Inside Chris’s Head

I had sent out a twitter message this morning saying:

“Is it cynical of me to characterize the election as choosing between hope (with no specifics) over fear (with no answers)?”

It looks like other’s had that a similar thought today. From Seth Godin’s blog:

It’s too easy to criticize hope

And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.

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If you have been paying attention to the Democratic primaries you may have noticed that Barak Obama has to date won more delegates in the various primaries and caucuses than has Hillary Clinton. So you might be surprised that as of today Obama has 158 delegates and Clinton has 232. What? How can that be? The answer is “super delegates”.

In 1972 George McGovern lost in a landslide election tot Richard Nixon. In response to that the Democratic party changed the nomination process so that 842 delegates in 2008 will not be chosen by voters but instead by party leaders.

This surprisingly undemocratic process was created to prevent a candidate from being nominated who is out of sync with the rest of the party. Either this process should be updated or perhaps the party needs to change its name. But “not quite democratic party” does not have a great ring.

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I had two very different reactions to this story:

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan’s thinness.But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” - listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old - they found the movie didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

ABC News: Al Gore YouTube Spoof Not So Amateurish

My first reaction was how sleasy, but my second was how funny and clever. I think all of those apply.

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If you heard that a Chinese maker of prophylactics had decided to market condoms named after a former U.S. president. Would you wonder which president they might have chosen? If you helps you to figure out which president, they are also naming a lower priced condom the Lewinsky.

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It was not that important at the time of the last presidential race and is obviously of less important now, but it is amusing after all the fuss that was made about the difference between Kerry and Bush in college at Yale, Kerry’s grades for Yale were finally released and they are pretty much the same as Bush’s. From The Boston Globe :

During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

Bush on the other hand did seem to have the better photographer. Ouch John, you should have burned that one.

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