I’ve added a few links within the article. Attached to this email was this op-ed by Dick Morris. Feel free to respond in the comments or send me your own riff and I’ll be happy to post it as long as it’s entertaining, clever and not too offensive.

OK, now we ARE socialist.

Looking forward… conservative thought crime will probably be punishable next month. But hey — at least I won’t be tortured, and will have a lawyer, a shrink and a doctor present. So that’s looking up.

Other than that I have no clue what will happen. I keep on trying to get details from Param but all he says is that I should email him my flight info and that it’s all set. I wonder if this is what he’s telling the other thousand guests. I bought my flight awhile ago and I’m travelling alone. I think there’s a good chance i get off the plane after 20 hours of travelling and have absolutely no clue what to do and where to go. My co-worker Matt who has attended a previous wedding in India and takes his honary Indian status quite seriously informed me that there are thousands of homeless people who live in the Delhi airport parking lot. So at least I won’t be crashing on the street (do they even have streets?) alone.

While the wedding will no doubt be an experience of a lifetime, I’m just as intrigued and interested to experience India itself. I’ve been thinking a lot about how globally connected our world has become (reading Thomas Friedman’s book helps). In my last blog post I wrote about Kiva.org, a website where you can lend money to third-world entrepreneurs. I made a loan to a women in Togo. It was exciting to connect with someone that I never thought I would be able to connect with. But I also know that I’m going to look back at that international loan and laugh about how excited I was over such a rudimentary business deal.

Thanks to improvements in technology (think wikipedia/facebook/Skype), everyone in the world will soon be connected with each other. Once that happens people from all over the world will start to do business with each other. Once that happens, and the resources of the world are within reach of everyone, the opportunities are infinite. Right now most college students that go abroad do so to enjoy a different culture. In the future, students will go abroad because it will be a necessity to be successful in business.

Let’s now think about India. It’s a democratic nation that values education and is very familiar with the English language. India has 1.2 Billion people (4x times the size of the US). As someone told me today, you can be one in a million in India and there are still more than one thousand people just like you! While many of those people are in rural areas, just as many of them are modernizing and at an incredible fast rate. My guess is that there are many Indians who grew up in huts with no plumbing or electricity but who are now on the other end of the phone when your laptop acts up! It’s taken them less than a generation to make the technological advances it took America two centuries to progress. Imagine they continue that rate of progress in the next generation. Each month 8 million new people in India acquire a cell phone. They’ve become connected. They hurdled right over the “landline” and are downloading Bollywood ringtones.

Like most third world nations, India is drastically split between a wealthy class and the poor. But the poor are becoming educated and that means they aren’t going to be poor for long. Every time I speak to a customer service technician in India we get into a conversation about American movies or sports. If I’m an enterprising business man, I’m not only interested in hiring this cheap labor but I’m also looking at this new educated class as an amazing new market to serve with my existing products.

Before I get too carried away though India has it’s issues and obstacles. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the escalating conflict with Pakistan reinforce the fragileness of India’s leap into a modern society. Government is weak, corruption is rampant and efficiency doesn’t seem to always be a priority. Like the rest of the world, their stock market has collapsed.

I keep on trying to get the western perspective on India from an American guy in the office who has been spending lots of time there for business in the last few years. He tries to explain the chaotic energy, the lack of common sense, the frustrating and sometimes impenetrable culture barriers and the phenomenon of taxi cab drivers use of their horn. The conversation always ends in the same way – he tells me “you just got to be there”.

I think he is right. I can blog until my fingers cramp up but until I feel it, see it and experience it I don’t think I’ll be able to understand what is happening in the world. It sure seems like the stuff that’s really worth paying attention to is happening there and not here. I want to understand this world and I think in a few weeks I’ll be able to understand much more than I can today.

So help me out. If you know anybody in India worth meeting please put us in touch. I’m interested in anything and everything and have a few free days between wedding celebrations to meet up and also a few more days after the wedding ends. I want my tourist attraction to be the people, business and society that is developing in India. I want to come back to the US a smarter, more forward thinking, more global thinking person.

