Eenie Meenie Chili Beanie

It's fun to try and make predictions. I have had mixed success making forecasts on this political race. A couple of successes (and nooo, I didn't blog them, just stuff I said to MrB) are (1) when McCain was busted broke and it looked like he was out the door, I predicted that he was going to make a big comeback, and (2) when Guiliani said he was going to skip Iowa / NH and go for Florida it looked to me like he was wanting to drop out of the race for some hidden reason (personal change of heart, scandals, health, who knows?) but wanted to go with dignity and drop out because he was lagging behind -- a plausible logical reason. These things are just my iNtuition (the N in INTP) talking.

Some future wild-ass predictions: McCain will pick a running mate who is unmistakably perceived as conservative and not anyone else who is running now. Maybe Condi? {shudder... hope not}

The Democratic side has been tougher to call. I was really surprised that Clinton took California. Texas and Ohio are coming up, and I have no feelings about what will happen in Ohio, but for a penny, Puss in Boots over there in the Fortune Telling Booth has predicted that Obama will get the Texas Dems in March. Out there in the wide open spaces of This Big Red State, I think Huckabee will do very well. I see Huckabee and McCain with high numbers, followed by Ron Paul with Romney trailing [edit: looks like Romney might be dropping out, so he will even closer to the bottom of the heap than I thought]. Here in this little blue oasis of Austin, the motherlode of Texas Liberals, I think that our pretty blue face is going to be bruised purple in March from Democrats registering Republican so they can vote for Ron Paul. I believe most of the other Democrats will go Obama, but in the more "normal" cities like Houston and Dallas they just might go for Hillary. My feeling is that she's not popular in these parts, but then I don't get out of the city limits all that much.

I think that Clinton and Obama will both visit us in Austin (MrB thinks they will be busier elsewhere in the state, or concentrating more on Ohio). Obama already paid us a visit back in Feb 07 and drew a crowd of over 20,000 people (and that was in the rain, folks). He has used footage from the rally in his Super Bowl ad. Here are a couple of the obviously Austin screen captures from the vid: our beautiful skyline and a shot of one of our favorite bands, The Band of Heathens, who played at the rally.

Personally, I'm going for Obama. If Clinton gets the nomination I will vote for her in Nov. We have GOT to get the White House back, folks. You may not be in love with Hillary, but I think we've got to get the right-wing-nuts out of power. I'm not one to be taken in by the speeches, but we've got to try and start attempting to fix the economy and health care and bring the troops home and try and save the earth. I'm not saying a Democratic president can do that, but a glimmer of hope is better than no hope at all.

Puss 'n Boots Fortune Teller snagged from this page, where you can buy it if you want.