Republicans! WOW!

 

The essence of the Republican agenda is simple, and truthfully summed up this way:

WOW! War On Workers!

MIA! Made in America, otherwise known as, Missing in Action — a casualty, or, I might have alternatively said, the military AWOL, Absent Without Leave — through out-sourcing manufacturing!

For example, Talk to the workers in Evansville, IN!

I have this belief that we should have a listing of all those businesses and industries which have moved abroad to cheap labor, thus depriving workers in the U.S. of employment. With that list, we make our patriotic shopping decisions. We need a smart researcher close to that field of investigation to provide the list.

WOW! MIA!

Not one worker should ever think about voting Republican. That would be like giving your executioner a tip for cutting off your head.

 

A Potential Political Conspiracy? Could Be!

I am not a conspiracy theorist, BUT…

I have not ever thought in terms of conspiracies standing behind and explaining great events in our national life. A conspiracy is a cabal agreeing on a plan of action to disrupt, destroy, overturn, undermine some law, or regime, or policy, or activity.

I do not usually see conspiracies at the bottom of all that I consider bad. Mostly, I see the ignorance of the public in making choices to serve better their interests rather than follow some ideology promulgated by a political party platform.

Conspiracies generally seem to be some minority agreeing among themselves to bring some plan of action to fruition in order to gain the power they desparately need to become the majority party. The plan of action must be undercover because the action probably might appear to be wrong, shameful, dishonest, dishonorable, cowardly, or brutish, way beyond simple demagoguery, to achieve some end, such as winning an election. Covert action is the best way to make something bad seem good and natural and desired.

Recently, the “birther” conspiracy gained credibility among people who hated the President.

I remember when President Roosevelt was accused of “inviting” the attack on Pearl Harbor by ignoring credible information reported about threatening Japanese military movements in the South Pacific. Certain historians wrote about the president’s culpability, which on further consideration proved to be untrue. It was said that the President wanted to bring on a war as a way out of the economic doldrums the nation was in.

Collusion, which always has a negative connotation, in a plan is a secret understanding with the intent to accomplish some bad end that cannot be accomplished by open and honest means. Damaging Obama to get him defeated in the next election. Damaging the reputation of President Roosevelt to get him defeated in the next election.

A Current Conspiracy Possible

I am going to pose the emergence of a political conspiracy.

Fact one, we are coming into an election cycle for electing a president, after four years of the Obama administration.

Fact two, the Republicans are out of power in the Administration and Congress.

The third fact is that the Republican Party is composed of people who subscribe to the conservative right ideology, having an overriding preference for unfettered capitalism in business and industry, for the purpose of amassing ever increasing wealth for owners and corporations. And I might add, for the representatives of the people who need big bucks for winning re-election.

Another fact is that the machines of business and industry, mass production lines, and other automated devices along with computerization, providing ever greater efficiencies, are taking manual labor more and more out of any workplace. The work force is diminished in numbers. The machines need maintenance, but they do not organize and make salary and benefits demands.

A fifth fact is true: the owners are sending manual labor to other nations where people work for much lower wages. Called outsourcing, an invention of management to maximise those wealth gains from cheaper labor, unemployment is increased by this fact.

A sixth fact is that a conservative party win at the polls will, I say definitely, eventuate in a win for government deregulation of business and industry, lowering the numerous costly measures for guaranteeing the health and safety of workers and consumers on the job, in the home, and in society generally. They want to win at all costs, at the cost of the health and safety and education of U.S. citizens, in the cities and towns and on the farm, all for the bottom line. Who knows how far they will take their ideology, to the first responders to natural disasters, to infrastructure repair, to the privatization of most government functions, too numerous to list here?

Fact: The workers have a party that opposes the capitalists and their ideology of emaciated government and corporations fattened by privatization of all government acts possible. The Republicans view the Democrats as socialists. The manner in which the Democrats make our government machinery serve the needs of millions of people might be considered a socialization of the major factors embedded in the “General Welfare” language of the Preamble to our social contract, education and good health and fair taxation and workers’ rights and safe environments and air and food and functional infrastructure and — well, you get the idea — that may be called an enlightened socialism. I do not mind that label. It works for me. The government can do it better and cheaper by the very fact that the government does not have a profit motive boosting the costs. We have seen that bad result in private enterprise payments to their golden-tower and golden-parachute CEOs, COTBs, etc. The recent health-care example is a case in point. The opposition must be saying to themslves, “DAMN! We missed a great opportunity to make a killing in that enterprise!” (soto voce, “But just wait ’til we take over coming up!”)