Four years ago, I was living/vacationing in San Diego and didn’t want to be bothered with having to register to vote or send in an absentee ballot. I remember an older guy in my office asked me if I had voted. I made up an excuse about not having permanent residency in California, but he sternly told me that it’s my duty to vote. I kind of shrugged it off and chalked it up to weird old people stuff (like worrying about cholesterol and being knowledgeable about window treatments) .

It’s no secret that young people are apathetic when it comes to voting. There’s probably a bunch of logical reasons why that’s the way it is. It’s interesting how voting seems to become more important to people as they get older. In one of my first posts on the blog in February 07 I wrote about voting and was just beginning to come around to realizing it’s significance (interesting to read P’s stinging comments to that post!). It’s like one day we all have a collective epiphany where we go from “my vote doesn’t matter” to voting is a “right, privilege and duty”. In my cynical youth, I was pretty sure that adults feigned outrage just to seem sophisticated. But now I’m that adult!

I’ll skip all the patriotic-constitutional freedoms-suffrage to the people- verbiage because it’s precisely those overused clichés that are ineffective. Here’s my reason why you, and everybody else, should sacrifice an hour of your time on Tuesday to go vote.

As I sat on that couch eight years ago, I wasn’t mature or insightful enough to realize that I had the opportunity to help determine who would be the leader of the free world. I didn’t realize that this election would dramatically influence the course of the world which we all share.

I’m already starting to get all philosophical so let be more clear before you zone out. [BTW, i went on a date a few months ago with a girl who said she didn’t care about voting. I went into a stumbling monologue why that was a bad attitude. The next day i sent her a link to the register to vote. I’m still waiting to hear back from her about our next date!…On the brigh side, if you unsubscribe after reading this blog post at least my skin has already been thickened. Anyway…

George Bush won. Al Gore lost. If it were the other way around lots of things in our world would be different. How we dealt with our enemies. How we dealt with ourselves. How we treat our planet. How we treat each other. How we live. How safe we are. It goes on and on.

I believe that the next president will be just as powerful in steering our country through our future. I want our next President to lead us into a future that I endorse. I want to say that I contributed to that in the most direct way possible. Yeah, there’s also a chance that the person I vote for isn’t the best solution. Or that I’m wrong in some of my beliefs on what is best for this country. As much as that scares me, it scares me more to think the future of our country is being created without me. Voting give you the right to care. I want to have a clear conscious knowing that I either validated or rejected our country’s path. My Nana always tells me “Brian, it’s your America”. I want it to be.

As for the argument that we live in NY or CA or wherever and our vote doesn’t even count. Well that argument is just a few fries short of a happy meal. Yes, I realize you don’t need to be captain of the 1998 Great Neck North math team to know that if NY had one less vote for either candidate it won’t effect the result of the election. But if every single individual voter had that attitude, well, it wouldn’t be much of an election. Furthermore, the “my vote doesn’t matter” argument is akin to “you’re going to die anyway so what’s it matter what you do in life”. It’s not about them, it’s about you.

Vote!

One last thing – Election day, especially for a presidential election, should be a national holiday (or at least a national half-day). There are lots of people who don’t have the ability to carve out an hour in their day to vote because of their binding daily responsibilities to their career, family, wii, etc. Isn’t it about time we use some of the great technology we’ve developed in the last quarter century to make it as easy as possible for everyone to vote.

Check out this awesome video to get you pumped. I dig the message and the dancing — you can vote however you like

Along with two friends at work, i’ve been representing a Tibetan guy (few years younger than us) in his bid for political asylum in the USA. As fans of the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere know, Tibet has been occupied by the Chinese since 1959. The Chinese majority (han) have done everything in their power to eradicate the “separateness” of Tibet. Tibetans speak a separate language, practice a separate religion (Tibetan buddhism) and are culturally very different.

