The Fight for Class President

I love watching political debates. I absolutely fucking love it. It’s not that I like politicians or that I like or even understand politics – I just like watching professional and potentially powerful people argue with each other. Last nights debate among the five hopeful replacements for Governor Davis was delightfully juvenile, and confirmed my typically bleak American view that politicians are nothing more than manipulative robots with barely concealed agendas. That is - not the cool robots like Voltron or R2D2 – I’m talking about the real asshole robots like HAL who start out nice but are really there to just fuck shit up.

The "debate" was set up in a pretty lame fashion. All the candidates had the questions beforehand, so naturally you expected canned responses to retarded questions like "California’s economy is bad. What should we do about it?" However, the candidates managed to completely stray off topic in amazing ways. A question about businesses moving to other states slowly melted into a naïve shouting match about who liked minorities more.

My favorite exchange of the night was when Arnold Schwarzeneggar kept interrupting Ariana Huffington (imagine a female Michael Moore). Ariana then countered with "this is the way you treat women, we know that." So Arnold counters by saying "I have a perfect part for you in Terminator 4." and then later says he could drive his Hummer through the loopholes on her personal income tax statements.

When Arnold first entered the race, I thought he would prove to everyone – finally – that the fact he is an action movie star doesn’t imply that he is a full-on retard. Unfortunately, Arnold’s whole campaign seems to follow a "keep reminding them you are a movie star and have a big car" strategy. Every time he takes a stage I have to hear some lame reference to Terminator 3 or that goddamn Hummer he owns. Usually candidates like to let you know where they stand on the issues, especially during a debate. Arnold clearly showed that on every issue, he stands in the middle, looking like he has a mild case of downs syndrome - which still puts him 3 or 4 rungs above Gray Davis.

The other candidates were unimpressive or boring. Bustamante had the energy and fervor of a coma patient. Peter Camejo, the Green party candidate seemed out of place and a little spaced out. His answer to every question included the phrase "renewable energy" around six times. His voice was shaky and he sounded unsure of anything that didn’t relate to carbon monoxide emissions or wind power.

The only candidate who looked like an actual human who actually possessed some common sense was McClintock. Although he has some pretty lame right wing views, he was the only one who saw the ridiculousness of the recently passed "allow illegal aliens to get a driver license" law. While everyone else was screaming that "the term illegal alien is mean" and "they are the backbone of this state", McClintock had to remind everyone that these were immigrants cutting in line and cheating the system of becoming a legal citizen. I wanted to crawl into the TV and give him a high five, but I realized that not only would this break the strict scientific laws governing our physical world, it would probably violate the rules of the debate as well.

All in all, the debate was more entertaining that an episode of Saturday Night Live in that it had 50% more humorous moments and 100% less Jimmy Fallon. Also, nobody from this cast will leave the show to make a series of annoying movies... oh wait. Nevermind.