Primary Elections

Primary elections can both benefit and damage political parties and individual candidates. Elections can benefit parties by allowing the public to gauge where the individual candidate stands. Additionally, parties can essentially weed out the weak candidates and put forth who their strongest candidate for a particular elections. Also, when the weaker candidates drop out of the race, they will put their support behind the strongest one and tell their supporters to do the same. On the other hand, primaries can have a bad effect on parties and candidates. During primary campaigns, candidates will often use mudslinging in order to make their oppinets look bad even though they are in the same party. Doing this can weaken the candidate in the general election, as their own party members have pointed out their weaknesses on certain issues. Primary elections are an important part of the politcal process, but they can also have negative effects.

Let me try this again.

Ok, I didn't exactly do last weeks blog correctly, but hopefully I can turn it around this week. Tonight I want to talk about Allan Greenspan's new book coming out tomorrow and what he has to say about the Bush administration and its handling of everything from the Iraq war to Bush's fiscal policies. Greenspan served as the chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly twenty years. Essentially, he was the chief economist of the United States.^ In his new book, Greenspan, a republican, slams the Bush administration's handling of the economy, and more specifically, the housing market collapse. There are those however, that feel Greenspan is partly to blame for the sub-prime market failures, as he lowered interests rates to a point that people who would not ordinarily be able to afford homes were able to purchase them. In his new book Greenspan also criticizes the war in Iraq, was "...largely about oil."* Bush's fiscal policies were also a target for Greenspan, who was critical of the President's refusal to make budget cuts and his "out of control spending."* My reaction to this story is one of surprise but also some of what Greenspan said is to be expected. On one hand, Greenspan is calling out a fellow republican President's excuses for starting the war, which seems to have no end in sight. On the other hand, it does not surprise me that a conservative has harsh criticisms of Bush's handling of the economy. A true conservative wants to contract the size of government, and limit spending. Bush has not only run up a large deficit, he has expanded the size and influence of the Federal Government in the name of fighting terrorism here and abroad. My only question is how far the Bush Administration will try to distance themselves from Greenspan once his book is in stores tomorrow.

Am I doing this right?

I think this is all I had to do for this assignment.