The Dalai Lama is the world famous leader and face of the Tibetan people. He fled in 1959 from tibet’s provincial capital (lhasa) to dharamsala, India where he lives with (i think) 50,000 other tibetans, and dharamsala is the seat of the tibetan government in exile. In Tibet proper it is illegal to have pictures of the dalai lama and you can get into all sorts of shiz for dispalying the tibetan flag, pics of the dalai lama and otherwise advocating for a free Tibet. There’s been a lot of unrest lately which began when some monks in dharamsala (without the dalia lama’s blessing) decided to march to the Chinese border – the indian gov’t for the most part tried to shut it down in an effort to thwart any sort of confrontation with China along their shared border. While the dalai lama has advocated non-violence and has gone “hollywood” to reach his goals – Tibetan autonomy (not necessarily tibetan independence) – some of the younger Tibetan monks have recently decided to take a more confrontational and active approach. At the same time as this march to the border, violence erupted in the Tibetan areas under Chinese control – Tibetans started to riot, Chinese stores got vandalized – the Chinese army was mobilized, foreign media was kicked out, and many Tibetans were killed. People worldwide used the Olympic torch relays for the upcoming beijing games as a medium to voice their protest against the Chinese gov’t crackdown and in general express support for the Tibetan cause, leading many world leaders (including gordon brown of the uk and sarkozy of france) to announce their plans to boycott the opening ceremonies – which led to chinese counter-protests and what I’ll call “reflexive uber-nationalism”, and chinese boycotting of french retailer carrefour, and the mess is continuing and will unfold over the next few months….

anywhoooo – back to our case, which has been going on for some 8-9 months, all the while our client has been sitting in a detention center in Jersey. The extremely condensed version of the story is this – our guy put up a poster telling the chinese to get out, calling for tibet independence and the return of the dalia lama – and was caught and arrested and tortured in prison for 15 months. He got out by way of a bribe from his very poor family (like many tibetans they’re farmers) – and when the chinese kept harassing him, he fled and wound up (after a long journey) on a flight landing at jfk, after which a human rights agency got hold of him and referred his case to my firm. again, without getting into too much detail (some of you i’ve told the story to already) – our client’s story is really crazy and intense, and throughout our representation the gov’t and we have noticed some inconsistencies int he story which cast some doubt on his credibility (but ultimately his story was more credible than not, and he’s at the least been very consistent all along). The case was a procedural mess for a multitude of reasons and we’ve had the final merits hearing postponed 4 times, continuances, etc. and this case was resolved today when it was originally scheduled to be resolved last august. Fortuitiously (in an interesting twist of fate I guess you can call it), because of the recent uprisings, the current conditions in Tibet became a central issue in the case, and in general became (in our view) a public relations issue for the govt (ie. the gov’t does not want to be sending politically active tibetans back to china, especially now, when their fate would almost certainly be extremely dire). So – after months and months – this morning – we WON political asylum for our client, which means he can remain in the US, can work, can bring his wife over here, and eventually can become a us citizen. A big day. We brought him to the city this evening, along with our interpreter, where we met up with a “friend” of his who lives in Queens who he can stay with – he’s never met this friend before, but is originally from his home town and arrangements were made for him to help out.

There’s a lot more to this story and many ups and downs – but needless to say its been a powerful day (i forgot to mention that we had some waiting time today after the hearing so we went to the mall and saw the new harold and kumar…) and a crazy and rewarding experience. at the end of his direct examination, our client gave a really nice answer about the u.s. and what this country means to him as a place where you’re free to practice your religion and be free to live your life w/o harassment and oppression. It was cool to be reminded that that way that even though of late our gov’t has been disappointing and at times dishonest, our country is still a pretty amazing place to live and means a lot to so many people.

We’re continuing to work with our client and helping him out going forward – with legal matters but also with personal – and we hope to do some sort of bar fund raiser where people come and chip in some money to help him get settled (details to come, and any suggestions let me know).

And tomorrow – our client’s going with his new buddy to visit “the lady in the water with the crown” – there’s probably no better way for the guy to start his life here in America than that!

I don’t normally write emails about the places I’ve been for work or pleasure, but I probably should, especially for the more exotic locations like this one or Beijing, Singapore etc, but it’s too late on those. This stop in Dubai, albeit for 2 days, is worth writing a little something about; as someone who’s addicted to traveling and fortunately to have a job that allows me to see some great places, I feel obligated to at least shed some light on what its like on the ground here, not just what you read.

