I have Libertarian friends who think Ron Paul has a chance at the GOP nomination… My intuition is that they are engaging in wishful thinking. My best guess is Romney will take it, but I’m hoping for Cain, for 2 reasons:

1. It would be kind of awesome to have 2 black candidates for President of the United States; and
2. I like the idea of Obama going up against McCain and then Cain… it would confuse future schoolchildren.

But should my guess prove correct, and Paul lose the Republican nomination, where would that leave him? He’s garnered quite a lot of support in some polls, and that might encourage him enough to consider splitting off again to run as an independent. After all, he is 76 years old, and may not have that many more chances to run (though he’s pretty spry), so he may as well throw it all in the ring for 2012. (Why independent and not Libertarian? He’s already got the Libertarian vote, and independent status might get him a few people who wouldn’t vote strict Libertarian… it’s a safer label.)

I would love this.

It would split the conservative vote between the Republican nominee (let’s say Romney) and Paul, and hand another term to Obama. It’s not that I think Obama is perfect, far from it; he’s too conservative or moderate for my taste, and I don’t like his persisting in these ridiculous wars, failing to revoke the expansion of Presidential powers, re-signing the PATRIOT act, failing to hold banks accountable, and many other weak moves. But I still support him in general, and I think he’s doing a pretty good job under very trying circumstances not of his making. I support Obama’s jobs bill, and raising taxes on millionaires; I even support him raising taxes on me, and I’m solidly middle class. And I think we need another Obama term to see his efforts really bear fruit, and to give the economy a chance to recover.

But that’s not what excites me about the idea of a Ron Paul schism from the GOP. With his seeming popularity among an increasing number of people, and the coming ugly break-up of the Tea Party and Republicans, and similar disillusionment on the left, it might increase the dissatisfaction with our two-party duopoly, and pave the way for voting reform where it is easier for multiple parties to credibly run for President.

The current system is a crock, where no matter if a Republican or a Democrat wins, the Republicans and Democrats win, and both parties have too much incentive to keep this convenient arrangement that neither will work to reform it, and neither will stray too far from the policies of the other. This race to the bottom is driving us away from real issues and further and further to the right (which is not right).

The simple fact of the matter is that a country of over 300,000,000 people must by necessity have more than 2 opinions on any given subject, so 2 parties can’t really represent their views with any degree of accuracy or subtlety. So, as a result, the “national dialog” consists of hand-picked non-topics that are blown out of proportion by the media, because that’s the only thing that the established parties will discuss. We need more diversity of voices in Washington; for that, I appreciate Ron Paul actually having the nerve to say things that push the boundaries of what Republican voters might want to hear (even if I think his particular stances are nonsensical sophistry or cynical manipulations).

And worse yet, this false black-or-white, uncompromising, your-team-vs-my-team bullshit isn’t just wasting our time and money, it’s actively driving a wedge between Americans, radically polarizing us into knee-jerk offense and defense, resulting in a fruitless stalemate. When I talk one-on-one to self-identifying Republicans, and get past the rhetoric to the real issues and real values, I usually find we think fairly similarly… we mostly disagree on execution of those ideas, and on personalities of the politicians; but I know that once we leave that personal, human conversation, the media machine will hammer at us relentlessly until we forget that point of similarity and solidarity. We too easily devolve into slogans and talking points, reaction against the banality of the opposing politicians’ public statements and stances.

We need more than two political parties, to baffle that echo chamber. We need new voices diverging and disagreeing, then coming to compromise, then pushing new ideas into the political arena, and that won’t happen when it’s just two talking heads shouting each other down. But right now, it takes a tremendous effort and a fortune to try to get on the ballot in each state; state-controlled ballot access means that even if a third party could get enough momentum and campaign donations to have a real shot, they blow that money and energy just trying to get on the ballot, while the Democrat and Republican candidates use their money to influence voters directly. This is only one of many reasons why “States’ Rights” advocates are dangerously naive; issues like this, which affect national elections, should be decided at the federal level.

Of course, lowering the bar for additional parties to be on the ballot, as difficult as it might be, is only one step. Even when they are there, the best they can do is deflect votes from one of the other candidates, as Nader did from Gore in 2000, and as I hope Paul does from Romney in 2012 (though honestly, I think could just barely live with Romney as President… just not Paul, Cain, Sanctimonious, Perry, or that one lady with the creepy crazy eyes… no, no, the other one).