Fact Eight: Collective bargainng by labor is seriously under attack, and has been lost in a couple of cases. More states and the federal government executive, judicial, and legislative branches must be controlled to win the battles against union power to influence corporations and other economic enterprises.

The ninth fact is that the U.S. Supreme Court has defined the corporation as another individual like the one-person-one-vote individual, for purposes of the moneyed support of candidates who speak the capitalistic (increasing-ownership-wealth on the bottom line) ideology.

Fact Ten: To hire the unemployed is in the hands of the conservatives of business and industry. That choice will test their empathy for the unemployed against their profit motive and loyalty to the conservative ideology. The latter, it appears to me, will beat out the former every time. And that may be the basis of a conspiracy among them.

CONCLUSION: Those facts support a political advantage for the conservatives in the Republican Party as long as the jobless rate remains HIGH.

What’s the conspiracy I see?

The issue of “joblessness” is the Trojan Horse, brought into every courtyard of debate by the Republicans to attack the Democrats for their failure to solve that joblessness issue, after the Republicans have conspired to prevent the legislation that offers solutions to the problem. That is the nature of the conspiracy of the Republicans. They successfully conspired to defeat collective bargaining for unionized workers in Wisconsin, in which the workers lost the Constitutional right to peacefully assemble. I am certain they have found in that scheme to keep HIGH the number of people without jobs by refusing to enact job-creation plans, such as the formation of a new infrastructure bank, a certain way to cause the Democrats to lose the next election for the presidency.

All the economic interests of the owners and corporations can be served by keepng “joblessness” high: to irritate Pres. Obama’s constituents enough to cause him and his party to lose the next election. (See fact ten.)

The Republican party line will be this: “Elect us, and watch the jobless rate go down and improve markedly under a Republican government. The Republican policies are the only ones that can and will raise the number of new jobs to make the U.S. prosperous again.”

They will, I say, collude, with the secret understanding that they will only do under a Republican administration, to make the U.S. economy vibrant again, what they just as well could do under a Democrat majority if they wished to cooperate. In effect, they will let the economy and the people suffer many hardships until they rule the roost. They have the ownership power that the Democrat party does not have.

It may be. It could be. I think they have a vested interest in keeping these times BAD for workers. And it seems to me that the workers who vote Republican will vote against their own best interests, seduced in some strange way by the Republican ideology.

I believe our nation should aim for ever higher levels of health and education, and that will only be possible under the Democrats because much of the millions for funding health and education programs and policies will not be siphoned off in profits for the owners. MORE FACTS: The Democrats are government people. The Republicans are capitalistic, for-personal-profit, anti-government people.

I leave you with these questions: Can unemployment be manipulated? Is unemployment/joblessness a variable within the control of an ideology of a political party? Are unemployment rates and corporate profits co-variates? And how could that be? I do not know the full import of what I am asking here. I could use some help.

From Bush to Obama to —

We have had eight years of policy gone horribly wrong in the rape of government under the guise of a “trickle-down” economic ideology. Eight years of economic self-service. The only political ideology was “preemption” and “small government”, under the influence of which came war and “outsourcing” of government services.

The ship of state took on a list to the right that threatened to capsize the vessel when the bilge pumps stopped working. The crew in Congress was deadlocked and the flotsam and jetsam in the hold mounted. But now a new crew of engineers have come aboard to repair the bilge pumps and clear the debris to “right” the ship.

The new captain is not white. He is not black. He is race neutral, and that is where, for the first time, we should all be. He is neither old nor young. His wealth is his serenity and intellect at the helm. In global experience, he has navigated many ports of call.

We are all passengers setting out on a world cruise with him in the wheel-house. I feel confident.

I thought of this limerick, and it may seem odd to you:

There was a young man from Carew,
who found a mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout
and wave it about,
or the others will want one, too.”

Odd? Yes, but not in the context I give it. Obama is the first head of state in the western world who is not white, it has been observed. Now that that road-block has been removed by the exemplar of Obama, any sort of hindrance to having black presidents in other democracies may now disappear.

(I admit, it’s an odd connection.)

