He's Dreamy Too ...

Friends,

I'm an asshole. That's undisputed. And so, when, in the last few days, more than one person has said something to the effect that I should try to convince them to vote for Obama over Clinton, I've perhaps been unable to resist being slightly condescending, or at least incredulous that this is still a question in some people's minds. This is perhaps why I'm not a diplomat (that, and the murky past that keeps haunting me, keeping me from ever entering the world as a man of record and consequence). If you were one of those people who received the brunt of my superiority complex, apologies all around.

I don't mean to be part of the "hillary is the devil" camp. After the debate last week, with the detritus of a crowded and desperate campaign flock stripped away, we watched two decent people discuss important things in a largely intelligent and candid way. (We'll ignore that ridiculously stupid question about sex and violence in hollywood… I mean really, is it 1993… are we also still talking about pedro from the real world San Francisco and his effect on society? Who gives a fuck?) It was one of the first moments ever that I was actually proud, whether of my country or democrats or just liberals I'm not sure, but proud. I was breathing. And I realized what I had been feeling for so long, what is, in the end, the argument for Obama. In the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights and voters' rights activist, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

And so I'm not sick and tired anymore, I'm hopeful. And with that hopefulness I think I can better explain how it is we can get from here to there. From hopeful to proud, from waiting and wanting to having and being. This will be a little long, but tomorrow will be one of the first times in most of our lives that we will enter a voting booth and not have to choose between the lesser of two evils. We should enjoy this, but we should not let it lull us into the thought that the decision is not important. So I hope you'll hear me out.

We could start with policy, but honestly there are, in my mind, only two major differences in policy between Clinton and Obama, and they are slight. (One is open foreign policy, I.e. should we be talking with Iran and Syria, which I think Obama is right about. We got ourselves into this mess by not talking with others. The world needs this conversation. The other policy difference is mandates for health care, which it seems Clinton probably is a little better on, though it's not as clear-cut as it may appear) We could start with the race or gender thing, but I think everybody is a little sick of the minority olympics here and the question of "who has it worse?" As Homer says, I'm an upper-middle-class white male, age 18-35, everyone listens to me. I don't know who it's worse for. The only black woman that I asked that question to told me to shut up. It's a bad question.

Let's start with what everybody is really thinking: who can beat the republicans? (I'll capitalize the 'r' in republicans when they stop calling it the "democrat party." It's democratic, dicks) It seems that this is one of the prevailing reasons people are thinking of voting for Clinton, that she can "stick it to the republicans." I think that this would be a good reason for voting for her, if it were true. Yet if we take this consequentalist tack, we really need to analyze it a bit further than saying she's tough. Sure she's tough, but she won't win.

The presumptive republican to beat is McCain (Romney might stage a comeback, but it doesn't seem very likely). Clinton has been running on one key point, her experience. This sways some people when she's competing against Obama, but put her up against a 76 year old man who's been in congress for 26 years, and is a veteran of both the Vietnam war, the Hanoi Hilton, and the even the freakin' Cuban missile crisis, and she doesn't have much ground to stand on anymore. (On an aside: experience doing what? Is Washington experience really what we want more of, experience playing the game that has ignored the American people for decades. Dick Cheney is the most experienced person in politics. Just sayin.)

Furthermore, though people are painting this election in shades of the economy, and downplaying the effect of war politics, come the general election the war will not simply disappear. McCain is unabashedly pro-war, and the democrat's desires for withdrawal will stand in stark contrast to this. However Clinton voted for war authorization, and when the general election flares up, she's going to have a much harder time making the peace argument with her hawkish history.

I've heard people say lately that "people make mistakes" or "why do we keep going back to her mistaken vote." I'm sorry, but the war has been the biggest thing on people's minds in politics for the past 5 years, and now that they want to vote for Clinton they try to downplay it? This is dishonest and a betrayal of the principles which have, in large part, created the new groundswell of political activism and engagement we are seeing in this election. We keep coming back to it because it was an amoral and immoral vote, because it showed Clinton to be in a political rather than contemplative mindset, because it was a weak thing to do, and it is a liability in the coming election. We keep coming back to it because one million Iraqi's have died since the war began, because more Americans have died in Iraq than did in the World Trade Center, and Clinton is still using the "if I had known then what I know now" argument. That's the point, as president you need to get it right the first time. I made the right choice then, most people I know made the right choice then. Why couldn't she? This was when she was supposed to "stick it to the republicans." She didn't.

Lastly, electability will be a matter of demographics. McCain is not your usual republican. He draws his support not from the extreme right or the religious right, but from moderate republicans and independents. It's really no big secret that even moderate republicans hate Clinton, and with her presumptions of inevitability and serious dynastic undertones, she isn't the darling of independents either. Yet these are exactly the voters that are most attracted to Obama. It's strange to think, but republicans like Obama. Odd. And sure, most of them won't vote for him, but some will, especially after the character assassination McCain is being forced to weather from the ridiculous wing of his party (we could lump the extreme right, the religious right, and the neocons all under the label of the ridiculous right and we'd save a lot of conjunctions). Obama is not seen as a raging baby-boomer liberal by these people, he's seen as a calm, decent person that will listen to you. Just as he wants to be in a conversation with Iran, he wants to discuss things with republicans (the latter group actually frightens me a bit more than the Persian menace). Even the crazies on the right like him, though I suspect that their feelings for him are akin to their grand-daddies' affection for their house slaves. ("He's one of the good ones … and so 'well-spoken'") In terms of demographics, Hillary is a nightmare against McCain, but Obama cuts his strengths to pieces. Obama is McCain kryptonite.

