Clinton vs Obama

Will someone please think of poor Matt Taibbi. The vacuity of the media's coverage of the Democratic primaries is driving him insane:

This relentless fragging from the media led to state of affairs in Iowa, in which all of the candidates were enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in her travels.

He's right. With all the issues confronting the planet the banality of media coverage of the US elections is hard to stomach.

I'm still trying to figure out who to (hypothetically) support now that Edwards is out.

Paul Krugman's done more than enough to convince me that Obama's proposed health care reform package is inferior to Hillary's. But, on the other hand, Obama is much better on foreign policy (his lead adviser is Samantha Power!). And, courtesy of this fascinating post at Crooked Timber, we learn that Obama has a discernibly more liberal voting record in the senate (the actual axis is not quite liberal conservative, but close enough).(Click here to read the rest of this post...)

On the other hand, Obama is gathering his economic advisers (and, presumably, his bad advice on health care) from the University of Chicago.

On the other hand, I think he's more likely to beat McCain(?) than Hillary.

And that's still what tips it for me. Neither Hillary Clinton not Barack Obama has really great politics but, compared with "bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran" McCain, anyone's an improvement.

Finally, returning to trivia (justified by the New Zealand connection), here's Alan Thomas over at the Liberal Conspiracy:

He [Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate] begins with a small but telling anecdote from 1995 when, after meeting him, Clinton announced that her mother had named her after Sir Edmund Hillary. Of course, the only problem here is that Clinton was born in 1947 and Hillary’s name-making ascent of Mount Everest was in 1953. When challenged on this rather obvious fact, Clinton spokespeople palmed off the inconsistency on to Hillary’s mother, claiming she had made it up to inspire “greatness” in her daughter.