Chris Dodd declares candidacy for president

[netmouse]

Washington Post article

Thoughts?

I personally hope the democratic party will not select Hilary Clinton as its candidate, because so much of the country doesn't trust or like her and it seems a shame to act as if there are not other strong (even female) candidates in the country, and to further alienate younger democrats who already seem to oppose the idea and are wondering why they can't influence their party. I don't know about Barak Obama's chances of winning, either. He seems like a sharp guy but also relatively young and unproven compared to some.

The Iraq war is clearly going to be a big issue in the next presidential election, as is the general question of how to reduce terrorism. If you could set those two issues aside, what would you want in an American president for 2008?

Comments

[omnifarious.livejournal.com]

• Take the constitution seriously. Including the 10th and 2nd amendments.
• Be committed to making the federal bureaucracy at least 5% smaller by the end of h(is/er) term. Some of this should come from simplifying and/or eliminating regulatory bodies. Those eliminated bodies would be replaced with a set of rules and balances that were designed to avoid creating centralized places in government for interested parties to exercise their influence. The best place to start would likely be the FCC's regulation of telecom companies, since those regulations mostly serve the telecom company's interests now due to the strong influence they have within the FCC and the blatant conflicts of interest of most high FCC officials.
• Be committed to real government accountability. Must be willing to send government officials who fail in their duties to jail if warranted. Must be willing to assign blame to those actually causing the problem instead of a politically convenient fall-guy.
• Be committed to an honest and above-board foreign policy. Must be willing to reveal what private interests are pressuring us to do at even a micro-level in foreign countries. I'm tired of us doing things for publicly stated reasons that are clearly false and covers for actual reasons that nobody's willing to admit.
• Committed to declassifying as much information as possible so the citizens of the US can make informed decisions regarding their government.

Those are the things I most want. The war on terror and the war in Iraq and all that other stuff are secondary to those fundamental issues that have been plaguing us for many many years. I think many of the evils we're experiencing today can be directly traced to not following those policies.