Election Post Mortem

The election is over, 2007 has mercifully come to an end, and we have someone new we can burn in effigy when times at U4Prez get rough. While Eric Gurr certainly has done his share to garner criticism, the democratic process, however legitimate it might be around here, produced a President.

I congratulate Faustus37, better known to Idahoans as W. Lane Startin, better known to Evie as Daddy, for being the first President chosen by the candidates of U4Prez.

Okay, that’s long enough of a honeymoon. You can officially start ripping on him.

Voting for Faustus for President at U4Prez is sort of like voting for Winnie the Pooh for President of the Hundred Acre Wood. After he won Democratic primary #3, it was evident he was the man to beat. And let’s face it, Independents and Republicans, he was able to accomplish what the rest of us couldn’t—he got his entire party behind him.

While I don’t consider a victory of six to nine votes, depending on who you listen to, a decisive mandate, I do feel Faustus is probably the best choice for U4Prez at this juncture. This place needs someone who can start right away, and he hasn’t screwed around, already putting together a Cabinet and taking an active part of the Constitution we at Kiss & Tell had previously discussed.

Faustus’s win did not come without its share of controversy. Many candidates were screaming foul about how votes were gathered, not just concerning Faustus, but in the other camps as well. Like virtually every other election in U4Prez history, this one will be questioned long after the fact.

All this, you already know. You didn’t come here to read about events you participated in and already know backward and forward. You came to see how I would torture the facts, twist events to fit my warped view of the world, and butcher history for my own delight.

And away I go.

Musicman deserved every one of those 42 votes he got, and not a single one more. Whether my previous comment about how a vote for Music is a vote coming from your rectum had anything to do with his poor showing, I don’t know, but I have no problem taking an inkling of credit for it. Music was the victim of a thoroughly divided GOP, and while Mduminiak did the very noble thing in taking the blame for the Republicans’ pathetic showing in the election, I think he quit about three months too late. Musicman was thrown under the bus for Mduminiak’s ineptitude, much of which has been recorded elsewhere on this blog.

Mduminiak can’t say Olivia didn’t warn him. I was saying as early as July, the Steering Committee was a bad idea, but NOOOOOO, Monkeyboy was going to divide his party, no matter what anyone told him. He installed his own flunkies and more or less turned the entire U4Prez GOP into his personal Liberty Caucus, the same way Kempite put the LC together in the first place: throw in a few moderates and liberals as tokens to make it look broad based, but make absolutely sure the extreme right wins out, by any means necessary.

I know it’s the politically expeditious thing to do, to tell the rest of us all is well, Olivia is just making shit up, but when you have high-profile Republicans like Copulate and HAK beating down the Steering Committee’s door to get in, and lackeys like Goffdale and Friday acting like they actually know something, something’s not quite in sync with reality. The very fact that Mduminiak set up his own buddies in this committee screamed cronyism, and considering the real GOP has been riddled by one awful appointment by Bush after another after another, and we have to watch in awe their complete ineptitude when things like a hurricane drenches New Orleans, I’m not how anyone can think anything but another disaster could occur. Mduminiak remained obstinate, denying the very truth that his party was fracturing; it’s not news that Mduminiak, Kempite and the Hard Right wanted to steer the GOP even further to the right, and they fully expected the slightly more moderate elements of the party, like Copulate and HAK and Efferiss, to follow blindly in partisan loyalty.

This piss poor decision bore its fruit in the Republican Convention and the multiple runoffs. There is a potential for things to turn ugly anytime Copulate gets in the middle of it, and this was no exception. Musicman might have won the nomination, but instead it being a uniting victory, it was a stumbling escape from a war of attrition. Musicman survived instead of conquered, and by the skin of his teeth, by the looks of it.

For his part, Musicman could have done a better job of uniting the party after his “victory”, but instead of picking a running mate that could have done that, he picked his friend, Ghost. At one point this summer, I thought Ghost and Musicman were one and the same, for one always did what the other did, one was the other’s shadow. As much as I can appreciate the loyalty (I said previously I would have picked DonnyWiz to be my VeePee if I were in such a position), considering a GOP in ruins, he could have done better by picking a better mate. This is where thinking only of yourself hurts an entire party. Despite months of Mduminiak’s gross negligence and ignorance of how dangerous that negligence was, Music could have repaired some of the damage done by an egotistical party leader and a brutal convention. Instead, he thought only of himself. Which is why he deserved 42 votes but not 43.

