School (and, one presumes, most UT classes) is out, and the difference on the street is startling. Lots of Obama supporters out on the street, waving signs at passing cars, encouraging people who are driving by. Didn’t see any Hillary supporters, but I’m not exactly plowing through downtown; still out in the Rollingwood area.

Just got another campaign phone call, this time from Michelle Obama telling me that the polls close in just over two hours, and reminding me about the funkiness of the Texas pri-caucus. Impressive saturation. Still no Hillary calls. What’s up with that?

It’s a new experience for me.

I’m middle-aged, and this isn’t exactly my first Presidential primary as a voting adult. But as someone who has only lived in California and Texas, my vote has never really counted; the primaries have basically been over by the time they rolled around to me. And to be honest, that’s what I was expecting again.

Silly, silly me. Not this year.

For the first time, my vote is being courted. For the first time, I’m receiving multiple phone calls urging me to vote, and asking me to vote for a specific person. The sensibilities of my Uncle John in Derry, N.H. may be dulled by the repetitiveness of this sort of thing happening to him every four years, but for me it’s a new experience, and I’m really enjoying it.

So what’s it like on the ground here in Austin, Texas for a Democratic voter?

2/29-3/4: Lots of phone calls–no fewer than 5, and probably more that I didn’t pick up the phone for–urging me to vote for Obama. None for Hillary. None. Further, the Obama calls were smart; prior to Friday evening, they were all urging me to vote early for Obama. Afterwards, to vote on Tuesday and asking if I knew about the Texas primary/caucus duality.

Obama was in the area last week (I think); lots of advanced notice, lots of information on location and time. Hillary was in town yesterday; no notice, no information on location and time, and she was at a place (The Burger events center? What the hell is that?) that neither I nor my wife have even heard of, let alone knew where it was located.

3/4, 7:45 am: Hauled myself out of bed at 6:30, not because I’m so eager to vote (although I am), but because it was Dad’s Turn to get the kids ready for school. On the way to my daughter’s school, the number of lawn signs has decreased since yesterday, interestingly. The neighbor across the street has taken down their “Hillary” sign. Lots of other signs on Exposition, a main neighborhood street down near the river, have been removed since yesterday afternoon. Go figure.

8:10am: Pulling up to the voting location–which here in Rollingwood is the municipal building–I see something I have never personally observed before: a line of cars along the road, parked in front. I manage to park in the tiny lot (4 slots, shared with the town’s police department in the same building). Hillary supporters have set out a table just the other side of the lot, presumably one inch from the “no canvassing here!” line.

Voting is a multi-step process. You have to show your voter card or ID to the “registrar” lady. She gives you a couple of stickers. Then you move over to your party table; they take the stickers and paste them in forms, and then ask you to sign in. Then you move over to the voter admin guy; he’s the one who gives you your–I don’t know what to call it; a voter receipt?–and your unlock code for the voting machines. Then it’s over to the machines to vote.

Rollingwood is a pretty affluent community, with a population of around 1200, and forms its own precinct. We have about a dozen voting machines, and they weren’t all being used by any means, and there sure wasn’t a line. Every time I blitz through–I’ve never had to wait–I always feel bad for more heavily populated precincts where they probably have fewer machines for far more people.

Rollingwood has voting machines; these have four buttons (next, previous, enter, and the big red VOTE! button), and this funky wheel dealie that scrolls through the lists. While I was voting I kept thinking about how easy it would be for someone with shaky hands (and my hands shake because of the Ultram I take) to screw up and vote for the wrong person. You can go back and correct fairly easily, but there’s no question in my mind that some people will vote for the wrong person and not know it. There is a final screen that lists all your selections, so you can double-check at the end, but still.

8:25am: Finished voting. There has been a constant movement of people in and out while I was voting. Certainly not a mighty stream, but definitely higher than a trickle. “Good throughput,” as we nerds say.

More later at the “precinct convention,” better known as the caucus portion of the Texas two-step.

There’s a lot of things about this campaign that defy my understanding, and so I’m going to bore you poor folks with them.