The United Arab Emirates is the second Arabic country I’ve ever been to, Morocco being the other, but let me be clear, this is NOT Morocco. Morocco is probably the only true third world country I’ve ever visited and an experience I’d never take back though I could have done w/o the stomach issues and the sickness that ensued thereafter. The UAE is an “emerging market” and then some – it’s modern, expensive and the people tend to be very sophisticated and western educated and VERY wealthy (nice to be sitting on oil). You come to Dubai and you see what wealth derived from the abundance of oil can do to a country that invests back in its own infrastructure. Is surreal to see these huge buildings, incredible hotels and highways that link it all together…in the middle of the desert. I was told that temps reach as high as 130F during summer here, no exaggeration.

Quick observations: The local dress; more so than in Morocco, the woman who are “more” religious are fully covered, they wear sunglasses b/c its eternally sunny here (85 degrees today) so you literally see none of them which is cruel to the heterosexual male tourist; the men wear white robes, for the most part, with the kiffiyeh covering their head. Mostly the red/white checkered kind that you saw Arafat wear (though his was black/white). It was explained to me during lunch yesterday by an ex-pat from NY running a new start up hedge fund out here, that each of the robes and headwear differs based on where you are from: Quatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Iran, UAE etc. In Morocco, the poverty was evident everywhere you went, people were dressed in scraps in many places in the inner cities I visited, here the woman will be wearing nice fabric and have huge rings on their fingers which I found funny. The men are all well groomed and neatly dressed; quite a difference.

They refer to Israel in the news here as the “Zionist” entity, never using the word “Israel” and Jerusalem is referred to as “Occupied Jerusalem.” Can’t say this is very surprising but something you notice when reading “The Gulf News.”. As a Jew with a very Israeli name I thought I might see some resentment, I haven’t.

My meetings: I’m here for business and yesterday, after a 6.5hr flight and a little delay from Heathrow, I arrived at the airport, was escorted by the Marhaba (or welcome service; marhaba means “welcome” in Arabic) through customs and had a car waiting for me provided by the first fund I was to visit. I had no issues getting through customs, I thought that maybe my Israeli stamps might matter, but I don’t even think they checked. This was good as I didn’t want the headache of going through a Q&A with customs officials. My meetings took place at Emirates Towers and the DIFC which you can view here.

I met with about 7 people there, 5 of which were Arabic, and all very intelligent and obviously hard working and successful. Western educated, perfect English for the most part and a pleasure to sit with. 3 hours go by and the MP takes me to lunch at a Lebanese restaurant where I was the only one not dressed in the outfits I mentioned above. I thought I stood out when I was in China! Interesting experience, great food. Any suggestions I made to the MP was greeted with: “consider it done!”. You don’t get this in the US or UK very often. Second meeting was with a South African and a Brit (not too cultural) and the final meeting, which ended at 7:30pm (mind you I arrived that morning on about 3 hrs sleep on the plane) was with a Brit and a local. All very interesting, I’d ask lots of questions and get very direct answers. As meeting were winding down I’d ask questions about the local economy, growth and other things just as a curious outsider. Nothing like talking to people on the ground and that’s why I’m here for my firm and why my boss was here three weeks ago doing much of the same. There is no substitute being “onsite” as we like to say; a big reason I have traveled so much this year and will continue to do so going forward.

