My Take on the Dems

But first, the coolest article of the day: Men who marry smart women are happier.
(Of course, there's an endogeneity bias there; smart men tend to marry smart women, smart men also tend to make more money and live healthier lives and thus be happier in general...)

OK, now for my take on the Democratic presidential candidates, as a reader requested. But before I evaluate them, I'd like to point out that ANY Democrat is going to be better than ANY Republican for the next presidential term, from either a conservative or a liberal standpoint. This is because A) Any Republican will have an obligation to his party to "preserve" the Bush legacy, which will mean staying in Iraq and failing to repeal Bush's tax cuts, and B) The Republican Party has been so comfortable in power for so long that it's become horribly corrupt, and its internal dialogue has become a near-complete echo chamber. Smart conservatives should abandon the Republicans for a while and focus on making Democrats more conservative, if they hope to further their ideals, while liberals of any stripe should vote Democratic because the alternative is ridiculous.

That said...

I like Obama. He has more charisma than the others put together, and he seems very reasonable on policy. This is a dangerous little age-let we're living in, and reasonableness is probably going to be more important than good pre-set policy ideas (that's the basic idea of representative democracy in general, as I see it). I don't buy the "inexperienced" knock against him; name one presidential candidate who ever lost a general election because of inexperience. Nor do I buy the "he's too vague" knock, because as I said, I value reasonableness more. The one problem he has might be electability; people consider him "black" (which is kinda silly, since he's half Caucasian and half African-immigrant), and that might lose him a few lower-class votes in the general election, whatever people say in the polls.

I like Hillary OK. She seems marginally less reasonable on policy, and there's always the worry that she'll try to act "tough" in order to compensate for perceived womanly weakness, and be too aggressive on the international stage (i.e.: bomb Iran). She's somewhat of a weather vane, and her values seem less intrinsically liberal than Obama's. She's taken a lot of specific positions I don't like - for the Iraq war, against the South Korea free trade agreement. This smacks of either poll-sensitive opportunism or a lack of understanding of what's good for the country. My guess is the former, which is less bad than the latter, but it still puts Hillary well behind Obama. I don't think her gender will be as big a factor against her electability as Obama's race, whatever the polls say.

I'm not a big Edwards fan. He has alway seemed a little plastic to me, a little like he was picked for his demographics (young good-looking Southern white man with a rags-to-riches story). His economic "populism" seems a little shlocky. Again, this is just the impression I get. I like the idea of helping the poor, and of making this a fairer society, but Edwards' speeches seem long on problem and short on solution. And when a populist is short on solution, there's always the danger that (s)he'll resort to stuff like protectionism, which in most cases just harms the economy and poor people along with it, and sets back the liberal cause. Edwards does seem to have some real compassion for the people who have been left behind by the system, but he's too focused on this issue at time when foreign policy looms large. He should stay in the senate and fight for his issues instead of being the chief executive.

So, Obama it is. But to be honest, despite the faults I found with Clinton and Edwards, I'd be overjoyed to have either of them as president. That's because he alternative is a Republican, in which case we'd look forward to four more years of arguing over whether we should deport illegal immigrants or simply underpay them, of whether we should pump up the deficit in order to cut taxes or pump up the deficit in order to award no-bid military contracts, of whether we should stay the course in Iraq or expand the war to Iran, and of whether Democrats should be shut out of power or actually thrown in jail for "treason". No thanks. I'd like to avoid seeing my country fall into precipitous decline until I'm old enough to care a bit less.