• Why–why why why!–does anyone think Hillary Clinton can win the general election? Too many people hate her, and it is the only thing that could galvanize the republican nutty-right base enough to bring them out in large numbers.
• What’s the hooha about Obama’s rhetorical gifts being a negative. Whose genius idea was that? What, we’re supposed to ignore the fact that, finally, we have a candidate who is an actual, honest-to-god orator. This is a good thing, folks.
• On the flip side, what is it with the press and Clinton? Why do they hate her so much, and enjoy their shadenfruede so visibly when she is struggling? Did she drop fleas in Tim Russert’s shorts or something?
• I used to like McCain, but he sold his soul to win this primary. Cut taxes! Fence us in! More war in Iraq! Good God; how can anyone in their right mind vote for that guy? If the world was a just place, McCain would get the 30% hardcore right-wing loony vote, and the democratic candidate the other 70%. Too bad it won’t work out that way.
• Anyone who’s arguing that Obama is an empty suit is either being obtuse, or simply obnoxious. He went out there in Houston tonight and gave a speech so long and detailed it was damn boring. My preference: to know that he has that stuff in reserve, and then listen to the inspiration stuff that will get it done. Reagan didn’t pull in “Reagan Democrats” with his policy wonkishness, kiddies.

It would be arrogant and presumptuous of me to even pretend to know what it’s like to grow up “biracial” like Barack Obama. Or anyone else, for that matter. But consider this:

When I was a kid, my relatives all lived in New England or New York. All of them. My Dad and uncles and aunts married other white, New England Catholics. My Dad was a radical for marrying a non-Catholic. A non-Catholic.

My cousins and I, not to put too fine a point on it, live everywhere, from New England to L.A. to Texas. One cousin has been in New Zealand for over a year. But even more than that, we’ve gone outside the bounds of our “culture.”

My sister-in-law is Assyrian, moving from Iraq to the U.S. with her family when she was 12 (they’re Christian). My brother-in-law is half Japanese, and spent some time growing up on Okinawa. My niece looks Asian, not Caucasian. My son is adopted from Taiwan. My wife is from the South (my daughter qualifies both as a D.A.R. and a Daughter of the Confederacy).

And this is where racism is changing on the ground, I suspect.

How can you think “all Asians [fill in the blank]” when your son is an Asian? When your niece is an Asian? How can you look at Iraq dispassionately when your brother’s wife and her family fled the country?

And how can you not look at someone like Barack Obama and not feel that he represents you better than anyone else probably could?

I don’t think racial problems in this country are ever going to heal entirely. But if they do, it’s going to be because of millions of families like mine, where the children didn’t give a rip about following their parent’s faith, or staying put in the ancestral home, or dating who their parents thought was “appropriate.” We’re going to heal because it’s harder, and hurts more, when “the other” that you’re fighting or railing against is really not “other” at all.

Then again, maybe I’m just a naive idealist.

In every election that I can remember, the Republicans hammer the Democrats over two main issues: national defense, and economics. And the craven Democrats truly suck at deflecting these comments.

As Al Smith once said, “Let’s look at the record.”

“Trickle-down” economics, or Reaganomics, or “VooDoo Economics” (as George H.W. Bush called it) had a 12-year run from 1981-1993. Taxes on the upper income brackets were massively slashed. The result? Some good times, two or three recessions, and a huge buildup of debt from the exploding deficit.

George W. Bush’s version also included massive tax cuts that went disproportionately to the upper income brackets. The result: some good times, a couple of recessions, and a huge buildup in the debt. Bush brags about job creation, but many months the number of jobs created has not exceeded the number of new workers entering the market; the way I learned math, that’s a net loss of jobs.

Conclusions: Tax cuts do not pay for themselves. “Trickle down” economics increases creates a deficit and increases the debt. Tax cuts for the upper income brackets do not provide a massive stimulus in job creation.

By contrast, against the votes of every Republican in Congress, Bill Clinton passed a budget that included tax increases in 1993. The result: the longest period of economic growth in this country’s history, including the creation of millions of jobs.

Conclusion: the Republicans don’t know dick about how to make the economy hum, and are just blowing smoke when they say they do.

On defense, the “adults” who took over from Clinton have been responsible for the debacle in Iraq, and letting Afghanistan go to hell after they had taken out the Taliban. Now, the projected defense budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars for next year alone. Yeah, them Republicans sure is good at defense!

So in short, the Republicans have shown through their own actions that they are not superior at managing economic policy or defense. So Democrats, show some friggin’ backbone when they accuse you of it!