Growth: I’ve never seen so many cranes in one place in my life – 25% of the entire world’s are here in Dubai, that’s not a lie (my facts come from the Big Red Bus Tour I took this morning). It’s unreal to see how this place is building itself up. Skyscrapers that you thought only existed in NY and Hong Kong are popping up here, everywhere. The Burj Dubai Tower will be the tallest building in the world when complete, a European company (not disclosed) just bought the 158th FLOOR and apparently the interest is sky high for more. They are building it so that, should anyone else try to build higher, they will easily be able to build even more floors. 30% of the building has already been sold/rented I believe its now 159 stories and won’t be open in 2009. There are 3,000 workers working 24/7 to get this done at the order of the King. Burj el Arab, the worlds only self-proclaimed 7-star hotel is built on a man made island. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, its so exclusive that you have to pay $150 just to walk in (I took some pics, but didn’t need to enter). They have created other man made islands here, one of which you can see from space; the only other man made thing you can see from space is the Great Wall of China (another place I was fortunate enough to see this year). You get the point, this place is exploding. 80% of the people here are ex-pats; 20% are actually from the UAE. There is such a need for workers that you see a lot of people coming in from neighboring countries, India and many other places. The royal family, in order to try and grow the local population gives people 50,000 dirham ($13,000) to marry local to local, 70,000 dirham per child from local family and payment for education going forward. Those who work here have no income tax, the royal family pays all taxes, that would be nice.

Religion: the work week here, for those who don’t know, is Sunday-Thurs, Friday is the holy day – today. From 1-4pm everything is closed except the hotels; TV’s show the Imam’s (their version of a Rabbi/Priest) at the local mosque on every channel; the only time we see this is in the US is during the State of the Union (or other significant event when the President speaks); this is how it is every Friday here. Pretty interesting to be here on such a day.

Safety: I’ve never once felt in danger here, that was not the case in Morocco as I got into some hairy situations. In fact, the locals have been extremely hospitable and the service is excellent. This morning I get into the elevator and in comes three fully dressed Arabic men in a very tight space. They all smiled, said hello, and wished me well when I got out. They probably didn’t think I was Jewish, but just another of many situations I’ve been in here where I was pleasantly surprised by how the situation went. I’ll be the first one to admit how anti-arab I can be, but that really relates more to the terrorist pieces of sh*t all over the world, their sympathizers and sponsors. Trust me, I’m not booking a trip to Tehran any time soon.

Off to Israel tomorrow and can’t wait; the tour of the Middle East continues. See most of you sooner or later…

I think there’s a good chance that I will begin to blog more often about political issues and the presidential race. I am still “playing the field” and trying to learn more about all of the candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties. One of the things that peeve me about politics is how everybody (media, politicians, friends) seems to have a partisan allegiance and blindly pushes the agenda of their party or candidate. Maybe that is how politics works and if so I would like to see that change.

In the course of this political discourse I may very well choose to back a certain candidate. What I hope for is that you also determine which candidate you truly support. If my posts, thoughts or ideas help you come to a conclusion then I will be thrilled.

Below is a note from someone who is way more knowledgeable and informed on both the American political process and the events of this presidential race. It was passed on to me by a friend and does a wonderful job explaining what is happening in our country right now. I was surprised by both how much I already knew and how much I have to learn. The first section is somewhat of a history lesson but then it moves into a great synopsis of each of the candidates and where they currently stand.

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I will discuss the status of the races for the Democratic and Republican nominations later. First, I will explain the origins and meaning of the primaries.

Until the 20th century, the candidates for the parties were basically chosen by the party leaders in the states. They would bargain and try to decide on the strongest candidates. The exception was George Washington, who was picked as the first President because the leadership of the new country agreed he was the ONLY right person to lead the nation under the new Constitutional system adopted in 1787-88. He was President for two terms, running without opposition. But after that, starting in 1800, the candidates were chosen by the party leaders, and starting in 1840, usually chosen at meetings called Conventions. The Conventions still exist, but normally the candidates are known well in advance of the Conventions, and that is because of the modern primary system existing in the past half-century.

A primary is an election in which the registered members of the party get to vote for whom they think should be the party’s nominee. (A few states also let “independents”, that is, people who are not registered in either party, vote in either party’s primary–New Hampshire and Michigan do that.But very few do that. And a few states, like Iowa, have “caucuses,” where people actually meet together and debate and then vote –but that is by far the exception. )

Primaries exist today in most states to pick not just Presidential candidates , but generally to nominate ALL candidates, both federal (President, US Senate, US House of Representatives ) and state candidates (Governor, State Senate , State House of Representatives and, in SOME states, judge nominees). The exception is that the Presidential candidates choose the Vice Presidential candidates they want to run with, but that still has to be approved at the Conventions,. The Conventions vote for the presidential candidates, too, but they vote according to the results of the primary elections, so that result is already known when the Conventions meet in the summer of the election year, as long as someone has won a majority of the Convention “delegates”–discussed later. The party that does not hold the Presidency (this time, the Democrats ) meets first in their Convention , generally in mid-late July, and the party holding the Presidency (this year, the Republicans) meets second, in August.

