Eyes On The Prize
Posted by hope on March 27, 2008
Lately, I have started to really worry that Obama and Clinton supporters are prepared to cut off their noses (ie, vote for McCain) to spite their own faces should their preferred candidate not get the nomination. I have started to worry about Clinton’s attacks on Obama, and the possibility that she will weaken him enough enough that he would be too weak a nominee to defeat McCain. And I worry that, should Clinton be the nominee, the people who already loathe her plus the Democrats she is currently alienating will come to the polls in droves just for the pleasure of giving her the finger.
This gives me a little comfort, even though I know they are both only saying it because they must. I just hope they and their respective supporters actually take it to heart. Up until about a month before the Texas primary, I was leaning toward Clinton. But I finally decided Obama might just be sincere about doing things differently, which greatly appeals to me. Clinton knows how to play the current game, which is good if she is getting things done that you support, but doesn’t do anything to change the stinky way the game is played or restore people’s trust in government. When it comes to policy, Clinton is very different than Bush, but I think the two of them share some fundamental approaches to governance that I vehemently dislike.
The thing is, if Clinton is the nominee, there is no question that I will vote for her. Somebody’s got to dig us out of the mess we are in and I know a Republican can’t and won’t do it. So I will hold my nose and vote for Clinton if it comes to that. Democrats can’t let themselves lose sight of the overriding priority in November, which is to get a Democrat back in the White House to fix what Bush has so thoroughly broken. What I fear is that many people are focused on their idealism (which I completely share in this regard) to the exclusion of practicality.
Liz said
Voting for the democratic candidate for the presidential race in Texas is like trying to whistle in the middle of a rock concert: you know you did it, but nobody heard you, and the band played on. I joke with my mother that I only vote just so I know I’ve cancelled out her vote for the republican candidate. That’s about all it’s good for here. I can’t recall the last time Texas went to the democratic candidate – was it Carter? I would have been 8. Oh well.
Sam said
It’s a lucky thing for me that I live in Texas ’cause that way I can vote my conscience without having any impact at all on the election of the president. First of all, I can’t imagine a scenario under which the superdelegates would so undermine the party that they would nominate her. However, if they do nominate her, under no circumstances will I vote for Hillary Clinton and here are a few reasons why.
She’s run one of the worst Democratic primary campaingns in recent memory. She’s operated under the assumption that she deserved the nomination without actually needing any credentials for being president. To expect her to run a general election campaign or, God forbid, her administration any differently from the way she’s run the campaign is, I fear, the height of folly.
Imagine a liberal George W. Bush. Imagine a universal healthcare task force run just as she ran it in 1993, just as Cheney ran the energy task force, behind closed doors with secret witness lists. Her Machiavellian machinations killed health care reform for a generation. While Obama’s plan lacks the scope and ambition of Clinton’s is has the inestimable advantage of actually being passable by Congress.
When her christening as Democratic Saviour was challenged by the impertinance of Barack Obama, she resorted to the worst, lowest variety of character assassination and innuendo to poison him. What did it get her? Her highest disapproval ratings of the campaign. I’m not sure she cares though, because I’m not entirely sure she’s actually running for the 2008 nomination. I think that she may instead be running for the 2012 campaign. She seems to be doing everything she can to poison Barack Obama to the majority of electorate. It begs the question “Why?”
Hillary Clinton is one of the most divisive politicians in American public life. She is so toxic that any meaningful policy initiatives she may propose will be dead on arrival, unless she has a super-majority in the House and Senate, which I fear her feeble coat tails in the general won’t garner.
She will be so self-conscious about proving her foreign policy bona fides that she’ll have no choice but to meet every international threat with force, to prove she’s tough enough to stand up to the bad guys around the world. You think John McCain is scary? He at least has the military legitimacy to NOT address every crisis with the military. Remember, only Nixon could go to China.
The great bugaboo is the Supreme Court appointments she could make. That’s a valid point, except that John McCain can’t get another Scalia or Thomas through the Senate, so I think that may not be as great a crisis as it has been made out to be. Of course, I could be wrong…I usually am.
Also, she lacks what George Herbert Walker Bush memorably called “the vision thing”. She has yet to articulate an overarching reason to justify her ambition to be president. To me, her desire to be president seems no more than the culmination of a personal ambition for political power. She hasn’t demonstrated for me any reason to vote for her beyond the fact that she’s not John McCain. Is there more?
Finally, in the greatest test of her political judgment, she failed horribly. She voted to authorize a misguided war against an essentially powerless foe simply to show she’s tough. She makes false claims of experience when it’s judgement we need in the White House. I avoided having to fight in that criminal war by a margin of a couple of weeks, so I take failures of judgment like hers personally.
Like I said, it’s great being a Democrat in Texas. It doesn’t make any difference who I vote for ’cause the Democrat won’t win. For that reason, I get to remain pure by not voting for President in November if she’s the nominee. Of course, I’ll vote for the down ballot races, but I can leave that one race blank.
hope said
Sam, I agree with you on almost all those points. I am not as convinced as you that she will use military force to prove herself and I disagree that the Supreme Court is not a huge consideration. In terms of vision, the fact that she aligns herself with the Democratic Party implies that she generally shares that policy orientation, and I would much prefer that orientation to the one Republican candidates are aligned with.
You really should blog more