Fractured Dreams

…about this:

Al and Tipper Gore separating after 40 years of marriage.

And while we’re on the subject of politics, intrigued by this:

Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband is supporting a plan by deputy leader Harriet Harman to ensure half of the party’s new shadow Cabinet team is female.

I hadn’t intended to post anythihttp://fractured-dreams.com/blog/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy =post_tagng about this week’s general election, because UK politics depresses me. (I find US politics entertaining, but you have the luxury of finding another country’s politics entertaining when you don’t have to live with the consequences.) But with the extra-ordinary nature of this election there have been some things I wanted to note:

• On election day I miraculously let go of the Labour government — after months of denial — and accepted that there will be a new prime minister.
  
• I cannot quite come to terms, though, with the Liberal Democrats negotiating with the Tories. If, as Cameron claims, a “liberal democratic” party and a “conservative” (note the small “c”) party have “many areas of common ground”, then UK politics is even more depressing than I thought.
  
• (My preference, as inconsequential as it is, would be a Lib-Lab coalition with anyone other than Brown as prime minister.)
  
• It’s been unusually exciting for journalists to be observing this election (at work there was a camaraderie of gathering around the TV on Friday as vote counts came in and party leaders gave speeches) but I would not want to be one of those political reporters on the news channels who were on live for 24-48 hours straight.
  
• Waiting for the first constituency results to roll in on Thursday night once again brought out the worst of 24-hour news reporting — stuck with endless airtime to fill and nothing yet to say, the BBC presenter was all, ‘I want to start bringing in results but there aren’t any yet; well, I don’t know what to do then.’ Sigh.
  
• The best news of the election was the fascist BNP (British National Party)’s loss of all 12 of their local council seats in Barking & Dagenham and their failure to secure a parliamentary seat.
  
• It’s oddly heartwarming in a humourous, appreciative-of-satire kind of way that The Official Monster Raving Loony (William Hill) Party is still alive and kicking and standing for elections.
  
• It’s straight-up heartwarming to see the first Green party MP elected. (Go Brighton!)
  
• London is now an island of Labour red in a sea of Tory blue. I feel a sudden connectedness with Scotland, where the Tories won only one seat in the whole country.
  
• When will Lib Dem supporters realise that they actually need to vote for them? I’m so tired of hearing variations of ‘I want the Lib Dems to get in, but there’s no point in voting for them, they never get in’. Well, no, they won’t if you don’t vote for them. How they lost a net 5 seats I don’t quite know.
  

President-elect Obama taps Sen. Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state.

Mixed feelings about this. I still can’t quite imagine Hillary leaving the Senate, but this is a new adventure…

• I wasn’t going to write anything tonight but CNN is actually using holograms of its reporters and that kind of absurdity can hardly go unnoted.
  
• I mean, seriously, you know the big cheeses sat around their boardroom planning what they could pull out of their bag of tricks for election night coverage and one guy was all “hey, why don’t we use holograms” and suddenly we’re living in some bad 80s vision of the future where news reporting involves holographic talking heads.
  
• CNN’s website is a million times more useful than its vacuous TV coverage.
  
• Madly refreshing the CNN congressional maps will not swing close races in the Democrats’ favour.
  
• Kay Hagan’s drubbing of Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina was unexpectedly thrilling. Clearly Dole’s self-satisfied smirkiness on C-Span bothered me more than I realised.
  
• How does Ted Stevens, a man recently convicted of seven felonies, have a lead among Alaska voters?
  
• So relieved Mary Landrieu is hanging in there in Louisiana.
  
• And yet, it doesn’t seem the Dems are quite getting the sweep they hoped for.
  
• Bill Clinton best summed up tonight with a single word: “bittersweet”.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. McCain picks Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his VP.

John McCain has pulled something so cynical in selecting a conservative who is also a woman that it may just be the ultimate in evil genius “strategery”. Well played, sir. Such is the delicious contrarianism of American politics.

I can’t help but think of Chelsea Clinton’s words in the video tribute to her mother: “because of her those 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling gave way and what opened up was a new world of possibility.”

A female Republican VP candidate this year is a direct result of Hillary Clinton’s historic campaign, and McCain’s wooing of disaffected Hillary supporters. Shows he believes it’s working too. As the commenters over at The Confluence put it:

Geraldino Ferraro => Hillary Rodham Clinton => Sarah Palin

Oh to have been a fly on the wall when Hillary and Bill found out about this!

