If you take an Internet stroll to the Democratic Party of Orange County’s web site you find the typical party RA-RA and fund raising appeals and smartly a big pitch for Dem endorsed supervisorial candidate Tom Umberg.
Down at the bottom of the page is one of those rolling straw polls for the Democratic Nominee for President. It’s been operational since Nov. 28, 2006 and over 1200 people have responded to the on-line poll.
I thought it would be fun to put in a vote for Kucinich in the straw poll. I assumed it would be one of only a handful for the guy. Surely Hillary or Obama would lead the pack. I thought maybe Bill Richardson would be high on the list, after all Orange County is a conservative place, maybe our Democrats would prefer a more moderate Dem.
I was embarrassed for my local rival party when I saw that my shill vote for Kucinich was joined with hundreds of others.
No political professional considers Kucinich to be a real candidate for anything other than perhaps re-election and certainly a good shampoo and hair cut. Yet it seems that the Dems in OC are excited about his presidential prospects.
Are they that out of touch? The answer is yes. The Democratic Party in Orange County is out of touch with not just the everyday American, but certainly the average Democrat voters in their own back yard.
On-line polls are representative of nothing other than the population of people who chose 1) go to the web page and 2) choose to fill out the poll. So it’s impossible to know who really makes up the response pool to this straw poll. But the Democrat Central Committee might want to come back to reality if this is really how their membership is leaning.
Dennis Kucinich
743 60.1%
Barak Obama
142 11.5%
Al Gore
136 11%
John Edwards
67 5.4%
Hillary Clinton
60 4.9%
Wesley Clark
29 2.3%
Someone else
19 1.5%
Bill Richardson
16 1.3%
Joe Biden
16 1.3%
Evan Bayh
5 .4%
Tom Vilsack
2 .2%
John Kerry
1 .1%