I've been sitting here, thinking for a couple hours now, about something my friend Tony and Mrs. Havens said yesterday
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Mrs. Havens and I were talking about the McCain and Palin ticket, and how it didn't matter to her whether or not McCain chose a woman, a black man, a Native American hermaphrodite, a Yeti or an extraterrestrial to be his running mate, because all politicians are lying sons of bitches who never live up to their empty promises.
So I went back and looked at some of Bush's 2000 campaign promises...
Bush promised to restore honor and integrity (sometimes honor and dignity) to the White House.
Bush told us he was a uniter, not a divider.
Bush told us he would be a President for all the people, not just the ones who voted for him.
Bush promised big tax cuts.
He said he'd create new drug benefits for the elderly.
He said he'd overhaul Social Security.
He said he'd make a new commitment to public education.
Okay, some of us did get the tax cuts (I didn't). And we could argue the positives and negatives of No Child Left Behind. And he did push through the biggest expansion of Medicare since it's creation four decades earlier, although we can also argue if it was truly a benefit.
The rest of it? Yeah, good luck with any of that happening in the next six months.
Although here is my favorite Bush promise from the 2000 campaign, which he stated on June 28, 2000...
If he was president, that he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude. ''I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,'' Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. ''Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.''
Not that Clinton was any better. During his 1992 campaign, Bill promised to streamline the federal government and change the way it works by cutting 100,000 bureaucrat positions and putting 100,000 new police officers on the streets of American cities, to increase federal funding for research, prevention, and treatment for AIDS, to cut defense spending by one-third by 1997, and to raise the expected fuel efficiency in cars to 45 MPG.
So, in all honesty, what does it matter what Obama or McCain promise? Has any Presidential candidate in the past fifty years really lived up to his major campaign promises?
I was also talking politics to one of my former writers for FilmJerk, and he said he was going to vote for McCain/Palin because she was a MILF. That he too didn't believe either candidate was going to affect any kind of major change in Washington, so why not vote for the one you'd fuck?
So I guess what I am trying to ask is... do you really think either candidate can live up to their expectations? Do you think these are minor voices of cynicism or something that approximates what many Americans are thinking?
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Responses:
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