I commented over on Professor Tracey's blog Aunt Jemima's Revenge that the curse of the today's 24-hour news cycle is that 10 minutes worth of facts are often inflated to hours and hours of opinion positioned as gospel truth. Since the beginning of the 2008 election season, pundits have postulated that:
- Hillary Clinton is unbeatable.
- Rudy Giuliani is a top-tier candidate.
- White Americans, especially those in the flyover states, won't really vote for Barack Obama.
- Mike Huckabee is too corn pone and naive to garner Republican votes.
But last night, Barack Obama swept the Iowa caucus and John Edwards nudged Clinton out of the way to take second place. Mike Huckabee trounced all comers even Rudy Giuliani, who barely made a ripple in the political waters. So, now what?
I'll tell you my opinion: I think folks like me are tired of media telling us the outcome of elections before we have a chance to step into a voting booth. Media, in part, create top tier candidates by who they choose to cover and who they anoint as viable and electable.
If you are an eligible voter, first of all, register and vote. Secondly, ignore the pundits. Instead, get informed about your choices. Visit the candidates' Web sites. Submit questions to debates. Visit http://www.glassbooth.org/. Consume left-wing and right-wing media. Read political blogs, like SheCodes' Black Women Vote. Watch candidate interviews on Meet the Press. Gather all the information you can to help make your decision. Knowledge is power. And we get the government we deserve.
Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I support John Edwards. To learn more about his platform, click here.
2 comments:
Thanks for the shout out, Tami. And welcome to the WAOD sisterhood!
Good post Tami--I esp. like spelling out our civic duty to get educated about candidates and their platforms.
I also have to say that in doing a little blog surfing this morning before writing my own post, I started to come across some pretty nasty conservative stuff about Obama that was pretty racist. I think it's going to get worse leading into New Hampshire and Super Tuesday (sigh). The sexism stuff was always out there but this other stuff is relatively new, to my eyes (maybe it has been around on the conservative blogs for a while). The worse that people say about Edwards is that they think he's too pretty and call him a "silky pony" (whatever that means) but there's all sort's of stuff about Obama being a "dark" horse and riffing off of the Husein part and calling him a terrorist (sigh).
Why are people so mean???!!! I mean, you don't want to vote for the guy, don't vote for him, but there were even falafel jokes at his expense (which seemed both racist and bizarre).
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