I hear there's this primary today

[dmaze]

To reiterate what I've said in a couple of contexts, I think the Republican primary is all-but-decided, but the Democratic primary is still an interesting question and I intend to vote in it. I think that's a choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and they do both seem to have content on their Web sites.

Hillary's rhetoric is all "middle class, middle class, I'm middle class, I support the middle class". Out of Iraq now, pro-Israel, $50B for green-energy initiatives, make the US reputable in global politics again. Her "middle class" plan doesn't actually sit terribly well with me; "$50B Strategic Energy Fund" is included as a key part of the middle-class plan (I wouldn't think of the R&D-class jobs it creates as "middle-class"), and there's some amount of throwing money around to "ensure that workers who have lost jobs because of global competition get the support they need" and to try to bail out people who consciously made bad mortgage decisions at risk of their home.

I don't really buy the "basic bargain" that gets mentioned a couple of times, "that if Americans work hard and take responsibility, government will do its part to make sure they have the tools to get ahead". That does feel like a staple of Democratic politics to me, but people who "work hard and take responsibility" already largely have health insurance, retirement savings, and didn't gamble their house on short-term adjustable ARMs. Why should government have an active role here?

Obama's Web site starts with a landing page and an auto-play Flash animation, never a good sign, and the layout and flow is a little harder to follow though the details are still there (some in PDFs). "Civil rights" includes a lot of sensible criminal-justice bits, including cutting down manadatory sentencing and trying harder to reintegrate released convicts into society. The full economic plan is a broken PDF link, but there are some interesting detail bullet points, including banning unilateral changes in credit-card policies and capping interest rates on payday loans; I don't see a comprehensive "avoid the recession" plan but I also don't see federal money being tossed around randomly. (A small tax credit to people with mortgage interest who don't itemize deductions is consistent with existing policy and visibly benefits lower-income homeowners.)

Obama wants to spend $150B in 10 years on clean energy; some of the energy plan sounds reasonable, some ("36 billion gallons of renewable fuel" sounds to me like corn subsidies) not. Out of Iraq in 16 months, actually try talking to Iran and other countries we "don't like", "make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (with a somewhat detailed mostly pro-Israel plan), address nuclear weapons globally. Homeland security plan is about "protect targets" which doesn't address the problem, if any. Limits on farm subsidies. Network neutrality, balance "save the children" against the First Amendment, improved privacy protection.

Commonalities: why make a "research and development" tax credit permanent? Most of the special-purpose tax deductions seem really strange to me. Both have health-care reform plans but I can't easily distinguish between them.

Conclusions: I think the Internet has helped to address a lot of my concerns about Obama ("he does have actual, largely sensible, positions"). Some of the detail points do sound like something nobody actually in the system would propose (what special interest supports ending current legislation making crack cocaine more illegal than powder?). That, plus a perception that he is a more charismatic leader who is more likely to bridge political and cultural gaps, wins him my primary vote.