What we would also need is the ability for people to make real and direct choices in who they want as President (and for Congress)… not simply pick the lesser of two evils, but rank them according to how well that candidate matches their own preferences, how well each candidate represents that voter’s views. This is nothing new… we’re one of the last first-world nations that still uses the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all ballot system, when what we need is a more sophisticated ranked voting system, where if your first choice of candidate doesn’t have enough votes to win, your vote is counted instead for your next choice, then on down the line, until one candidate is the candidate that the most people can live with. Then, an alternative party candidate might actually stand a chance of winning… and even if they didn’t, it would disrupt the carefully-controlled unequilibrium that the duopoly enjoys, so we could at least hear those new voices.

But could this happen? Could a national referendum on voting reform actually bloom? Well, I can imagine a scenario where it might. Obama is limited to one more term, and I have a feeling that he’s going to be more aggressive during his last term… he has less to lose. So, he could well support such an effort, on the basis that if a Republican wins in 2016, they will try to dismantle his reforms… so he’s better off trying to widen the field, on the chance that a it would yield a less clear “mandate” for destroying what he had built just to score one more point in political pong.

Right now, the duopoly strategy against us is winning: they divide and conquer. It’s a proven principle that we need to apply the in reverse: we need to divide ourselves into many parties, so we can conquer them.

What a fine day! Most importantly, of course, America has a new President, a man of dignity and intellect, who selects his appointments on the merit of the candidate. And if that weren’t enough, Megan and I were there to bear witness (along with two million of our closest friends) to this historic event.

We were active during the campaign, canvassing and donating, and obsessively reading Electoral-Vote and FiveThirtyEight. So, since we live relatively close to DC, we thought we would come up to see whatever we could of it. We didn’t plan anything at all, but we got pretty lucky, I have to say!

First,  an old college roommate, Dave, got back in touch with me via Facebook a few months ago; we said we’d try to get together soon.  We missed each other I was in town last month, but we talked on the phone, and he offered us a place to stay if we were in town for the Inauguration, which we were considering then.  We decided at the last minute to take a day off and take him up on his offer, and he’s been an incredibly gracious host, waking up early to drive us to the metro station, and picking us back up.

Next, we decided to eat at Ben’s Chili Bowl last night.  We stumbled on this place a few years ago when I was doing some consulting up in DC (for a special-needs school and the Navy Criminal Investigative Services, two great tastes that taste great together).  I love vegetarian chili, and this place does it up right (as you might surmise from the name)… and it has that great diner feel.  I had seen on the news that Obama had eaten here a week or two ago, and apparently Bill Cosby did as well.  But I was not prepared for the lines… we waited in line for two hours to get in, the line stretching back into the alley and cops directing nearby traffic!  But we had nothing else to do that night, and we stuck with it on a whim.  And it paid off in a really unexpected way.  A guy came in (I don’t know exactly who) who was handing out free tickets to the Inauguration.  We hadn’t event tried to get tickets before, since we knew how in demand they were.  But I approached him and asked him for a pair… he was surprised we came up from North Carolina without them, but handed them over with a smile.  As it turned out, they were not just to the general admission area, but to the Blue Gate into a section of the White House lawn.

Our luck took a slight tumble, when we first took a wrong turn out of the subway station, then after we found our way back to the right gate, we got shunted into what turned out not to be the “blue” line, but just a “blue” line.  We stood in that line for a frigid hour and a half, barely moving, until we finally ended up in what was actually the line for the gate… about 50 people wide and several hundred deep… and which we could have entered directly, rather than wading through a mere tributary.  By the time we go up to the security gates (and it was a real crush at points), and then on to the viewing area, the garden wall was already lined with people sitting along it, and the stairs up were packed.  Megan is less assertive than I am, and wanted to stay were we could catch an occasional glimpse of the jumbotron.  But I could glimpse large gaps in the crowd on the other side, so I took us to a “breach” in the wall… a knot of people climbing over a narrow section where nobody was sitting.  Once we were over the wall, there was actually quite a lot of space open… the stairs were just a bottleneck nobody was willing to move away from.

In the spot we ended up, we couldn’t really see the screens, but we could see, in the distance, the rostrum itself, with the tiny but visible figures of the people.  A little surprisingly, the crowd booed when Bush came out, and serenaded him with “Na, na, na, na… hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”  We listened the Aretha Franklin with respect and joy, and to Perlman and Ma with quiet reflection.  And we saw Obama take his oath of office, and give his grave but hopeful and poetic speech… saw it with our own eyes.