Market Watch: McCain’s Heroism Corp.

John McCain started the corporation and owned all the stock. In 2008, he decided to take it public. He started selling the stock and it took off with a high price when people bought into it. However, business started to take a downturn when his advertising turned sour on the competition. That’s where most of the advertising capital was spent, and stockholders generally forgot to look carefully at what the product was. As long as the CEO was a good man with a beautiful wife, had a flip humor and wore the scars of his stock in trade credibily, people continued to buy.

Then he chose the vice-president for his corporation who had no relationship to his business, but the stockholders loved it and his stock had a nice bump.

What followed was devastating. He invented a “slime machine” which cranked out the attack ads that achieved a professional status in the politics game.

Until the vp started to make her sales-pitch. She picked up on the theme set by the CEO’s slime machine, attack the competition. She had to work that way. Even she could not represent how the true stock-in-trade of any political operation, detailed statements of any program of legislation for resolving issue before the public, should be sold to the public at large because she was not aware of what the product was, except a few slogans one sentence long on taxes or the war. She did re-invent definitions for “socialism” and “guilt by association”.

McCain nominated Joe the Plumber to be his secretary-general and titular head of propaganda.

It wasn’t long before the corporation, to boost its sales of McCain’s stock-in-trade started nasty, lying, robocalls and mass media advertising against the competition, cranked out by their newly patented Slime Machine. The corporation gambled every share of its wealth on their invention.

The shareholders will meet all day on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, to vote on the viability of McCain’s (and company’s) Heroism Corporation as the kind of business that can succeed on the strength of what the business has to sell. Because that is generally all it has. It does not have a program clearly stated beyond a few vapid slogans and the CEO’s angry assertions about the competition.

Analysts, at this point, have not been able to pin down the basis of stockholder faith in the corporation. They are puzzled by the popularity of the stock (ticker MAD). It is now trading slightly below its nearest competitor (ticker BOB) which the company it is attempting to trash.

(The BOB stock relies on its policy machine. It makes clear what the program of its company is. It stands for the opposite of MAD. Its CEO is young, energetic, prescient, articulate, global.

Tomorrow’s vote will be a referendum on the strategy of McCain (and the MAD company).

Colin Powell on Obama, McCain and Palin

Colin Powell’s analysis and justifications indicate an unusual insight into the inner qualities of Barack Obama as opposed to his puzzlement at the eccentric behavior of John McCain. Powell has been mis-represented by McCain supporters, using the ancient rhetorical technique of “minifying” him, and in modern lingo, “marginalizing” him. What else are they to do if they are not going to assassinate his character. Maybe that’s next. Powell is a military man and understands the fight he has joined.

Powell has magnified his ethos in speaking against what has gone wrong in our political culture, and as he is pilloried for his endorsement, he will regain some credibility lost in his role in the run-up to th war against Saddam Hussein. Of course, his person will be minified and devalued by those very people he has turned against for doing great wrongs to this political process. Let them stew in their own juices. We should care about Powell’s preferences and cautions in this election.

Powell sees ignorance in truth corrupted for personal gain. How far McCain, the so-called “hero”, has fallen!

“A man’s wisdom is most conspicuous where he is able to distinguish among dangers and make choice of the least.”

McCain has become a world-class liar, as he endorses them in his ads.

A Vietnam Vet, video, on John McCain–Unsuitable for the Presidency!

Please paste this URL into your navigation bar —–> http://blip.tv/file/1223458 <—– to see the testimony of a Viet Nam vet/prisoner who knew John McCain. From his experience, he believes McCain should never have his finger on any red button of military power in such a place as the White House, or anywhere, anytime. He uses descriptions that most of us opposing him have seen abundant evidence of in McCain’s deportment.

John McCain: Country First? I don’t think so.

You, sir, are approving warped messages. “I am John McCain, and I approve this message.” That must indicate that you are, yourself, warped. Your desperation is so great that it is obvious that you have forgotten your country. This country has its ideals. Odd that somebody feels the need to lecture you, YOU, OF ALL PEOPLE! The democratic process is being sabotaged by your nastiness in political advertising. The process involves discussion and debate to resolve social problems. It is a peaceful process, but you have turned it into verbal warfare and have thrown dangerous incendiary devices into the arena.

