Blogs

Hopeless?

Looks like someone has lost "Hope." -- Michael Roberts

Welcome to the Internet, where weirdness is as close as your mouse.

Today's example: The video clip below, which allows users to insert any name they'd like into a mock news story about swelling support for an unknown presidential candidate. Of course, I entered my name, which magically pops up on a bus board, a newspaper and even a tramp stamp tattooed on a very unlikely lower back.

Check it out for yourself by clicking "More," and start your own campaign here. -- Michael Roberts

More

Shiloh Benson Tillemann Dick has a head – a very large head – for politics, one that stands out even among the feisty politicos of the colorful family profiled in the July 10 Westword. The 18-year-old correctly predicted Obama’s church affiliations would prove problematic – last August. Shiloh took time out from his internship at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. to put the finishing touches on his breakdown of potential Democratic vice president candidates, a list he’s been sending around to friends and family members just for kicks. Here’s his take:

More

The 2008 presidential race has special meaning for Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo. After all, he was part of the Republican candidates pack mere months ago – and in the hefty Q&A below, he recalls the good, the bad and the fugly parts of his experiences with humor and frustration, not to mention a decided lack of enthusiasm for Senator John McCain, his party’s presumptive nominee.

More

A number of Coloradoans have run for president, but no one came closer to actually winning the office than former Senator Gary Hart. In 1984, he presented a heated challenge to anointed party favorite (and subsequent landslide victim) Walter Mondale, ultimately falling short in large part because superdelegates -- a species of Democrat much sought after this year -- had committed to the former veep in the earliest moments of the campaign process. Then, in 1988, he was widely seen as a surefire nominee -- at least until publication of a photo showing Hart and a model named Donna Rice posing in a friendly manner in front of a boat named the Monkey Business.

Today, Hart is the Wirth Chair professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs, not to mention a keen observer of the electoral process, as he demonstrates in the wide-ranging and revealing Q&A below.

More

Christine Smith wanted to be the first female president of the United States, the first Coloradan and the first Libertarian in the Oval Office. And the 41-year-old Golden woman, who ran a principled if underdog-style campaign, thought she had a good chance of winning her party’s nomination at its national convention in Denver in May.

But the delegates nominated former Republican Congressman Bob Barr as their presidential candidate instead -- and now Smith isn’t even a Libertarian.

Still wincing from what she sees as the party’s complete abandonment of its principles in selecting Barr on May 25, Smith posted a scathing article on her website, www.libertarianforpresident.com, and announced that she is leaving the party.

“What I saw at the Libertarian Party convention disgusted me,” she wrote. “I thought Libertarians actually believed in libertarian principle and that would always be their highest priority. I was wrong…Obviously, the majority of Libertarian delegates cared nothing about libertarian principle when they chose Barr…Sunday was a tragedy as we lost the political party I, and others nationwide, had hope in.”

More