Why the Republicans can't win next November

Winning Presidential elections in America is a weird science.  It's not necessarily important that you be smart, (see George W. Bush), personable (Nixon), or even desperately well qualified for the job (the present incumbent).  But it sure does help to have some measure of credibility. 

And that's why I'm pretty confident that the Republicans simply can't win next November. They have yet to field anything like a credible candidate. 

Let's take a look at a few of the declared and likely candidates, starting with Newt Gingrich.  Granted, Gingrich is a darling of the right, remembered for his hardball takeover of the House in 1994, and his relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.  But these career highlights are also the self-sown seeds of his own destruction.  He's deeply susceptible to being branded a hypocrite for his own infidelity (conducted while he was after Clinton) to his second wife, with the woman who is now the third Mrs G.  The Christian right is unlikely to be able to swallow any kind of family values pitch from a guy on his third marriage.  And there are few candidates who are more likely to galvanize the Democratic base than this particular nemesis.

Mitt Romney is deeply tainted too.  The further he distances himself from his healthcare reform as Governor of Massachusetts, the less appealing he is as a centrist alternative to Obama.  Independent voters must already be wondering how many other experiments he might be willing to conduct at the expense of the American people, and then renounce a couple of years later because they hadn't worked.

I was amazed by the amount of ink and airtime was spilled on a possible Donald Trump candidacy.  Here's a guy whose businesses have declared bankruptcy not once but several times.  Is this the dude we want in charge of our extremely fragile national economy?  His persistence in pursuing the issue of Obama's birth has also sullied him in many folks' eyes.  To my delight, however, the news broke as I was writing this that he had decided against a run.

There's a raft of others, whose national name recognition is a stumbling block that will hurt them unless and until they become the GOP's nominee, including Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Mitch Daniels.

And then there's our pinup for this post, Ms Palin, whose personal popularity did not suffer too badly even after she had Gabrielle Gifford's district in her crosshairs, but who suffers from the fact that fully 67% of those polled at the end of last year thought that she was unqualified to be President.

Plus there are important considerations about the Republicans' opponent.   Mr Obama has all the benefits of being an incumbent, plus his own credibility received a real boost after Osama bin Laden was captured and killed on his watch.  To be sure, the rose-tinted spectacles with which many viewed his candidacy last time have been replaced for many.  But if, as is likely, the economy shows signs of improvement in the next 18 months, he looks relatively secure.

That said, I'm a lousy predictor of which way the American people will jump when it comes to elections.  I've been consistently wrong over the 10 years I have lived in the States as to who would win (even when I voted for the winner).  Let's see if, for 2012, I can be fourth time lucky.  I'm calling it early for Obama, and looking forward to collecting on a bet made shortly after the 2008 election that he would be a two-term President.  There's a whole $1 riding on it.

Twinlets

Not telling anyone that I was pregnant for three months nearly killed me.  Especially after we found out we are having twins.  It made me think of the codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park in England in WWII, some of whom held on to their secret work for nearly 30 years (even from their spouses), until the1970s, when the story of Enigma was first released.  I had trouble holding my tongue for a quarter of a year.  I can't imagine the self-discipline required for a quarter century!  

I have been broody for a Very Long Time.  Probably about 12 years.  But, partly due to my age, and partly due to the risks of miscarriage in the first three months, we held off telling anyone - even close family - until we got past the first trimester.  We have just cruised past 20 weeks, however, and the vast majority of family and friends has been informed, so it was time to do some baby pontificating online...

The savviest among you may have noticed that the tagline to this blog actually changed at the beginning of the year.  It used to read, Fortune in the Valley: One Woman's Search for the Job of her Dreams.  But since a few days after the pregnancy test came back positive, it has read On Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  To some extent, this reflected the sorry state of my job hunt, and the fact that the blog had long since become a place for me to do a brain dump of what was on my mind.  But it was also, of course, a virtual nod to the vast change that is about to come upon the Coatney household.

Ironically, of course, I was finally offered a job just a few weeks ago by UC Santa Cruz.  But it was a fairly simple decision to turn the offer down.  The money was lousy!  And the possibilities were limited.  The positives were all around the location and the potential for something more fascinating down the road.  But even as I declined it, there was some agonizing.  I had always assumed that if I were ever fortunate enough to have kids, it would be as a working woman, and that I would be the sort who juggled a job and the cooking and the childcare (while naturally maintaining a regular gym schedule, and remembering to get pedicures).  So much for that.  Instead, I am adapting to the new reality and privilege of being a stay-at-home Mom (apologies to my English readers).  Which is actually far more scary (for me, at least) in terms of the skills required.  And the gym schedule is already up the spout.

Even though I haven't had a tricky pregnancy so far to date, I am amazed at how easy other people make it look.  My girlfriends all appeared to sail through in the manner of Hollywood film stars...looking glamorous and elegant, and producing extremely cute offspring at the end of it all.  By contrast I feel schlumpy all the time, and go to bed at 8pm regularly, since the thought of staying up until 10pm is a distant memory now associated with other illicit treats like cocktails and unpasteurized cheese.  And this isn't even the difficult part!  As all the mothers of any age I have met recently have said, with twins, we are going to be "busy".  Since when did "busy" become a euphemism for manically sleep deprived and completely unable to form coherent sentences?

Over the next few months, you will doubtless read more about the trials and tribulations of the pregnancy, before twinlet one (a girl) and twinlet two (a boy) arrive, probably sometime in late August or possibly early September.  After that, it is quite possible that this will turn into a mommy blog (Eric's hoping that I will be able to mimic the success of www.dooce.com and bring in $30,000-$50,000 a month).  In his dreams.

In the meantime, I am delighted to declare that I have found my Fortune in the Valley, and it wasn't in the place I was looking for it.  Not at all.

Green Guilt

So I confess that I switched back to Lysol.  For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away.  Enter the bleach, exit the scum.  Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.

Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle.  I recycle religiously.  I compost occasionally.  I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time.  But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything.  I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless.  But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner?  You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits.  So you end up cleaning twice!

It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes.  As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?

The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious.  And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.

Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.  Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon.  But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought  by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon.  Let's make this easy.  The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans.  Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone?  I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer. 

Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.

Here endeth the lesson.  Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy.  Which is ironic, given where I started.  I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order.