You have exploited your heroism in war for purposes other than patriotic duty. You distort the messages loaded with hate mongering. You disrespect your main opponent, designated with contempt “that one”. You turn loose onto the world stage of our politics a neophyte who argues not from reason, but from incitement to dangerous acts through ad hominem argument from your model, who makes audiences into beasts shouting criminal acts, and who is lampooned in SNL parody–very funny! You make wild proposals that break over our heads like bombshells. You put much stock in your self-styled labels which evoke the image of an unbranded range animal, or which can also have the meaning of obtaining something by questionable or dishonest means. You make jokes of serious things. You began your effort with a grand illusion; you are ending your effort with the deflation of your grandiose aim to run a clean and honorable campaign. Your message is bankrupt of ideas. I think it has to be that you revered the present president who managed a regime destitute of understanding what this nation must be, a beacon of justice and honorable pursuits, liberty and democracy, and all those ends promised in the Preamble to our social contract.

“Maverick” hell! You are more like a rogue elephant, normally a beast the symbol of wisdom in Asian cultures, famed for their memory and intelligence, but you have strayed from and lost the herd instinct, our solidarity around what good this nation represents. Your sleazy ads do not do us honor.

I believe that you have tarnished the shining image you once had. It is my hope that you will go into retirement along with the president you so lovingly embraced.

I really hesitated a long time to post this entry. It says very harsh things. However, I so much detest what you have done to corrupt honest discussion and debate, the lifeblood of our system, and so I must, sadly, put this out there.

I asked someone, “Do you think John McCain has gone nasty?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“He’s scared. He sees the handwriting on the wall.”

I remembered Belshazzar’s Feast (William Walton), the writing on the wall,

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin

(The days of your kindom are numbered. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.)

Belshazzar had used vessels sacred to another people to toast his gods, and shortly he was destroyed.

Hm-m-m-m.

I believe democracy is one of those “sacred vessels”. I believe democracy needs everyone who claims to live  through it must become a democracy watchdog.

John McCain’s Houses—Nobody Got It Right!

“I’ll have to refer the question to my staff; I’ll get back to youi later on that.” Or words to that effect. Everyone, EVERYONE I heard on the talking-heads shows missed what had happened. His hesitation was NOT due to faulty memory or being out of touch with his personal finances. In the context of that question, a man wanting to get on the right side of every issue that resonates with the electorate in a forum context———I know for certain, as I perceived the situation: JOHN McCAIN WAS EMBARRASSED TO SAY THE NUMBER OF HOUSES HE WOULD HAVE TO OWN UP TO, FOR HE KNEW HOW IT WOULD SOUND TO THE GREAT NUMBERS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE IN TROUBLE.

That was another instance of many where John McCain has demagogued it. Not one commentator got it right. That context was very significant, and JMcC knew exactly how many houses he owns and saw in his own mind an embarrassing, truthful answer, about which he was forced to dissemble.

McCain’s discomfort with that question should also become the voters’ discomfort with John McCain.

The Pick of Joe Biden for VEEP

I am on the record for (long ago) having known that Biden was the man. (I had also preferred Al Gore as an equally perfect pick.) My and my wife’s good judgment has been validated.

Does the pick by Obama show Obama’s weakness in his experience? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Obama wanted to install in the workings of the White House, the Executive Branch, robust and healthy debate, not crony yes-men or shadowy presidents. With Biden, being his own man owning deeply supported information and wisdom, a forceful and decisive speaker, Obama was getting just what he wanted and just what a superior President must have. That’s showing a strength, NOT A WEAKNESS, of an Obama presidency. Such a state of affairs was a void in the Bush regime. Obama wants an equal debating partner to prepare the best case for presentation to the legislators.

Biden is another aspect of CHANGE which is Obama’s theme. Change must be based on high intelligence of a long past to draw upon. The Democrat team now has both.

If people continue to see something “foreign” in Barack Obama, I believe that that word is a euphemistic proxy for a racist viewpoint.

The Game: Password. The Secret Words: “nuance”, “maverick”

The Game: Password. The Game: Political

The Secret Word: “nuance”

What words would you give as hints to your game partner?

What connotation, or undertone does it have?

