just in time to poop on yr party...
... here's Matt Gonzalez:At what point will there be intellectual honesty about what is happening? People are voting for Obama because they find him to be an engaging public speaker and like his message regardless of his history of being part of the very problem he professes to want to fix. Most people don’t want the actual facts to interfere with the desperate hope that he is everything they want him to be."
Yeah, okay: nobody gives a fuck about Nader; we've been down that road before. My concern, which Gonzalez elucidates much more elaborately than I would, is that we are collectively buying into an elaborate sham. Not to denigrate the hard work (and hard-earned pay) some of us have been donating to The Cause, but: What gives, fellas? Where do you see us a year from now? Four? Hope? Change?! Yikes!!!
Labels: Barry O, party pooping
posted by meatcoat @ 2:34 PM
4 Comments:
roughly 3 years ago i had the hilarious fortune of debating this very issue with stridewideman and Dennis Kucinich, who stridey stopped on the street when he was visiting in DC - namely, has the hope overshadowed the voting record?
i wholly disagree with Barry's stances on FISA and the death penalty, and i understand why those have alienated people. i also take issue with his stance on marriage, "clean coal", and any number of bogus things he's adopted to get elected.
but anyone who agrees with a candidate on every point of his/her platform enjoys a happiness that i (and, if i may hazard a guess, few of us) will ever know. since i accept this, and when juxtapose it with the menagerie of douchebags that have led this country during our lifetimes, i am beyond pleased with barry. beyond. for the first time i'll be hopeful. not ecstatic, but hopeful. guess the messaging worked.
but getting elected in this country, sweet jesus, is only the first test. the real one is the governing, and fair enough, nobody has a clue how that's going to go.
interviewing cherry-picked supporters of a candidate in order to prove a point about a candidate is, i think, garbage. you can run a good campaign on hope & change, but obviously you don't govern on it. so we'll see.
I'm of the same mind, and since I spend most of my clocked in hours pushing politicians of all stripes to suck less, I look with glee on the prospect of actually getting to push a progressive to do better stuff. I'm fairly certain that Barry is going to be easier to get to do a lot of things I want then most other yahoos, and he can bring others along with him to actually accoplish the task of passing laws.
Which, God love him, Nader has mostly failed to do over the long term.
My greatest humiliation to date, and I don't think that's hyperbole, is that in the one presidential election in which I've participated where my vote really mattered*--i.e. Ohio, 2000--I voted for Nader. This is deeply embarrassing to me. Particularly because I used, as justification for my vote, that tired argument that there was no difference between Gore and Bush, anyway. My ignorance was a shock and awe campaign all its own.
Then the last 8 years happened. And while I'm not suggesting that powerful Democrats are the virtuous, humanitarian, defenders-of-the-meek that we might hope for, I still think it's safe to say that Bush losing to Gore in 2000 would have been good.
So I don't know. I guess the beef is with the two-party system. I also think there are a lot more ins and outs of parliamentary vs. pure presidential democracies that I don't really know much about, and that cloud that issue, too. The presence of two powerful parties might be the only way anything gets done at all (to the extent that anything does get done, that is). But I tend to agree with the the comments posted here: I try not to pretend that Obama is really my best friend or that he believes all the same things I do. But nor will I anymore pretend that there's no different between him and McCain. I learned that lesson.
The downside of all this enthusiasm is that Obama, should he win, is going to have a real heaping helping of shit-salad on his plate come January. And the currently hyperventilating Devoted might just have unrealistic expectations of how long it's going to take to fix everything. It's not going to just get better, and I fear for his approval ratings and the 2010 interim elections if there's a big emotional crash when Obama fails to produce a magic tincture that instantly erases all ills.
*I'm not being negative, I'm just saying voting blue in Massachusetts is kind of, well, you know. A rah-rah vote.
Well put, Pribble. I believe the same sentiment that you expressed at the top of the post was the beginning of some of my more feriocious arguments with the Terror and Meatcoat.
But damn. I agree. The part where we help push through all these grand promises that the One is making over the protests of the Blue Dogs and the Right will be the fun of the next several years.
Or we'll lose and meatcoat and I go back to the drawing board.
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