We here at News Hour miss the US election. The ‘transition to power’ just ain’t as fun, and until we can see how the frictions in Obama’s administration are going to settle out, there’s one unsettled question. What on earth happened to all those other candidates? We decided to pay their campaign sites a visit to find out..
Most have sign-off letters of some form or another. Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate, rails against ‘statism’ and talks a lot about debt – something that Hillary Clinton has halved since her campaign concluded (not including that $13 million odd personal loan). Barr also grumbles about expenses generated in ‘compliance with federal election regulations’. It’s a very sober letter, and the machinery of the campaign has vanished from the site – just a ‘donate’ button remains, unless you’re from big corporate, whose contributions can go **** themselves.
Chuck Baldwin’s thank you is much more wild west (it looks like the menu at Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers), and offers the chance to relive the glory days through a link to his old campaign site. A former Republican and Baptist pastor, Baldwin stood for the Constitution Party and riffs passionately about sovereignty and ‘big L’ Liberty against the ‘global agenda’ on his sign-off. Intriguingly, running mate Darrell Castle is a dead ringer for Nick from The Apprentice.
Where Baldwin challenges the ‘global agenda’, the independent Ralph Nader is no friend to corporate power. The Nader/Gonzalez thank you is minimal, and the website doesn’t look anywhere near like it accepts defeat. It positively bristles with the suspicion that it was all a set-up from the start; never, never, will Nader back down, not while he has breath in his bones, that sort of thing. The site is impressively organised, which is not surprising when you consider that his name was first tied with the top job in the 1970s. He’s been doing this since Obama was 11, and is two years McCain’s senior although you wouldn’t know it to look at the website. Some Democrats allegedly offered him cash not to do so in 2004; this could be considered a compliment.
Finally, we have the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney (pictured top), born 21 years AN (After Nader), whose 2006 congress campaign site is still remarkably prominent on a Google search. Everything she does makes a splash, though – the feisty McKinney, she once rather memorably remarked that:
‘Al Gore’s Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I’ve never known him to have more than one black person around him at any given time.’
This was during the milennium election. After 9/11, McKinney claimed that George Bush may have had advance knowledge of the attacks; never one to rest on her laurels, she has also taken a close interest in the death of Tupac Shakur. Her campaign site deals with the defeat in minimal terms, with a simple thank you from the Greens. Her personal website was inactive at the time of filing, but Cynthia was last heard of on a boat, headed to Gaza with aid for the Palestinians, and stopped by the Israelis – one certainly has to admire her get-up-and-go.
So that’s that – more or less. Politics is a cruel mistress, and only Nader remains of interest to the googling public since the election.
2012 can’t come soon enough.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 