a male Democratic Party, a black Democratic Party and a white Democratic Party and a Hispanic Democratic Party, but that there is a united Democratic Party. As long as he allows Clinton & Clinton to play the cards of identity politics, he’s going to get a losing hand.