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I've been slow making up my mind this year:
Dennis's positions have as usual been very good, but also as usual I question both his ability to win and his ability to govern effectively even if he did win (not that I wouldn't take that in a millisecond over what we have now, of course). My feelings about Mike Gravel are similar, but my acquaintance with him is much more limited (love his YouTube videos, though).
I was lucky enough to meet Edwards in a small, informal setting last month and found him far more relaxed than he seemed in 2004, with solidly progressive stances across the board. This does not appear to be the same John Edwards as the freshman Senator who got bamboozled by Bush 5+ years ago into supporting the Patriot Act and Iraq War Resolution (I'm willing to give him a pass for his October, 2004 expression of support for the latter, which he has since repudiated: as Kerry's running mate, what else could he say?), nor the bland-and-slick freshman presidential candidate of 4 years ago: like Al Gore since Y2K, he seems to have found his real voice, and given his former profession as an effective courtroom advocate for the weak against the strong it's at least somewhat believable. His position on Iraq (immediate draw-down of 50,000 combat troops with all the rest gone within well under a year, leaving a military presence only sufficient to protect the embassy) seems acceptable, and while I lean toward a single-payer solution for health care his proposal includes a guaranteed universal expansion of Medicare as a reasonable-cost *option* which would effectively become single-payer if enough people chose it rather than conventional insurers (and it has the potential benefit of keeping both the insurers *and* the government program on their toes by having them compete against each other, not to mention being far less susceptible to charges of "Socialized medicine!" from the right than a direct move to single-payer would be). And of course it doesn't hurt (IMO) that Nader considers him the only front-runner who might be sufficiently progressive for him to support.
I braved yet another early snowstorm to hear Obama speak last Thursday evening and (to my surprise and regret) came away unimpressed. He's bright, articulate, personable, a good communicator, and has a great resume, but while he's superficially progressive on most issues he just doesn't seem to have all that much depth (not that vast amounts of detail in stump speeches is all that common, but leaving such a speech feeling pretty much empty is not satisfying) - his ill-advised (though perhaps since reconsidered) support for liquefied coal being perhaps one case in point. He seemed in some ways to be channeling the form of Howard Dean's buoyantly populist 2003 campaign but without most of its substance.
But then came the point where he announced his intention to ensure that America's military might remained the greatest in world history - which clearly means at least as great as it is today. This significantly transcends the typical "I'm no dove!" rhetoric that Democrats seem to feel compelled to include these days: it's an unequivocal assertion that even after the demise of the Cold War stand-off we need to spend more than the rest of the world combined to maintain a military establishment sufficient for world domination, when if anything the past few years have conclusively demonstrated that *we can't be trusted* with that level of military might and that both we and the rest of the world would be far better off if we had to find ways to achieve consensus rather than impose our own will. He did give diplomacy a nod soon thereafter, but by saying we needed it *also* rather than to ensure that use of force (or even threats of force) was an absolutely last resort limited to the truly extreme circumstances that (for example) Edwards clearly specifies in his discussion of the matter on his Web site. He seems to have little problem with the idea of U.S. world domination as long as it's what he'd consider to be *benevolent* domination - which sounds more like a kinder, gentler neocon than like the kind of president that I'm looking for.
Later he mentioned that his primary concern with the Iraq war was the level of U.S. military deaths (followed a bit thereafter by commenting that a significant additional concern was the $9 billion per month price tag). With Iraqi deaths running several hundred times the U.S. body count and that country's infrastructure falling apart, this seems a staggeringly insensitive and/or parochial view.
I came away with the impression that he's probably a decent man who lacks the depth to guide him through the really tough decisions that a president is sometimes called upon to make - and the humility to seek sufficient counsel to make up for that lack should such circumstances arise.
The rest of the field is just way too corporate/beltway for my taste - even Richardson, whom I was at least willing to give a chance. So I guess it's Edwards for me both from the head and from the heart, though I wish his NH poll standings were better.
- bill
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