Hillaryzilla

Let me get this straight. Barack Obama is brown nosing voters by telling women that the best candidate for women is really a man.

Right. And George Bush has a three digit IQ.

Obama’s latest speeches and television commercials are a real hoot. Suddenly he’s become deeply sensitive to the needs and aspirations of women, seeing as how he was raised by a single mother and is committed to women’s issues and blah, blah, blah.

Right. And Bill behaves himself around female interns.

I didn’t just get off the banana boat. Obama is brown nosing women for votes. Literally brown nosing. Brown. Literally. Anyway, it’s disgusting.

The problem is that some women are just not too smart, and I can’t emphasize that enough when talking about women voters in Iowa. Obama walks around saying things like, “Women, I think, should take pride that Senator Clinton is running, the historica nature of her race… That’s a genuine sign of progress.”

Puhleeze. That’s a sign of pandering, not progress.

What is it that women find appealing about a black man? Is it the lure of forbidden fruit? Does size really matter?  Maybe Obama got pissed because my campaign has more support from black folks than his campaign. Whatever.

What’s more fun than watching a bunch of angry, bitter old men in funeral suits yell at each on stage in front of a national television audience?

Nothing.

I watched the Republican presidential debate on television. What a hoot. It was as if God had raised her hand and not one of the candidates knew how to pronounce the name Hillary. All they did was stutter, bluster, poke, and pick at each other for two hours– like an old man picks at a scab on his nose. It wasn’t pretty. Fun, though.

If I had to pick a winner it was probably Mike Huckabee. Why? All the other old geezers ganged up on poor Mike. Why? Huckabee’s leading the polls in Iowa, so there was an obviously orchestrated effort to bring him down a notch or two.

John McCain looked like the elder statesman on stage. Really elder. I give it to the guy, though. Considering his age, he really broadsided that little weasel Ron Paul. Paul advocates isolationism. McCain said, “That kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II… we let Hitler come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.” Whoa.

If only McCain was a Democrat. If only he was 20 years younger. If only he didn’t look so much like Elmer Fudd.

I had no idea where Ankeny, Iowa was on a map, so I rejoiced when the plane blew a tire on the tarmac in Washington. What a relief. Well, it didn’t last long. Airports actually carry spare tires.

Even funnier than the fact that there’s a place called Ankeny, is the fact that I was actually in Ankeny 14 years ago stumping for Bill. The topic then is the topic today. Health care. Political footballs never die, they just get carried back and forth.

Since I was a couple of hours late getting in to Iowa (airplane tires don’t blow themselves up) we had to feed lunch to all the people waiting in line at the Des Moines Area Community College. Since Iowans don’t contribute much money to a presidential campaign, expenses and contributions were pretty much a wash.

I found out that Ankeny is over 100 years old. I believe it. Some of those wrinkled old codgers in Iowa look like they’ve been facing a North wind for about 100 years.

What’s interesting about Ankeny, besides the fact that anyone lives here, is that their little community college is named Des Moines Area Community College. It’s as if they don’t want anyone to know they live in Ankeny and their kids attend ACC. ‘Des Moines’ sounds so French and classy. Duh-moines. Duh. That cracks me up every time.

I need some good news. This whole Iowa thing has given me a headache. Now I hear that Oprah’s coming to Iowa to campaign for Obama. What does she see in the man?

Bill says to stick with the game plan and waved some new Gallup Poll in my face which is supposed to make me feel better. This poll shows me leading all the Republicans in the presidential race, even Giuliani, but the margin is thin. I beat McCain, too, but only by a hair. Thompson and Romney get clobbered.

The same Gallup Poll shows Barack Obama barely ahead of all the Republican candidates except Giuliani, and that’s a dead heat. I just don’t get it. The Republicans have crapped all over the country in the past seven years. Unpopular war. Budget deficits. Scandals. Moron for a president. After all that, the best any Democratic candidate can do is win by a few points over a shifty New York lawyer who’s been married three or four times already.