As I said, until the 20th century (the 1900s), there were no primary elections, and the people as a whole had no opportunity to decide who would be nominated to run for President or the other offices. By the early 1900s, however, there had developed a political movement called the Progressive movement. The progressives were reformers who wanted the system to be more democratic–small “d”–not in terms of the Democratic party but in terms of DEMOCRACY. That is, they wanted the people to have more of a choice in picking the candidates. They also were in favor of other reforms of the political process to give more power to the individual voters.

The progressives were both Democrats and Republicans. Most did not join the “Progressive party’” which existed only for a few years in the early 1900s, but the progressive movement achieved various political goals in reforming the system, notably to start the primary election system, so the people, not just the political leaders, picked the candidates.

In 1912, the Republicans had five primaries–not enough by a long shot to pick the nominee. That election is famous for various reasons that I will spare you–suffice it to say that the winner of the Republican primaries did not get enough power out of that success to be nominated,and he wasn’t .

Anyway, the primary system grew slowly. As late as 1956, the winner of most of the Democratic primaries (there still were not many primaries) was denied the nomination by the party leaders at the Convention. Not until 1960 did it really make a difference, when John F Kennedy won all of the primaries,enabling him to win the Democratic nomination for President–but there still were not that many primaries and he won the nomination narrowly. (I recall listening to the Convention vote while in camp that summer, and I remember he won only when they reached the state of Wyoming in the voting–they did the Convention voting alphabetically. ) After 1960, the primaries grew in number and have been crucial to nominations for President. Almost never have the nominations NOT been known well in advance of the Conventions since then, because someone usually wins a lot of primaries and sort of “snowballs ‘ into the nomination.It takes so much money now to run for President that a candidate cannot lose the first three or four or so primaries (sometime even fewer–some candidates drop out after one or two–) and still continue in the race.

In sum, today, the process of getting nominated is based on running in the primaries of your party , and doing a lot of advertising on TV and radio and a lot of in-person speaking and meeting voters and debating on TV with the other candidates and building an organization of volunteers who will send out mailings and work the internet and visit and call thousands and thousands of people –over and over and over –on the phone. and raising huge sums of money. I need to explain what you “win” when you win votes in a primary–I will do that in a bit. (That’s the discussion of Convention “delegates.”)

Unlike most years since 1960, this year could be a situation in which the nominations will NOT be decided after just a few primaries with most candidates just dropping out after that. This year, there is a good chance that three candidates on both sides– Obama, Clinton and Edwards for the Dems and McCain, Huckabee and Romney for the Republicans, as well as former NY Mayor Giuliani for the Republicans (maybe) –will stay in the race a long time.

So far, no one has broken out as the clear leader, which of course means the candidates all have incentive to keep spending money and campaigning. Because so many primaries are on Feb 5 and because almost virtually every big state will have voted on or by that night, it is assumed that we will know a lot by then, but of course if various candidates win various primaries, we could still have a close race–only if one candidate wins most of the big state primaries will that candidate be well ahead.

