Presidential Candidates Assessed

For the Democrats as far as a "good" politician goes, Kucinich is the only one I believe not out to make money for himself or corporations, although I disagree with him on almost all of his policy proposals. Still, honesty and integrity are very hard to come by in Presidential politics. Mrs.Clinton seems to have more personal agenda rather than policy agenda. While Mr. Clinton as President from 1993-2001 displayed surprising insight and vision in creating many of the really good things we experience now, Mrs. Clinton betrays extreme ambition with her statements. Personal ambition, as we have seen in over 220 years of Presidential politics, is usually wrapped in some base form of irrational populism, and that type of ambition has always proven a disaster for the people once the consequences of electing professional politicians with little policy experience to the position of chief magistrate of the nation.

On the Republican side, Paul is the only one with whom I agree on more than 1/5 of their views, voting and policy records, and statements of vision and philosophy. Paul will outlast McCain, and already has more money. While Paul might have some streak of naive faith in a power politics world, he does have the most optimism about the future of humanity. That future is rightly thought to be the destiny that only more individual liberty, based on the relative freedoms people can have opposed to their responsibility, is the one and only thing that will guarantee a peaceful and prosperous world someday.

On the other Republicans, the only credible ones from a public acceptability point of view are Romney, who hides a religious agenda behind polish (he is a professional politician, not a policy maker) and prove just another in an unending supply of corporo-fascists. Thompson, who if he ever really enters the race, is in the same mold as Cheney, Wolfowitz: He is a disciple of the American Enterprise Institute neo-conservative conspiracy against the Declaration of Ind. and the US Constitution.

The least bad of both parties, one who has fairly decent odds as an underdog (and someone I hope will surprise the experts) is Richardson. He has more policy making experience, despite being a sometime politician) than all of the rest of 20-odd candidates in both parties combined. He is honestly the only one qualified in the current field to be chief magistrate of the country. Even with him, I might agree with him probably only 1/5 of the time, but he might surprise skeptics who find more agreement as time goes onward. But Richardson’s experience and his record clearly say that is the most immediately prepared to address our most pressing need: Foreign Policy. Perhaps like Nixon, he can be the right foreign policy grand strategist at the most critical time since the early 70s. At that time, the liberals and even the paleo-conservatives were bent on surrendering the Cold War completely. Nixon used immense experience in foreign affairs as Congressman, Senator, Vice President, lawyer and world-traveling private citizen to seize a unique moment in history. One can only hope that Richardson could have the same grand perspective and a practical, pragmatic, original way of addressing foreign policy. This is a dire time in the entire international system since the post-Vietnam era. Unacknowledged to the general public, the peaceful cooperation on which world prosperity and individual liberty depends is disintegrating into a dangerous situation. If not Richardson, then someone with a similar policy making/political consensus building background and experience is needed the most for the next US President.