A few weeks back we finally held our Presidential Primaries here in Texas and I finally got my dose of “election spending”.

I found a few things interesting which I thought I should point out.

First, the democratic race was obviously contested; the republican race was not even though Huckabee was technically still campaigining. I must have seen or heard dozens of Obama and Clinton ads but did not see or hear a single one from the Republicans.

That week I heard the pundits, as well as the DNC chair for Texas, speaking about the strength of the Democratic party in Texas (Republicans have swept all state wide offices for almost a decade now). What data did they have to prove it? Voter turn out in the primary.

However they failed to mention that:
1) Primaries in Texas are OPEN and an estimated 10% of “Democratic” voters were in fact Republicans crossing over with, well, somewhat dubious purposes.
2) There was ACTUALLY a race on the Democratic side. Republicans had little motivation to turn out because the candidate was all but set ahead of time.

So needless to say I chuckled a bit each time I heard these points left out when mentioning Democratic turn out. Makes you wonder whose side the pundits are on and how “balanced” reporting in the media truly is!

Aside from that, my next chuckle was at Barack Obama’s expense. I heard several of his very eloquent ads on the radio, each of the speaking to “bringing jobs back to Texas!”. Now, if you’ve followed politics for very long you will immediately recognize this as an age old objective to bring in middle/lower class voters. It was a constant topic in Ohio as well.

The truth of the matter is we do not have a problem with jobs in Texas; or the US for that matter. In Texas, current unemployment is at 4.3% which, if anything, is TOO LOW and applies quite a bit of upward pressure on inflation at a time where the nation is already seeing considerable upward pressure on inflation due to high commodity / energy prices and an aggressive Fed trying to pull the economy out of a nose dive into Recession.

Here’s a graph that shows some historical unemployment rates for the US (Ohio, by the way, has 5.5% unemployment which is right at the National Average).

It really makes you think whether the Democratic candidates, Obama in particular, really know what they are talking about or are simply using the same taglines that they used in the past. I certainly didn’t feel like he understood the concerns of the Texas electorate after hearing that advertisement.

I’m really wondering if anyone in the media is going to bust them on this? They would certainly have done their best to bust Bush. McCain’s idea of not “bringing back” the jobs most commonly spoken of, manufacturing jobs, and instead educating and redirecting those particular workers to higher skilled jobs is a much more sensible option. But that’s a topic for an entirely different post.

But for taglines, that one made me laugh. The Dems had better figure out that the tide seems to truly be shifting in Iraq as well. If they don’t, they may end up sticking to another tag line that has worked in the past and, in today’s situation, sounds rather naïve and silly.

But it all makes you wonder whether anyone is REALLY paying attention to the issues or are simply enjoying the fight?