There’s only one thing left to do. Get out the Clinton-Obama in 2008 stickers.

Bill just gave me the bad news. He was on the phone with Newt Gingrich. According to Newt’s view from his personal political crystal ball, he thinks Barack Obama will win the Iowa caucus in January.

I cried.

We put in so much time and money slogging around Iowa corn fields the past couple of years. I’ve still got some kind of fungus between my toes from all the mud. And Bill tells me I’ve got an eye twitch every time someone says ‘Iowa.’ Honestly, I feel let down. Betrayed. Buggered. The fact that it was the worst of all possible predictions and it came from Newt Gingrich only made the feeling worse.

After all, Gingrich is just never wrong. The man has some kind of crystal ball. He can see the future. How else do you explain that he knew his wife would get cancer so he went out and found another wife? It’s uncanny.

Bill tried to get Newt to look farther ahead, to Super Tuesday, then to the Democratic Convention, but Gingrich wouldn’t bite. Maybe there’s some kind of time limit on his crystal ball.

I’m devastated. I really don’t want to go back to Iowa.

Yesterday I was in Sioux City, IA when I ran into a woman with a bald head who looked like a man with a bald head at a football game.

Someone painted her head red, white, and blue, with some flag stripes, a few white stars and a nice “Hillary” logo along the side. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.

Well, come to find out, the man was actually a woman who lost all her hair which made her bald which is why she looked like a man with a painted head heading to a New England Patriots game.

Campaigning in Iowa requires sacrifices. For example, I have to take my picture with anyone and everyone at each campaign stop, so when I saw this sickly bald headed woman with a painted head who looked like a man, I figured, “hey, against this woman’s face, I’ll look pretty good” so we did a photo shoot.

Don’t I look healthy compared to her?

Anyway, this woman gets her picture taken with me and I make the big mistake of saying, “Thanks for your support. How are you doing?” It’s supposed to be the other way around. I don’t really care how voters are doing, but they all like to be thanked for their support.

This bald headed woman starts yammering on and on about tonsillitis, surgery, cancer, chemotherapy, and yada yada yada. You can never be too careful when talking to voters. She told me she has five kids, and four adopted kids, and two of them have autism.

How convenient is that? Right then and there we came up with a plan to support autism research and that gets plenty of applause, and then this bald headed woman starts crying. Turns out she’s a Republican but now she wants to campaign for me.

I love this country.

Barack Obama has it right. My campaign polls, triangulates, and tests opinions so I end up telling voters what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

It’s what good politicians do.

In the entire Democratic presidential campaign to date, has Barack Obama ever told a crowd something they do not want to hear? Of course not. If he won’t do it, I won’t do it.

Running a nationwide campaign requires each candidate to be pragmatic and deal with the realities of politics. One of those implicit realities is that we only tell voters what we have polled, tested, triangulated, and agree is what they want to hear.

Do voters want to hear trash talk about Bush and Iraq? Of course, so I don’t disappoint anyone. Do voters know that we need to improve health care by increasing coverage and reducing costs? Of course, that’s what I tell voters because that’s what they want to hear.

Is it my fault they don’t ask the follow up questions like, “Uh, how will you increase coverage and reduce costs?” Hell if I know, but nobody asks, so I don’t worry about it.

Magicians have some kind of code that prohibits them from disclosing the details of their sleight-of-hand tricks. Politicians have no code, so everything is fair game. Most of the voters in any given election are in the middle, Democrats are on the left, Republicans are on the right, and as the campaign moves toward the election, both of us veer to the middle, in some kind of mirror image swoop on the electorate.

We do that by starting off a campaign by telling the fringe voters, the extremists, what they want to hear. Once they’re on board, politicians shift gears toward the center to pick up more support by telling those voters what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear is a little different than what we, the politicians running for office, just said.

Politicians tell voters what they want to hear. It’s what we do. Fortunately, for politics as a career, most voters don’t pay attention, and those that do can’t remember what they ate for breakfast yesterday.