Just some random, semi-political observations:

• There’s something wrong when your country doesn’t create its own Stuff. Cars, dishwashers, TVs, refrigerators; we don’t make our own stuff, and that strikes me as a Bad Idea. I don’t have a solution; when you can manufacture Stuff for a fraction of the price in Taiwan or China or Indonesia or wherever, you can’t continue to pay workers in the U.S. a living wage to manufacture the same Stuff. But still, something’s out of whack.
• I don’t think Hillary has a prayer of winning the general election, and it drives me nuts how many people try to rationalize their way around it. I don’t give a rip what the polls say in “head to head matchups;” there are just too many people who hate her and won’t vote for her. It’s really that simple. All else is pundit-and-campaign blather.
• Speaking of Hillary, I used to really like Bill Clinton. I think he did a good job as president, and has done pretty well since then. Now, though, he simply won’t shut up. He’s fomenting civil war in the Democratic party just so his wife can be elected President, and it stands a good chance of putting another Republican bonehead back in the White House. Bill: shut up!
• And frankly, I’m am so ready for the Clintons to go away. Very very ready. What next; they run Chelsea for office? Go away!
• We have got to have energy independence. We used to, but now we’re stuck. It’s absurd. Why haven’t we brought the hammer down on Saudi Arabia, when the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from there? Why are we playing footsie with Iranian speedboats in the Straight of Hormuz? Why do we give a shit about Iran at all? Why did we just “sell” $20 billion of military hardware to these extremist whack jobs? Because they have the oil, and have us by the balls, is why. Why U.S. companies don’t invest in alternative energies and try to corner the market now, I have no idea. It baffles me. Isn’t that what Capitalist Robber Barons are supposed to do?
• We’ve tried Trickle-down economics now for 23 years; it doesn’t work. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, budget deficits are bad, and Reaganomics only creates huge budget deficits. Which will destroy this country in the end. The Reaganauts out there can bellow all they want about how “If there had been government cuts, it would have worked!” Well, maybe, but I think that a quarter of a century proves that Government doesn’t have the ability to do that matching, so Reaganomics doesn’t work. Sorry, kids.
• And due to Reaganomics Bush-style, we now have larger deficits, and a larger debt, than Reagan could have possibly imagined. And what does this do? It means that with countries like China, we have basically zero diplomatic leverage because they hold our markers on so many loans. (How much of our debt does Saudi Arabia finance, I wonder?) Ditch the Reaganomics and get back to some fiscal discipline, you boneheads.

That’s enough bitching for one day, don’t you think?

Or “whinging,” as they call it in the British world.

Ol Steve Jobs just finished his new products announcement at Apple, and it’s funny for me in a number of ways:

• I never used to give a rip about MacWorld, as I work in the PC universe pretty exclusively
• I was just whining myself a few months ago about how innovation at Palm is completely dead, and here’s Apple–itself given up for dead multiple times over the years–literally en fuego with innovations
• I have resisted going to Macs for years–about 25 years, to be exact–due to the price, and the fact that as a freelancer, I need to be able to use certain particular applications that are PC based; and yet, I find myself actually considering getting a Mac (at least as a secondary system)

But that being said, let’s start with the whining:

• I’m glad to be able to personalize my Home screen on the iPhone, but I would have appreciated things like Bluetooth A2DP or voice dialing.
• No announcement about a new iPhone with 16GB (or more?).
• No word about the timeframe for the 3G iPhone?
• No word about things like–oh, I dunno, native games?
• The worst thing, of course, is Apple’s simply idiotic restrictions on “rental” content. Look, I know Jobs probably had to accept some compromises in order to get so many Old Media companies to sign on, and I can sorta accept the one month limitation on “rented” movies. (I put “rented” in quotes, by the way, because “renting bits” seems like a weird concept to me.) But forcing you to finish watching movies within 24 hours of starting them? That’s utter stupidity. One of the beauties of buying a movie or TV episode is that you can watch as much as you want, whenever you want. It will frequently take me two or three or more days to watch a movie (on DVD or an iPhone); I don’t see any good reason why I should be limited to “hurry up and watch!”

  I can see no reason–honestly, none–for “renting” a movie through iTunes when I can get the same movie, probably for a less price per-unit, from Netflix, which I can then watch whenever I want, as many times as I want, taking as long as I durn well please. This is a hugely stupid move, in my opinion.

