Texas Blue Mailbag: Week 08/05/07

Jon Stewart for President? Publicy-financed campaigns? What is this, some sort of liberal website?

MC requests:

I was looking at Josh's article

Actual Texas Political News
Josh Berthume

.......... and it's the wrong summer for much campaign news to be
happening outside of the presidential variety. Etc..........

It brought to mind that some states have off year elections that may
indicate what might happen in 2008. I found a short Wiki about those
states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-year_elections

Since I can't spend the time you all at The Texas Blue do researching
all this, might The Texas Blue keep us peons up on what is happening
in Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia?

Thanks!

George replies:

Funny you mention that! There are a lot of interesting things going on in other southern states in particular that could be telling for how things will go in Texas. The off-year elections are definitely of note. I've also been talking up Oklahoma around the office, and more specifically how their Senate race is looking to possibly be almost as interesting as ours, with a promising contender in Andrew Rice against incumbent Sen. Inhofe, and what possible synergistic effects there could be for Texas and southern Democrats in the long run. I think I've got Josh interested enough where he might write a little blurb on it. As the trend in the South is definitely germane to Texas politics, we will be presenting coverage of selected regional races of interest along with our standard Texas and national coverage. Keep an eye out!

Joe asks:

i hear constant talk about "campaign reform," and simply wonder if there is a time in sight when campaigns will be at all evenly matched in terms of finances.

Josh says:
A time in sight? The short answer, as George succinctly put it when I brought this up, is "No." Or at least, not any time soon. Campaign finance reform has been a favorite stump item for the last two decades if not longer, and not much has been done about it yet. McCain-Feingold started out as an interesting set of ideas and has made some small steps towards reform, but politicians as campaigners are rational actors — they have to be — so whatever system for financing elections is placed before them is likely going to be maximized for their best interests over others. As I have said before, money is the equivalent of gas in the tank in politics, and so it will remain, I think, for at least the foreseeable future. You never know, though — there are an awful lot of presidential candidates out there calling for change.

TPG asks:

If Jon Stewart ran for president, would any of the candidates take him as a serious threat with the current generation/viewership/fans that he has behind him?

George answers:

Only if his running mate is Al Gore.

LP asks:

in your opinion, would america benefit from being a collection of smaller, autonomous areas, or would that simply mess everything up?

Josh answers:
To tell the truth, I think America is a collection of smaller, autonomous areas, as struggles over same-sex marriage and state immigration laws have shown. Federalism is a little weird, but its what we got.

That being said, do I think America would benefit from being split up, like into Northwest America, and Midwest America, etc? I think the symbiosis between regions as far as interstate trade, subsidies, the road system, and other systems works very well because they've been developed over many years and tweaked until it got to being acceptable, at least, and highly functional in many cases. As I am a big enough nerd to be a fan of certain systems of government, I point you to this information about how the German federal system works, in that it is one that has been put into practice relatively recently, right after World War II, and that it works fairly well. Short answer: it isn't right for us, because we have a system that works fairly well and that sort of bureaucratic reorganization, on any level, would be terrifying, even for someone who loves bureaucracy as much as I do.