What is won in the primary(or caucus) is called “delegates”. That means genially that you win votes in the Convention (you win delegates who attend the Convention) according to your percentage of the vote you get in the primary. It is usually NOT “winner take all.” Example: Hillary Clinton won about 39 per cent in New Hampshire last night, so she will get 39 per cent of New Hampshire’s delegates at the Democratic Convention this July; Obama got 36 per cent, so he will have 36 per cent of the NH delegates, Edwards won 17 per cent, so he will have 17 per cent of the delegates, and so on. The key is that the bigger the state (in population), the MORE delegates it is allowed to send to the Convention. Thus, New York and California and Texas and Florida and Illinois send far more delegates to the Conventions than small populated states like Wyoming and New Hampshire and Rhode Island and the Dakotas. Example: Winning 39 per cent of the New Hampshire vote may mean you get 3 delegates– I am estimating here–but winning 39 per cent of the California vote in the primary may mean you get 40 or 50 or 60 delegates. ( Sometimes winning the vote gets you a couple of extra delegates, and the Republicans also increase the delegates for a state a little if the state voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the last election–the Democrats do not do that.)

Therefore, winning a lot of votes in a big state’s primary is worth a lot more (in Convention delegates) than winning a lot of votes in the primary of a small state.

BIG DIFFERENCE– in almost every state, in the general election in November, between the people who ARE nominated in the summer Conventions, the winner of the popular (citizens’) vote in a state gets ALL of the states “electoral votes”. There are just a couple of exceptions –Nebraska and Maine, I think. ( Electoral votes are like delegates, but are the people –the “electors”–who vote later in the “Electoral College”which technically elects the President and Vice President, after the November results are tallied, based on the electoral votes won in November ). As I said, this “winner take all” system in the general election is different from the primaries, in which the winner gets close to her or his percentage of the delegates based on her or his percentage of the votes.

As you can see, in the general election in November, winning a state like California gives you many, many times more “electoral votes” than winning New Hampshire. (To win the Presidency in November, the candidate needs a majority of the electoral votes– so winning a BIG state by a few hundred citizens’ votes–the “popular votes” — is worth a lot more than winning a SMALL state by a million popular votes. Example: Gore beat Bush by a bit over 500,000 popular votes in the general election in 2000, but Gore LOST the election because Bush won more electoral votes. Had Gore won Florida,which he lost by 537 votes to Bush out of millions of votes cast in Florida, he would have won Florida’s electoral vote and he would have won the election. So, he won the “popular(citizens’) vote nationally by a lot, but lost Florida by a hair , which cost him the election. (Some people think this system is not fair, and I will not go into that now–the Founders of the country devised it in the Constitution in part to give small states more of a say in the elections, because without it everyone would pay no attention to them, or at least that is the theory. )

Today, the people vote in primaries usually to pick the nominees , but that system has been significant for less than fifty years. Moreover, there is still the problem that the early primaries have a disproportionate influence because the candidates have to spend a lot of extra time and money there–you don’t want to start off by losing three or four of them because people like to go with a winner, and because the press will focus on the winners, and people who give money and work for candidates tend to give less to and work less for candidates they think are losers.

So far, Barack Obama, a relatively new( almost three years) US Senator from Illinois, a mixed race person (Kansas mother and Kenyan father), a brilliant ex-law professor , state legislator and great speaker, won in Iowa at the “caucuses” and finished a close second in NH last night.

John Edwards, a former US Senator, a wealthy lawyer and the losing Vice Presidential candidate with Kerry in 2004. finished second in Iowa and third (a weak third) in NH. His wife, also a lawyer, has incurable cancer but she is campaigning with him–a very poignant story.

Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton , a US Senator from NY since 2001, is an enormously accomplished , intelligent woman , with a long record of achievements. She won an upset victory over Obama last night in New Hampshire after coming in a close third in Iowa. Former President Bill Clinton is campaigning with her. Both she and Sen.Obama have a lot of money to spend and good organizations across the country.

Bill Richardson, the other candidate, Governor of New Mexico, and ex- Cabinet member in the Bill Clinton Administration, is of partly Hispanic origin–an political advantage, perhaps–and is also a sound candidate –all the Dems are very good– but he has little money and little organization, and knows by now that his only hope is to be picked by the winner to run as the Vice-Pres.candidate. They are the only serious Democratic contenders at this point.