For the Republicans, 2007 proved one thing, and unless they solve this one problem in 2008, the same thing will happen. And that thing is, don’t fuck with Copulate! All throughout the year, Copulate was a thorn in the Hard Right’s side, questioning any sort of authority with his customary variety of caustic sarcasm and relentless nagging. He was a high-profile candidate that no hardcore conservative could stand, and because the self-proclaimed powers of the GOP wanted to go further right, Copulate was deemed an outsider, a nuisance. Next year’s leadership would do itself a favor in keeping Copulate in the loop, if for no other reason but the old adage of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Left to his own devices, Copulate will fuck the GOP up again in 2008. Instead of engaging him in constant bickering, instead of letting him turn molehills into mountains, instead of letting minor incidents become front-page news, I strongly encourage you to play nice with him, find a way to include him into your schemes. You definitely want him on your side instead of against you. He is a warrior. Enlist him before you allow him to feel like an outsider. He made more of a difference in determining the president as a one-primary-win candidate than the party leader and the longtime Golden Boy Kempite. If there are any dirty-tricks or rumors of dirty-tricks, he will be all over it and biting hard. The best offense, in this case, is a good defense, and if you can’t beat Copulate, let him join you.

Two of the three major candidates employed late-registering candidates to boost their numbers. There isn’t anything illegal about it, some would even call it ethical. Not me. Among others, I noticed the stream of newbies coming in on the last night of the election. While I can appreciate someone working within the rules to find an advantage, the whole thing just reeks. Many are questioning the validity of this election, which figures, every election has been tainted, why should the big one be any different?

The rosy comments Gurr put on the homepage concerning this last year being a banner year, I hope no one bought that trash. Just like Friday and Goffdale trying to convince everyone Olivia is full of shit and the GOP is just fine, Gurr has no choice in the matter. He had to put on his brave face and lie. In such a speech, of course he isn’t going to mention how the moderators—him being one among equals—fell asleep behind the wheel on several occasions, screwing several candidates out of their positions in run-offs and primaries. He’s not going to tell you he had his favorites, and I can say this because I was one, and Kempite was another. He’s not going to tell you his wanting to buddy-up with his favorites, and his desire to play on U4Prez and partake the talk show circuit, not really caring how it looked to new candidates trying to get a toehold, while the creator was laughing it up with his handpicked president to be. He’s not going to tell you how this very blog got the attention of his corporate masters, forcing them to jerk his chain back and knocking him down to glorified-moderator status. He’s not going to tell you how every election can now be scrutinized and seen as frauds. He’s not going to tell you how his own pick for President was guilty of manipulating votes, proving every word ever uttered on this blog concerning corruption and the fix. And in what should have been U4Prez’s finest moment, he’s not going to tell you how the general election was tainted by the questionable ethics displayed with new candidate registration. Gurr’s optimistic comments were complete horseshit, and anyone who’s been at U4Prez for any significant amount of time knows it was horseshit.

But we can do something about 2007. We can learn from it and never let it happen again.

The Constitution is the perfect place to ferret out all the problems we’ve seen this past year, and correct them, once and for all. Gurr either won’t do it or can’t do it, so we’re going to do it.

In what is already turning into the biggest multipartisan project in U4Prez history, ideas for a Constitution are being brainstormed by many candidates. Even those who have previously opposed the writing of a Constitution (BigDaddy, Copulate, and Mduminiak, to name three) have contributed their thoughts to it. This is reason to celebrate, because this is a recognition that U4Prez does have problems, and it’s not just a handful of disgruntles candidates complaining. We can’t solve these problems unless we know they exist, and unless we’re honest about them, any solution will be in vain.

President Faustus supports the project, and he has named Olivia as Chairperson of the Constitution Committee. I will be talking more about this on U4Prez, on the U4Prez Constitution Caucus. We’ve already had at least one world-class brainstorming session, and in a little over a week, we should have rough draft #2 up for dissection and criticism and committee rewrites.

2008 does not have to be a repeat of 2007. Virtually every candidate has, at one time or another, expressed dissatisfaction with U4Prez. By working together in the spirit of camaraderie, the candidates can create a means by which the many problems with U4Prez, especially those concerning the moderators and our interface with them, can be resolved, and an infrastructure can be put up to solve any other upcoming crisis. Up until this pivotal point in the history of U4Prez, we were at the mercy of the creator and his moderators, who collectively proved to be inept, corrupt, favoring, negligent, and at times, outright dangerous and not giving a damn. As of this writing, we no longer have to be victimized by their carelessness, their dumb little games, their corruption, and their fuck-ups. As of right now, we no longer can blame the moderators for all the problems we’ve had to deal with. We can empower ourselves. We can ensure the moderators abide by a certain protocol, and if not, we can have a system to alleviate any effects of their negligence.

The election is over. We lived through it, just barely, but we did it. 2007 was a year of figuring out what U4Prez is and what we could do with it. We no longer have anyone but ourselves to blame if 2008 goes the same way. We certainly have the brains and the creativity to make it so; all we need is the will.