Viability is not, in my mind, justification for voting a certain way, though it certainly strengthens the case. It's been written that people support Obama not because of how they feel about him, but because of how they want to feel about themselves. This is given as a reason why he lacks substance. I first would say that I don't think this is entirely true. I think most people support him because when he speaks, he sounds like a person. And when he talks to someone it is a conversation, not a push-poll. He doesn't just listen to Jimi, he hears Jimi (anyone, anyone… white men can't jump … jesus, you people don't know anything). He thinks about issues, not at them. He doesn't parse everything he says in a legalistic fashion.

But yes, I think people like how he makes them feel about themselves too. I do. That's not a bad thing. The biggest problem with this country is that there is no civic engagement. We have national borders but no national culture. We aren't involved in each other's lives. We don't vote. I didn't know where Idaho was until I was 22 years old. These are problems that stem from a general disengagement with our government, with our country, and with each other. So when a politician comes along who makes people want to get involved, who believes we should all serve in some form of national service (not military, but park services, community groups, and many other forms of service), who speaks not about the agent of change he is, but about the force of change he wants us to be, when that happens yes, we like how we feel about ourselves. It is the cynical voice of the American political machine that tells us we shouldn't like a candidate who comforts us not by telling us everything is great, but by telling us how we can make it great, if we try.

And this goes for republicans as well. Though we would like to think natural selection will eventually take care of right-wingers, I think they're around to stay. So what would an Obama presidency and what would a Clinton presidency do to the republican movement. In the last decade or so, the republican party has devolved from a semi-coherent (if not dishonest) political ideology to an hysterical gang, clawing at power and money without reason or motivation. They play the political game, but they are pre-historically tribal, coming together out of self-preservation rather than common ideas and goals. That as of late they have imploded even further, and become ineffective even in self-preservation, is lucky for us, and has allowed an opening for the resurrection of a productive and ascendant left. Clinton's candidacy would close that opening. Clinton is so polarizing, and so hated by the republicans, she would be a new rallying point for the rabid right-wing of this country. She would feed the worst tendencies of the new republican party, revive baby-boomer era politics of opposition and bitterness, and sap any remaining intellectualism out of the right, to be replaced by the desire for blood and treasure that has been their clarion, the blood of Clinton and the treasure of tax-cuts and no-bid contracts. (Don't get me wrong, this hate of Clinton is unjustified, but it exists nonetheless)

Obama, on the other hand, would be a challenge to the republican party. Faced with a coherent intellectual liberal front led not by the old-guard, but by a conciliatory new face that is ready not just to negotiate and debate, but even to agree when possible, the right would have to evolve. They would have to find their own new generation, their own sanity, and their own ideas to counter a vital democratic party. Instead of a dynastic heir apparent with old scores to settle and pit-bull tactics at the ready, they would face a man that has never had to assassinate someone's character to win an argument, someone who isn't rooted in the real cold-war that has been raging since the sixties and did not meet its end with the USSR, the cold-war between the right and the left in this country.

That cold-war left me sick and tired. It led to an arms race of politics, and even with all those new appendages we couldn't reach our head or our hearts. A thousand arms sprang out of us, but all with fists, and not one with an open hand. I'm tired of it. Our country is a bad marriage with 300 million kids. Hillary is a divorce lawyer, Obama is a marriage counselor.

Mixed and convoluted metaphors aside, there are a thousand more things I would want to say about this, but chances are that by the time you get to this paragraph, the primaries are over anyway. I could go on about Obama's reason and experience, about his intellect and his humanity. I could go on about Clinton's disgusting political tactics, her dishonesty, and her past betrayals of minorities, of the queer community, and of many others who went to the line for her. I could talk about the dynastic question, which is truly troubling. I could talk about the woman thing, and point out that, contrary to what we might hope for, it won't do much for gender politics in America (India had a female PM, and new brides still are burnt to death if they don't pay enough dowry. You tell me how much things have to change). I could talk about the face Obama would give America for the world, about the cognitive dissonance in the new terrorist recruit's mind when he or she is told America is the great white satan and they see Barack Hussein Obama, a half white-American half African who was raised in the biggest muslim nation in the world, leading us. I could talk for ages about Clinton's past support for war and the many other times she failed to "stick it" to Bush because it was a political risk. I could talk more and more about the hopeful engagement in public life that Obama's presidency could inspire and revive. I could even talk about their respective policies, similar as they generally are (but who talks about policies in this day and age ... she cried! he got a haircut! my shirt is red!).

I could talk about all that (and I guess, in fact, I just did). But I could also make this last appeal. It is extremely rare in this country, and probably in almost any country, to be able to walk into a voting booth and make both the smart vote and the right vote. I voted for Kucinich once. That was fun, but bitter: It was the right vote, but stupid. If Clinton wins the nomination, I will vote for her in the general election. That won't be fun, but I will know that she might win (though I worry she couldn't): the smart vote, but it's not right. But before it gets to that point there's this: tomorrow will be the first time you can vote for a good, decent, honest person, who will do the job well, and has the best chance to win against the republicans. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I think this is what not being sick and tired is: pulling a lever, and making the smart vote, the right vote, and the hopeful vote all at once.

Cheers,
e