After most of the crowd had left, we were able to actually go up near the lectern, and take photos.  Colin Powell was giving an interview about fifteen feet away (and 20 feet up).  We saw Bush board his helicopter on the screen, and watched it rise over the White House and disappear into the distance.  Megan said she felt a surge of emotion as it flew away; I just waved goodbye.

Leaving the grounds, we wandered though chaotic streets to the Air & Space Museum, which we’d heard was open.  It was… and it held hundreds of people getting out of the cold, sitting and lying and sleeping and eating.  It was a strange sight.  We looked around a bit, rested, used the toilets, and then took off to find our way to a Metro station.  L’Enfant was packed, so we went down to a further one and got on with little wait.  We enjoyed an Indian dinner, gushing with other patrons, and then hit the trains again.

Back at Dave’s place, we watched the news coverage, and found out just how fortunate we’d been to get in at all, much more as close as we were.  We watched the oaths and speeches again, this time with close ups.  It was a remarkable trip!  We came up here with very little idea of exactly what we would do, and stumbled into a great Inaugural experience.

I was skeptical of Obama at first. I thought his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was great, but even then people were ready to crown him as the next Democratic nominee. I didn’t think we knew enough about him, that he had a track record to back up his admitted charm and eloquence, even after a couple of years in the Senate.

I think I was wrong.

I’m ambivalent about Hillary Clinton; she did seem to have her heart in the right place regarding health care and several other civic matters; but she’s gotten rather conservative in the intervening years, and yet is still divisive (whether that’s her fault, or her detractors, it doesn’t matter). And I really don’t like the idea of a 24-28 year Bush-Clinton dynastic monarchy; I think we should amend the Constitution to limit not only the number of terms a President can hold office, but extend that to their immediate family, to guard against oligarchies in powerful families. I dreaded her getting the nomination, since I think it would mean 4 more years of a Republican. So I felt a little schadenfreude when Obama defeated her in Iowa.

But then it really struck me… the implications for America, and the power of his victory speech. Over the course of the next day or so, it really sunk in. I still don’t know if the guy means what says, or if he could pull it off in practice… but I believe him, and believe in him. He really does seem to be a unifier, across parties and races and ages. Everybody promises change when that’s what the public seems to want to hear, but I think he really means it.

But still, there is that lack of experience, right? Well, I really thought about what that means, and I realized that nobody has experience being President in the current climate (George W. Bush included, since a component of experience is learning from past mistakes). Hillary helped run the White house in a very different time, with a very different economy and geopolitical stage. Obama can draw on precisely the same body of expert cabinet members she could. So, it comes down to will and to vision, to relying on the best of resources you have at hand, and approaching problems the right way, and from what I’ve seen of Obama, he has just as much of that as Hillary. And he has something else, an indefinable leadership quality. He just kinda rocks.

There’s other stuff, too… he’s not yet in the pocket of special interests, he preaches a doctrine of governmental reform, he has all the same policies, more or less, as the other Democratic hopefuls… but offers a lot more hope. (No offense to Edwards, who seems like a good guy, and who would make a great Attorney General.)

So M and I got more excited about him, and donated money to his campaign, and then decided to join a couple friends to canvass for him in South Carolina (since NC pretty much has no say in the primaries, happening well after Super Tuesday). We drove down today (yesterday now, I guess) at 6:00 to help get the word and the voters out in Florence, SC. That experience was less than inspiring, to be frank. We were shuffled around to different canvassing centers before we actually got to work, and by the time we hit the streets, it was already 11:00; the canvassing lists were really poorly designed and hard to read, and many of the houses and people (all registered voters, supposedly) simply didn’t exist. After 3 hours of driving and walking around the sprawling rural district, we had arranged for all of 3 or 4 people to get out to vote for Obama. I know every little bit helps, but it seemed like an awful little bit.

We did meet 2 cool people, a couple that just moved to Raleigh from California, both programmers, and we drove them around, and had great conversation. They planned to drive on to Columbia to see Obama’s victory or concession speech after canvassing, and we decided to join them.

Wow.

We had to wait in line for a while, and hadn’t gotten tickets from our canvass station, so we weren’t sure we’d get in. As it turned out, we got right up front, about 20 feet from the podium. We saw Obama speak, and it felt like history. Astounding. Invigorating. Inspiring. A feeling of camaraderie, and yes, hope for a better America. Shouting and cheering and chanting.

I hope Obama is our next President.