• How about copy and paste capability? Seems pretty important. Hey, call me crazy.
• And lest I forget, still no eBooks! C’mon, Jobs! Get on the stick!

Anyway, like I said, I’m just whining. I’m still pretty excited to see what Apple will come out with over the next few months (my guess: a 3G iPhone by June).

Rudy Guiliani is of course one of the most terrible cases of a public figure being a Johnny one-note. For Guiliani, 9/11 is the answer to every question. How do you feel about the Iowa results? “I felt much worse things on 9/11.” What do you think of Hillary Clinton crying? “I cried too sometimes during 9/11.” The word “shameless” doesn’t even begin to describe this guy.

But Bush is just as bad. Worse, really, since he’s the President. Yesterday he gave a “wide-ranging” press conference about the economy. Here’s what the Washington Post said:

President Bush gave a wide-ranging speech about the economy yesterday, but proposed no new policies to deal with the emerging economic distress.

That perfectly sums up Bush. Bush–who chooses a policy and then sticks to it no matter what–never proposes new policies. He’s like all those “New and Improved!” products: the same old crap in a brand new package. With a tiny bit of rewriting, that quote can apply to every Bush speech:

“”President Bush gave a wide-ranging speech about Iraq yesterday, but proposed no new policies to deal with the emerging sectarian strife.”

“President Bush gave a wide-ranging speech about North Korea yesterday, but proposed no new policies to deal with the emerging dangers of their nuclear capability.”

“President Bush gave a wide-ranging speech about Iran yesterday, but proposed no new policies to deal with the Iranian Government.”

And so on.

I can’t wait until this guy is out of office. The only question is, how much more damage can he do in his remaing 12 months?

In reading a “Best of 2007” movie list on Moviefone, I had a bunch of random thoughts about the films and the actors that I thought I’d bore you with:

• Why do all actresses–even the naturally voluptuous ones like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Winslet and (most alarmingly) Jennifer Connally–have to be rail-thin? First of all, every guy I know likes women who are shaped like (gasp!) women. You know: with breasts and hips and a backside and so on. But second of all, what on Earth is someone thinking by taking a womanly knock-out like Christina Ricci and trying to make her look like Kate Hudson? Yeesh. Does anyone find that attractive?
• Speaking of Johansson, did anyone think that her appearance in Home Alone 3 would be the steppingstone to massive stardom? You never can tell.
• Do Ethan Hawke or Timothy Hutton ever comb their hair? Do they even have combs?
• Having Cate Blanchett play Dylan is genius. But it’s not enough to get me to watch “I’m Not There.”
• What the heck do people love so much about Naomi Watts? I admit I’ve only seen her in a couple of movies, but she’s a) a block of wood, and b) totally generic looking in that “skinny blonde Hollywood actress” way. I mean, there have got to be a million of them (and I mean that literally) in L.A.; why so much love for this one?
• Am I the only guy in the world who feels sorry for Chris Cooper, who always seems to be stuck playing dicks?
• Speaking of feeling lonely, while I like Knocked Up, I certainly didn’t find it as hilarious as The 40 Year-old Virgin or Wedding Crashers (to name a couple of recent comedies I liked). Did I miss something?
• Every critic in the world seems to love The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and I may well too, if I ever see it. But honestly, I would have to be pretty worked up to want to see a movie about a guy who can only move his eyelid, for crying out loud. All the reviews I’ve read sound a lot like my mother when I was 10, telling me that I would love those lima beans, if I only gave them a try. (I tried them, nearly gagged, and ran outside and spit them out, in case you were wondering.)
• I’m a big animation fan and I love Brad Bird, but does anyone really think Ratatouille was better than The Incredibles or Iron Giant?
• I’m still waiting to see Juno, but the backlash against it kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. My guess is, 7 years of Bush has made reviewers grump.

Tune in to my next fluffy offering, weeks from now!

Am I the only guy in America who has noticed that Mitt Romney bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Fred Gwynne, most famous for his role as Herman Munster? Judge for yourself:

Illegitimate son? Illegal clone? Separated at birth and cryogenically frozen for a couple of decades?

I can’t believe all those political columnists–and, more importantly, political cartoonists–have missed this. Tom Toles, get cracking!

In the meantime, contemplate the prospect of a President Herman Munster. America, the choice is yours!