Gone Diving – Orpheus Island
May 16, 2008
Michael and I leave tomorrow morning for Orpheus Island on the Great Barrier Reef. I’ll report back with our findings.
More at http://www.orpheus.com.au/
Guam is receiving some unexpected media attention of late. It seems that Senator Obama has opened a campaign office in Hagåtña, Guam’s capital “city,” in an effort to woo Guam’s eight Democratic delegates. The Guam caucus is as unnecessarily complex as the rest of the Democratic nominating process, so I won’t bore you with the gory details. I do note that each of Guam’s eight delegates has one-half of a vote, which I find curious. More importantly, Guam does not have any electoral votes in presidential elections. Hmm. Seems to me – and I can say this because I’m from Guam – a whole lot of fuss about nothing.
The funniest part of the news coverage I’m seeing is that a goodly amount of time is dedicated in each instance to explaining to people what Guam is, where it is, and the fact that it is a territory of the United States. Now, to be fair, I don’t know the names of half the fly-over states – I think there’s an “Arkantucky” in there somewhere – so I can hardly blame people for not searching out the island. It is small and it is in the middle of nowhere. What is especially ticklish to me is that, with no other real issues on which to focus, both Obama and Clinton are trying to win over Guam delegates with confident assertions that they know where the island is. This from the Wall Street Journal:
“Senator Clinton and her husband are reminding voters about their multiple visits to Guam during stopovers on presidential trips to Asia in the 1990s.”
“Senator Obama is pointing to his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, saying, ‘I learned firsthand about the unique issues facing Pacific island communities.’”
While I agree that Guam is surely starved for national media attention and unaccustomed to making decisions that affect the country, I’d like to think the candidates could do a little better than that.
Words of advice to Obama’s campaign – go ahead and close the campaign office. While I have respect for his campaign’s groundswell of grass-roots activism, that is not how you win an election on Guam. What you need to do is take whatever funding you allocated to print flyers and make buttons, and spend it on a giant fiesta. If you want to make an impression on Guam, you have a fiesta – the bigger the better. A fiesta is basically a big party – heavy on food and beer, Budweiser being the perennial libation of choice – and, generally, on a large enough scale that the correlation between invitees and attendees cannot be feasibly managed. If one of the candidates figures this out, they will indubitably be the delegate of choice on the island and the proud owner of all eight one-half votes. Call me crazy, but I’m from Guam and odds are you don’t even know where it is.