There is great excitement here; no woman and no African-American has ever been elected President or nominated for President by the Republicans or Democrats . And of course black men were not allowed to vote until after the Civil War, when the Constitution was amended in the 1860s –and no woman was allowed to vote –except in a very few small Western states– until 1920, when the Constitution was amended. ( It is astonishing for us to believe today that women were such second class citizens for that long, but it is nevertheless true. )

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses. He finished third in NH. He is a friendly Baptist Minister, ,and an ex -Governor of Arkansas. (By coincidence, he was born in the same little town in Arkansas –Hope–as former Arkansas Governor and former President Bill Clinton!) Huckabee is the candidate of the so called “Christian Conservatives” or the “Christian right ” (meaning “right wing” politics–conservatives,mostly who are Republicans, are ‘right wing’ and liberals–like most or many Democrats–are ‘left wing”. )Christian conservatives form a large part of the Republican vote (maybe 40 per cent or even more) , and are generally evangelical Protestants, who are opposed to abortion rights, stem cell research, and gay rights, and who favor more religion in public life. The Founding Fathers made sure in the Constitution that government and religion were separate– the Constitution states in the “First Amendment “(which also concerns free speech and freedom of the press) that there will be no state required single religion in the USA and that everyone is free to believe (and , by implication, not to believe) what they want. The Founders knew that religion always seemed to play a destructive role when the government came under the control of one religion–and you can see that now,as religious fundamentalism and fanaticism is the root cause of the major foreign policy problem we face today in the world , especially in the Middle East.

Mitt Romney was Mass. governor and was a Moderate (middle of the road) leader who has changed his views now to try to get the conservative Republicans to vote for him as the nominee. He is very smart and a very successful businessman with enormous wealth(from investment banking), who also ran the Salt Lake City Olympic games successfully. He is a Mormon, which is a branch of Christianity, founded in the 1830s, and a lot of the Christian conservative Republicans are opposed to having a Mormon as President, even though a person’s religion ought to be irrelevant. Indeed, the Constitution says there is no religious test for office. Romney finished second in Iowa and NH and won the little Wyoming caucus , where he was more or less uncontested., (The Dems had no caucus there–they have only a primary, later. )He has a great campaign organization and will probably stay in the race a long time, unless he is badly beaten on Feb 5. He was born in Michigan, where his dad was Governor in the ’60s , and he “needs” to win there on Jan 15. But john McCain (below)is popular there. I think Romney will stay in the race even if he loses in Michigan, but it would be a big setback for him.

John McCain is old (71) and is a Vietnam war hero. (He endured five years of torture in North Vietnam prisons and refused to be released because they would not release his fellow prisoners–they were offering to release him because his father was an Admiral who was in charge of the US Pacific fleet at the time.) He is a long-time US Senator for many years from Arizona. He is known for being honest and speaking his mind, and is a somewhat moderate Republican candidates. He is not well liked by the Christian conservatives because of his middle of the road stance on illegal immigration and his efforts to reform the campaign finance system . Like the Democrats, he is very good on “global warming’, an enormous problem that , like President Bush, most Republican candidates refuse to take very seriously–but McCain does take it seriously,as do the Democrats. (Everybody needs to take it even more seriously. )

Former NY Mayor Giuliani is also moderate , and is the closest to the Democrats on the “social issues”–abortion , stem cell research, gay rights– which makes him unpopular with the majority of Republicans, His whole campaign is based on his becoming a hero with the way he performed in NY for Mayor for the last three and a half months of his tenure as Mayor after the 9-11 attacks. He has taken the risk of not campaigning particularly hard the early primaries, where he knew he would not fare well, and he hopes to make a big showing in Florida on Jan 26 and then in the big states on Feb 5.

Ex-Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee –who played the DA on “Law and Order “after leaving the Senate—-was thought to be a formidable candidate, but I think he is going nowhere. His conservatism appeals to many Republicans but he has excited almost no one and Huckabee has supplanted him , I think.

All in all, this is the most fascinating race in the primaries since 1976, and actually it looks like it will be more exciting than that. It is more exciting than 1988 , another good year, and may be the most exciting race in the primaries since the Democratic race in 1972 and the Republican race in 1964. Hence, it might be the most exciting primary race EVER–especially as (unlike 1964 and 1972) BOTH parties have close and uncertain races.