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You might think politicians in Washington these days don't see eye to eye on anything. But whether Republican or Democrat, whether in the first year of a term or the last, politicians of all stripes are always thinking about their next election. Here's an interesting look at how even something as seemingly innocuous as presidential travel can actually have an electoral tilt to it. CNN has a look at Obama's first year "by the numbers". According to the piece Obama has visited 28 states during his first year in office. (The AP says 29 and CBS says 30, but neither of them list which states those are so for our purposes we'll stick with CNN.) Hmmmm, there's something familiar about that list! Of those 28 states, Obama won 21 of them (75%) in 2008. Of the other 7 states he visited, 4 aren't averse to Democratic candidates having voted for Clinton in the 1990's. Obama only visited 3 states that are solidly Republican and where he probably has no shot of winning in 2012.
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One year ago today we swore in our first black president. An historic moment in U.S. history! But based on the emails I got at the time many people were in no mood to put politics aside for even a day. President-elect Obama and Chief Justice Roberts had a tough time getting through the oath of office. And partisans on both sides came out swinging. "Did you see Obama mess up the oath!? He's not really president because of that, right?" and "Did you see Roberts mess up the oath!? I bet he did it on purpose!" are representative what people were telling me. Check out the
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Welcome to Unpledged Elector, the blog of President Elect. I'm the webmaster here, James R Whitson. It's January 20th and I thought that date was a good opportunity to restart the site after our post-election hiatus. In the past I have worked very hard to avoid the appearance of partisanship in this blog. This year I'm throwing that out the window. I will continue to be unbiased as always. But I'm not going to worry anymore about the the appearance of being unbiased! For example, in the past I've been careful to ensure that I kept positive and negative posts about each party and their candidates fairly even. Now I'm just going to post them as they come. If five negative stories in a row about the Republicans come up, I'm not going to go out of my way anymore to try to balance that with negative stories about the Democrats. If Obama has a slip-up, I'm not going to go look for a Palin gaffe to even things out. I hope you'll agree that this is not a biased manner of doing things in any way. I remain apolitical here, and have no desire to "preach" party ideology to you. But I also will not pander to you by trying to be "impartial" based purely on number of posts for or against your side! I've tried allowing comments here in the past, but as with most things political on the internet things get out of hand pretty fast! I thought this year we could try using Twitter as a means to allow reader communication. We'd need to come up with a hashtag to make it easy to find tweets from other readers. #peue (for President Elect Unpledged Elector) is random enough to not be commonly used by others, but it isn't that memorable. Though a few characters longer #elector doesn't seem to be in use, so that might be good for now. If you want to comment about a post, do so on Twitter and put that hashtag in your message. Then using your favorite Twitter search engine, look for that tag to see if anyone else has something to say. You can follow me on Twitter @Elector. (Note that I also tweet about my other websites there too, not just this one.) Before signing off, a quick explanation about the name of this blog. When first imagined by the framers of the Constitution, electors were supposed to be independent thinkers, unpledged to any one candidate, who were expected to use their own judgment and deliberate over the choice for President. That plan did not last long! But the idea was noble. I want this blog to have the same policy as the site in general - no partisanship, bias, or spin. I want to discuss politics but not from a liberal or conservative point of view. I'm not bound to any party or candidate and my judgment is not clouded by partisanship. I am your unpledged elector. I've still got some tweaking to do with the blog (adding things like permalinks for example!) so apologies that not everything is done yet. And thanks for visiting the site! I'll be back very soon to talk with you again! | ||||
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