Jake Tapper writes on ABC’s blog:

When considering Sen. John McCain’s VP pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, it’s worth putting into context how focused McCain has been about winning the women voters who supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and are not yet sold on Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.

Just think about how often McCain praised Clinton during and after her campaign, and all the McCain TV ads featuring Clinton.

Howard Wolfson, one of Hillary’s top advisors is right on the mark:

I’ll See Your Biden and Raise You a Palin

Yesterday I argued that picking a woman for veep would help re-establish McCain’s reputation as a maverick. If the pick is indeed Sarah Palin you are going to have a lot of women voters wondering why Senator Obama didn’t tap Senator Clinton as his running mate.

I personally hated the idea of Hillary as Obama’s VP, but this, coming straight off the Dem convention, just proved again why he should have wanted her.

The election may have just got interesting again. (As much as it could be without Hillary on the ticket.)

I might have to tune in to the Republican convention for the first time ever…

I’ve shed more tears in the last couple of days over the Democratic Convention than I did last week when I lost my job. I’m sentimental like that.

I teared up at the video tribute to Hillary narrated by Chelsea: “because of her those 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling gave way and what opened up was a new world of possibility for all of us.”

I teared up some more when Hillary came out, radiant in her orange suit, to a thunderous ovation, at what should have been her convention.

The tears spilled over when Bill mouthed “I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

And whenever the camera cut to him looking like he was bursting with pride or about to cry.

I laughed through my sadness when Hillary gave a shout out to “my supporters, my champions… my sisterhood of the travelling pantsuits.”

I was grieving for what might have been by the time she finished what was a presidential speech.

I saw the video and speech repeated several times yesterday (BBC Parliament is streaming C-Span coverage in continuous loop all day) and cried each time. I may even have a wet cheek as I type this.

There were tears again when Bill came out and valiantly pretended he’s not still pissed off. Hillary’s beaming smiles were bittersweet.

When I realised what was happening with that absurd excuse for a roll call vote and Hillary came out and performed some kind of ritual self-sacrifice, I would’ve bawled, if I hadn’t been so pissed off.

It burns that there was no public, historical record of the delegate count of the first woman to win a primary or caucus, the person who won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, just because it would’ve bruised some egos.

But what can you expect from a campaign so petulant it refused to print signs for Bill’s speech because he hadn’t “earned” it?

I’m emotionally exhausted by the campaign, but there’s at least the consolation (albeit small) of watching Hillary go back to becoming the most kickass senator the US Congress has ever seen.

Sen. Barack Obama has chosen Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate.

Obama/Biden? ZZzzzz.

To be fair, Joe’s a good guy, I came to like him even more during the debates, and obviously it comes down to his foreign policy experience. But, seriously, after such an exciting primary I’ve already switched off from the general election. My only interest has been in who McCain’s going to pick; I’m genuinely intrigued by the direction he’s going to go with his VP choice.

But other than that… my mischievous side wishes the delegates would bring the drama and chaos next week by nominating Hillary.

Dream on, I know.

Clearly working from the office is not conducive to blogging…

…neither is stalking Diane vonFurstenberg dresses on eBay…

I’m hoping to get back on track soon, but as tired as I am tonight, I just have to say:

“It ain’t over ’til the lady in the pantsuit says it is.”

Sadly it seems that’s bound to be sooner rather than later. Hard to believe that this interminably long primary season has actually come to an end. I wish I hadn’t got so emotionally invested, but it’s Hillary; it was inevitable. So, now, we wait…

It’s a big day in Hillaryland; she herself has called it a “gamechanger”. It’s just as well I’m going out for a couple of hours this evening, because I’m going crazy waiting for the polls to close in Indiana and North Carolina already and they’ve barely opened. In the meantime, the wonderful Maya Angelou has been eloquently expressing her support for HRC and the campaign has been running this ad in N.C., which I wanted to post today.



And to cheer me up while I wait, this amuses me more than it probably should:

Allow me to get all political again for just a moment:

I adore Hillary Rodham Clinton, but I sometimes question some of the people she surrounds herself with and I always wished she’d picked someone, anyone, else as a pollster and chief strategist other than Mark Penn.

The little notification window on my Feedreader just popped up with the news from CNN, Time, and various other places that he’s out.

All I can say is YAY!

I just wonder if it’s too late…