So many tv news commentator-panelists have used that word as a description of a position statement of a candidate, mostly Barack Obama. The word is used almost exclusively by critics opposed to Obama. The journalist is implying that Obama’s position is too technically difficult and intricate for common consumption, too “elitist” and “intellectual”. Obama’s positions, it is implied, have tones, shades, gradations, fine distinctions, touches, or traces of meaning that are too far from plain spoken, everyday useage to be grasped by the people (the journalists). Listen for that word “nuanced” in journalist or critic reactions and tell me what you derive as the meaning implied.

I get the meaning that they think “nuance” is bad, improper, undesirable, overrefined.

The secret word: “maverick”

What words would you give your team-mate to elicit the secret word?

John McCain has had the maverick reputation.

John, what have you done lately for the good of the maverick cause? (Which is what?) In what have been a non-conformist? You certainly are conforming to the Bush causes, aren’t you? In what instance have you been a rebel? Rebels do not turn humorous in every serious engagement, or make light of the evils of tobacco, or gas economy. Rebels have more gravitas!

What is individualistic about you, John? Are you a particularly unconventional person? Haven’t your votes in Congress regularly followed the party line?

Are you now really performing like the maverick you are portrayed to be?

Come on, John! Give us a maverick performance! Turn on President Bush and call him the names he deserves! Turn away from the negativity you have thrown Obama’s way and re-institute your high-minded, positive credo you started with!

You are not “a refractory, or recalcitrant member of a political party who bolts at will and sets an independent course”. (My $50 dictionary) You are getting good mileage out of undeserved fuel.

Gas Prices and McCain Policy

Old Chinese proverb:

When the house is on fire, it’s too late to dig a well.

When will political leaders become practicing futurists? Looking beyond their natural time horizon, the next election, and taking principled action?

Obama: “…lost his bearings…”(?) Nah!

Barack Obama is reported to have said McCain has “lost his bearings”, as if to say he “lost his marbles”, which refers to a problem of mental decay.

I did not take that meaning. McCain was in the U.S.Navy. “Bearings”, a navigation term used shipboard,
probably was a reference to McCain having lost his direction or position (bearing).

We all know why someone would want to give the statement its most pernicious meaning, don’t we?

Hillary’s Wager

O, ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll bet I’m in office afore ye.
Then me and my colleague will never be the same on the bonny, bonny banks of Potomac.

Rev. Jerimiah Wright: Wheat and Chaff

I heard the Rev Wright speech before the NAACP meeting. I heard the Bill Moyers interview. I heard the mostly negative reactions coming from all the reporters. What did I hear?

I taught intercultural communication. I would not grade the reporter-critics very high in their cultural understanding. They roasted Wright for the chaff, but did not show any understanding of the whole grains of wheat he presented. They threw out the wheat with the chaff. Pastor Wright has very personal and selfish gains to make from becoming controversial and without much care for Barack Obama’s campaign. I understand that. But Wright did make some points that teachers of intercultural communication teach, e.g., the principle that difference is not a deficit. He was both funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar in getting across that message, wheat and chaff. Now that his credibility has been lost, he may be one who will not be listened to, to get that crucial message across.

I hope that point does not get lost in the excoriation of Rev. Wright. Good critics might have made the distinction between the constructive parts and the bad parts. WHICH PARTS WERE OUTRAGEOUS, and WHICH PARTS WERE NOT? WAS THE WOLE SPEECH OUTRAGEOUS? Absolutely not! I’ll tell you what’s outrageous. The accusation of guilt by association in many critical comments by commentators takes us back to the Congressman Joe McCarthy era of witch hunts for “fellow travelers”.

I would like to have seen one fully functional deliberative mind operating as a critic, but I heard no one except Bill Moyers in a thoughtful probing of Wright. Wright made some criticisms of the United States government’s actions. Many people have done that. Black people have much cause for many discriminatory actions by governments of the past. Those points of Wright’s speeches were not taken up in anything I heard. All I heard was ad hominem attacks, name calling. That’s outrageous! The nutrition is in the kernels, but all I saw was the vultures feasting on the chaff.

THE DELIBERATIVE MIND IS A WINNOWER OF IDEAS, CAN DISTIGUISH GOOD FROM BAD. Most speakers and writers have a mix and need readers and listeners who do not throw out the good with the bad. Be judicious!

