Well, that tears it

[teddywolf]

I really don't like Carla Howell. (she's the Libertarian candidate, for those of you who don't know)

I'm watching the debate for Massachusetts governor right now. This is the first and probably the only one where all five candidates are on the ballot. The format is that the moderator asks a question, each candidate gets 1 minute to respond, and at the end each candidate can fire bits back and forth.
Each time it's come back to this woman, she has started with, "Small government is beautiful" and the tax cut she wants to push through. It hasn't mattered what the question is, that starts her answer. It's like she can't address the question, just her issue.

I consider myself partly libertarian in that I do believe that the smallest effective force needed to get something done should be the maximum force used - but the key is effective force and getting it done, which is closer to a Green attitude. I do not want to wait for market forces which have historically proven to not do the job to suddenly turn around and do it - I'll be waiting a long time.

So, my brief about each candidate via their party:
The Libertarian is monotopical. While she talked about private sector always doing better than public she didn't say how. I also find it completely laughable that all public sector employees are paid double their private sector counterparts. I find it even more laughable that when she was asked about charitable donations she'd made she counted an immediate family member as a charitable donation. Charity begins at home but that's re-diculous.
The Democrat is floundering in debate with the Republican. She talks tough about what she'd like to do but she can't back it up with enough concrete examples. She talks about cutting waste - OK, she does OK on that but not as well as she's trying to say.
The Republican talks about how his last few years of work were charitable. I have never heard of the Olympics as a charity. His approach to integrating foreign language students is sink-or-swim, and he proposes that when given that choice every child will swim. Idiot.
The Green talks about the numbers - taxwise she's talking the same way Clinton did, more like a Democrat. She wasn't particularly objectionable and she was intelligent but she seemed to lack some understanding of some larger issues. She at least didn't try to wave the same chart all over the place all the time.
The Independant... she was the least polished of the five on debate style. But of the bunch of them she seemed to be the most common-sensical. She didn't talk from a platform and she talked as a human.

So to echo what's been said for time immemorial in these kinds of politics, I will say this about the Independant and to a lesser extent about the Green: She seems decent, pity she won't win.

Comments

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Ehh, Glob stands for Glob-ular when it comes to debate summary :-)