Super Tuesday Night and Wednesday Morning

I only managed to make it to halftime of the Superbowl, but I’m going to try to last through at least a few Super-Tuesday results. (So if you follow this blog to read my opinions on subjects about which I actually know anything, you’ll just have to wait until a future post. And/or you can follow my even less scientific rambling, nattering chatter on Twitter — if it’s good enough for the NY Times, it’s good enough for me.)

I’m still registered to vote in California, so I mailed my absentee ballot about a week ago — I’ll never know if they even bother to open it. Just today, wistfully thinking of the millions of my fellow Americans in their voting booths, I learned that I could have voted online as part of a “global primary”, eschewing paper ballots, chads, and the lovely mechanical voting machines of my youth.

Obama is a fantastic speaker, and the symbolism of a black President Obama might actually remind people in the USA and, equally importantly, around the world, that American ideals still resonate even as America’s hegemony starts to seem less inevitable. He’s inspiring, but, change-laden rhetoric aside, Clinton’s the more classic liberal, and I’d like to think that policy matters in the end. For example, her health plan would actually at least try to cover everyone in the country.

Here in the UK, it’s been easy to follow the election news: local outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC are unashamed to devote significant space and time to the USA, and I’ve become a devotee of podcast versions of America’s Sunday morning politics shows. Sometimes, the talking heads get too much to take, especially when scary left-right politico power-couple Mary Matalin and James Carville talk too much, and I’ve started turning to Steve Gillmor’s Newsgang, an unexpectedly compelling spinoff of Gillmor’s usual tech-oriented podcast, featuring former members of the Firesign Theatre, the usual posse of tech pundits, and even the occasional political expert. They almost made me wish I had voted for Obama…