As I have said before, this election season is in the care, almost exclusively, of the ham-handed reporters wannabe pundits. They do not know how to moderate discussions nor listen respectfully as participant-panelists. They steamroller their fellows and blur disgustingly all others on the panel. Gibbity-gibbity, yackety-yack. The McLaughlin group is the worst of the worst. Chris Matthews as a hard-baller presses hard his view onto his selected toadies. But I have heard the soft-baller Matthews (see elsewhere on this blog) where he dropped the ball.

Bill Moyers had the requisite intelligence to manage an interview with Rev. Wright. He got to the wheat and stepped over the chaff. Sound bites were coming from everyone else.

I believe that Obama needs to give a speech on religion in politics as a counterpart to his racism speech. I believe Clinton needs to give a speech on gender in politics. Obama has proven he can hold forth on a critical issue and have a very satisfying result. All that Clinton can do is perform dirty tricks. One sneaky one is the use of a red hot branding iron, burning “elitist” into the hide of Obama, putting her brand on him and now she owns him. Hillary is the master of cliche, the thoroughly mundane as her head bobbles incessantly. Mundanity. Cliche. Ascribing traits, characteristics to her opponent, and then the label hangs there like the tag on Minnie Pearl’s hat.

I believe that it is much easier to get into trouble in the U.S. if you are black than if you are a female.

(I will write later about one basic course of training I would institute for reporters.)

On Hearing Sen. Obama’s Pastor: The Flip Side

I heard Sen. Obama’s Church of Christ pastor preaching today. I can hear the uproar now even before turning on the talk radio station or the news. I know without listening what they all are about to say. He must denounce and reject that man’s preaching against the singing of the national anthem. Well, hold on. There is a positive side that may not be heard.

Have we ever had indications from Sen. Obama that tell us how deep into the “culture of the black people” he is? Can that be judged by the voters? I know there is a domestic culture of black people that has language, paralanguage and nonverbal dimensions that most of us white folk know little about. I have encountered it and been found wanting in understanding the offenses that may innocently be committed without my awareness. (I know that political correctness should be defined as “cultural astuteness”. PC is an exhibition of CA.)

Since I believe one of our social goals in the U.S. is to have peace and understanding among all citizens of this melting pot, defeating in the long haul all vestiges of racism, sexism, and so forth, it is my obligation to continue my education in the best ways of communicating across cultural differences.

In that spirit, I see a black pastor preaching to his congregation with content I find ridiculous. But that’s his prerogative. His congregation accepts it rather enthusiastically. He is holding up the nation of “the man” as a villain to be disrespected. So that’s the status of our society. People need to know that. That feeling of disrespect is still strong. The report of his preaching puts it out in the open. And that’s the way it should be!

The kicker is that we might now have a President who will bring this society even closer to the problems of our racial divide. (Just as Hillary’s campaign has brought us all closer to an understanding of how a woman might campaign for President. Her campaign will constitute a model for future women candidates for President.)

Obama’s candidacy and perhaps eventual presidency may accomplish some additional healing, of the sort which I heard Bill Cosby and others talk about.

Hearing Obama’s pastor was not a bad thing. Hearing Obama’s pastor was an interesting event, not something Obama should have to show regret for. He should say that it was an event encouraged under Constitutional protection that we can all learn from, learn toleration, understanding, and something about a man who might be our President.

His incendiary speech set nothing on fire. He was asking, in a church building, his deity to damn the U.S. If there had been a tsunami or a tornado or a hurricane devastating our countrymen immediately after he uttered those words, that would have constituted, to the Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson types, proof of the deity’s retribution. There was no breaking of the rules of free speech by the pastor. How often and how many people everyday curse our government for this or that?

The Ticket: Obama-Clinton, Clinton-Obama

As I thought, the two candidates looked awful good together in the debate of 1-31-08, and it is going to be a very difficult choice for nearly everybody. They appeared to be more in harmony with one another, chewing on their minor differences. I thought there’d be a question about it, and it was the final one. It was so obvious, I thought, and I’m not so damn unique.

I would like to see them run together, and it doesn’t appear to me at this time which is the top of the ticket. BECAUSE! Because I envision the offices of president-vice-president evolving into a co-presidency, sharing the ceremonials and legals. A different use of the office of veep may be in the offing. They can and should work more closely together in a division of labor and as an expansion of the checks and balances. No more shadow presidential functions, as at present, with Cheney a sinister figure in the background pulling levers of political action out of view.