An Interview With a Revenge Voter
A: Hello, and thank you for being interviewed about this. You’ve said that if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination that you’ll abstain from voting or vote for a third party candidate. Do you stand by that?
B: Yes I stand by that. I might even vote for McCain, but I doubt it. One thing is for sure I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton.
A: Doesn’t that seem kind of short sighted? I mean, what if that helps McCain win. He wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years. Also, McCain will be appointing Supreme Court justices. He looks like he would be a horrible president. Maybe rival Bush in the sucking department.
B: So?
A: You want four more years of Bush? You want Iraq war blood on your hands?
B: I honestly don’t see much difference between McCain and Clinton. And if I vote for Clinton what am I really voting for? More politics as usual? More Democratic triangulation and realpolitik? I’ve had it with the Democrats standing for that. I feel like I did my part for the party in voting for John Kerry and see what happened? Do I have blood on my hands for that vote? I guess so.
But as Dick Cheney said, those Americans chose to take part in that conflict. They could have taken Cheney’s example and opted out. As Joe Galloway noted, “(According th Cheney our volunteers chose) to squander their lives in a war of choice.” As for the Iraqis. My heart goes out to them and it is comforting to me that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Tony Blair will be barking in hell for eternity, but I’m taking off the hair shirt if Clinton gets the nomination.
As for the court, we’ll have a large majority in the Senate so say McCain picks Rush Limbaugh to sit on the bench. If the Senate Democrats roll over for McCain like they have Bush whose fault will it be that Limbaugh gets to join Scalia? Why shouldn’t the Senate Democrats just provide McCain with a list of five people and say – if you want to appoint someone to the bench, pick one of these five people.
They wouldn’t of course and that is another reason for voting against Clinton if she gets the nomination.
A: What do you mean?
B: This primary campaign has put me in a nihilistic frame of mind. If Clinton gets picked by the Democrats to be their nominee it tells me that there is nothing much worth saving in the Democratic party. I get the feeling that it needs to be totally demolished in order to be rebuilt from the ground up. Maybe another republican President could finish off the currently useless incarnation of the once great Democratic Party.
Knowing what we know about Clinton and Obama, if Clinton wins I will be of the strong opinion that the Democratic Party is a house that can only be fixed by an earthquake, tsunami or a raging fire. An earthquake and a raging fire followed by a tsunami would be perfect.
It’s time the democrats and the republicans clean out their houses. These two parties have the citizens strangled! Two corporate parties…one snake with two corporate heads.
I was right with this interview until the interviewee claimed to be in a “nihilistic” frame of mind.
Nihilistic?
I mean, who talks this way?
I wish that I could ask this interviewee these questions:
1. How do you see Democrats being able to govern without a healthy dose of realpolitik? The repubs have been running a completely ideologically tilted board for since 2002 and people are not only exhausted by it, they are increasingly suspicious of it. Bonus question — do you think that the press is going to give Dems the same pass for a completely ideologically run government that they’ve given to BushCo?
2. If you have been watching some of the races shape up nationally for the House and Senate, it is pretty clear that Dems are just as energized about these races (most featuring folks with more progressive ideas) as they are about the Presidential ones. Helping this, of course, is the fact that repubs are currently recruiting for 29 or so seats that are being vacated. Will the interviewee be taking all of his or her marbles home for these races too? There is no value to trying to get into place a stronger progressive majority (more and better Democrats) in Congress as a better counterbalance to either Clinton or McCain?
3. if Clinton wins I will be of the strong opinion that the Democratic Party is a house that can only be fixed by an earthquake, tsunami or a raging fire. This is related to question 2, but this seems to call for top down change and re-creation of the party, rather than the bottom-up (slow) change that brings with it ready-made support for differing approaches and ideas. So I want to know how progressive the interviewee thinks this is.
Good questions.
If you are interested in downticket races and building a progressive majority I think we all agree that the thing to do would be to nomiate Barack Obama. The historic registration numbers and turnout can’t be attributed to Hillary Clinton.
So I think that the nomination of Obama will be a victory for the bottom up party building that you mention.
Picking Clinton would put the brakes on all of that. She has signaled that she is part of the old system of trying to pick up big checks in big states and win in the electoral college by one percent.
[On a side note Doviti’s post speaks to that as a kind of strength, but it is only a strength is you think that writing off 49% of the country is a good strategy. I don’t. Obama will do well in “red states.”]
Realpoltik? With landslides in the House in Senate I think that Obama would a real mandate – as opposed to Bush’s imagined madate.
He’s have the juice to get stuff done and create an honestly centerists coalition. While Clinton would be looking at another 4 years of politics being red in tooth and claw.
One more thing. A Clinton win would allow Rove to avoid the consequences of his many crimes.
Republicans, (and popular opinion egged on by the right wing media) would paint prosecutions as poltically motivated by the Clinton mafia.
So I think that the nomination of Obama will be a victory for the bottom up party building that you mention.
I think that this is true.
Where we differ, I think, is that the bottom up party building should not end at a primary nomination. Even if HRC should win it, I think that those of us who really want change in the Dems need to refocus and start working with the very many Dems trying to get to a veto-proof majority. More and Better Democrats should not be abandoned because HRC wins the thing. More and Better Dems in Congress means that she should get a shorter leash to do the kind of triangulation and abandonment of the traditional Dem base that has been the hallmark of the Clintons (heck, much of the traditional party) to date. More and Better Dems in Congress also means that at least one branch of the government may be interested in advancing more progressive ideas and solutions. And this is some progress, I think, and progress that provides some long-term building possibilities precisely on those things that polls show folks trust Dems to do.
Obama represents the possibility of rebooting Dem politics, certainly, and one that will rely on a truely centrist (as you note) coalition and not not triangulating rightward. But if he has a chance to govern from that coalition, I will expect that the ideologues and some activists on the Dem side will be hugely disappointed in him. And I suspect that prosecuting all of the worst behavior of the previous administration is unlikely to be high on his list of Stuff to Do and would, frankly, quite undermine what he says he wants to do.
Maybe a better way to think about this is What Would Obama Do if he is not the nominee? I think that he will be out tirelessly working for More and Better Dems in Congress — knowing that a more solid Congressional Dem majority (and one that is prepared to smartly revive its position as an equal to the executive) is Real Change. Not as much as we might want, but it is pretty darn big nonetheless.