Sometimes politics is just too easy. All that’s really necessary to get positive news coverage is to watch CNN, find out what’s happening that voters don’t like, then come out against it.

This week it’s toxic toys from China.

The Chinese government is like a bunch of little piggies wallowing in the mud. Do a little mud slinging in their direction and they squeal, well, like little piggies.

Here’s the short version. Chinese toy makers send toxic toys to the United States. We complain and halt toy shipments from China. Chinese government officials claim to be cracking down, but don’t really do anything, and more toxic toys are sent to the United States.

That’s my cue, so I step in and call the situation “unacceptable.” The little piggies in the Chinese government call that slander. Whatever.

What’s up with all the posturing, little piggies? Squeal on something worthwhile, like a fully armed nuclear aircraft carried docking in Hong Kong. But toys? China owns 60-percent of the global toy-making business, and 100-percent of the toxic toy making business.

Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” So, little piggies in the Chinese government, it ain’t slander if you did it.  You did it. Fix it already.

And stop the squealing. Did the Japanese squeal after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Think about it.

Wine and turkey do not a good dinner meal make. I took two naps today, and in both cases turkey was involved.

Speaking of turkey, I got a call and an endorsement tonight from, guess who? Bernadette Chirac, the wife of former French President Jacques Chirac. Bill says Bernadette is what I’ll look like in 20 years. I told him that in 20 years he’ll look like what her husband Jacques Chirac will look like in 20 years.

Think of Bernadette’s endorsement as some kind of Corrupt Foreign Leader Constituency for Hillary movement. The Chiracs don’t care much for George Bush and American diplomacy, Texas style. It makes you wonder why the French voted in Nicolas Sarkozy, since he spends much time kissing where Barbara Bush used to wipe. After all, George couldn’t do it himself.

Bill likes Jacques Chirac because he always has a new dirty joke to tell, but he doesn’t think much of Bernadette. Bill says she looks like CNN’s Jack Cafferty in drag. Neither one has aged well.

Why can’t they just have a primary election like everyone else? What makes Iowa voters so special that they have to caucus to figure out who they might consider voting for if they actually had an election?

I think it has something to do with the fear of being obscure. That happens to voters of states that are so far away they might as well be a part of Canada. New Hampshire does the same thing as Iowa, but at least they’re smart enough to call their’s a primary election. The same thing is called a caucus in Iowa. Go figure.

On a per vote basis, we probably spend more money in Iowa than any other state in the union, and there are plenty of states we won’t visit during the campaign. Ever. The best voters in those states can hope for is to look up in the sky and watch my plane and imagine there’s a presidential candidate up there that cares.

Iowa gets some sweat and toil because they chose to vote early. A bunch of other states don’t vote early, if at all, so they don’t matter much to a campaign. Can you say “Idaho?” In fact, my list of no-show states is rather long, considering that all the states together probably have a total population approaching one or two million.

North and South Dakota? Why don’t they just join forces and become Dakota. Call it, “Dakota: Canada’s Badlands.” Tourists go to Canada. If people thought Dakota was a part of Canada, the state would have more tourism.

Alaska? Fogettaboutit. Rhode Island? How do some of these states even get two senators? The only reason I will visit Delaware is because of Joe Biden. He’s a friend of Bill. Even Delaware only has one Senator.

Back to Iowa. I’ve about had it with these visits to Frozen Stick Land. Do you know how cold it is in Iowa in winter? The wind only makes it worse and the people there are so dense they don’t even know where the wind comes from. They all sit inside around a fireplace all winter and talk about politics and recipes and the price of corn and watch Wolf Blitzer’s beard turn gray.

Then, once every four years they expect a bus load of presidential candidates to drive through the state, smiling, shaking hands, dumping campaign money on both their television stations, and literally groveling for a few thousand caucus votes.

Enough is enough already. Iowa is a four letter word. Guess which one?