Not usually, anyway.
I generally use this page to post my affectionate ramblings about Muppets or my adoring thoughts on Geof from Ace of Cakes. Every once and awhile I actually post some original prose-poetry or write about something dramaturgical or Red Sox related. (The blog url *is* shakespeareandsox after all). I leave the political analysis and such to
GeekUSA, as he has a rather encyclopaedic mind for Americana/political history/Presidential trivia and he’s darn witty about it all to boot.
But, having just voted in Florida’s Democratic Presidential Primary…a primary that we’re all being told essentially “doesn’t count”…I find myself ruminating about the upcoming election and actually having a decent bit to say.
My family and some of my friends know that I have waffled incessantly back and forth between the potential Democratic candidates throughout the whole race up until this point and, while I won’t say who I voted for in Tuesday’s primary, I will say that I have doubted and then re-affirmed my choice at least four times in the two and a half days since then.
What options are we really being asked to choose between in this Democratic race?(I won’t even begin to tackle the Republican side of things as any prolonged examination of that party’s current candidates usually either leaves me shouting at my TV or giggling hysterically.
Back to the Dems...)
Barack Obama is a well-spoken, highly intelligent, dynamic Senator with fairly liberal ideas and views.
Hillary Clinton is a well-spoken, highly intelligent, dynamic Senator with fairly liberal ideas and views.
(I’m not going to debate how “dynamic” or “liberal” each of them may or may not be because everyone will differ in their specific definitions of those terms. I think that while Obama is truly a spectacular orator, if one really listens to some of Hillary’s finer language, she acquits herself quite well too.)
They have very similar policy views on a wide variety of “hot button” issues and each one of them would break new demographic ground within the presidency if elected. Now that John Edwards has dropped out of the race, the one thing that we all know for certain is that the Democratic nominee will *not* be a middle aged white man.
So, if there’s so much that is similar about them…does this *literally* all come down to a popularity contest?Well, kinda.
The press right now is characterizing the choice within the Democratic race as being the choice between Obama’s optimistic idealism and Clinton’s pragmatic realism. But, of course, the contrast is not described in such plain terms by the salivating and jabbering talking heads on the all-day news channels.
Every news outlet from Fox News to The New Yorker has taken pot shots at both candidates.
Obama is branded “naïve” or “inexperienced” because he dares to ask people to take a leap of faith with him and get on board with the idea of – gasp! – actually *changing* things for the better if he has the chance to be president. He is further indicted in the media for having the cheek to seem to believe in his own ideas and for having a sense of genuine awe for the possibility inherent in the presidential office. But honestly, this is not naïveté.
It’s hope. It’s belief.
The scary thing with Obama isn’t his short tenure in the Senate, and therefore his supposed lack of experience. He’s shown himself to be more than smart enough to do the job. No, the frightening part of voting for him is actually *believing* in something positive but oh-so-ephemeral. The fear lies in making the leap and saying “okay…I don’t know if he can really affect all this bi-partisan change he’s talking about, but I really want the future he’s painting to come true. And if enough of us believe, it’ll work.”
I hate to say it, but nowadays so many people are incredibly cynical, and so it’s a hard battle to get them to drop their inhibitions en masse and entice them to believe in something really new and exciting.
On the other hand, Hillary is deemed “paranoid” and “argumentative” and has been accused of seeing a conspiracy against her in everything, and wearing her opponents down with petty bickering…circling them until she finds their weaknesses and can “pounce,” thereby bringing them “down to her level.” The knock on her is “sure, she knows *how* to do this job, but she’s more invested in winning the argument than believing in what she’s arguing for.” In other words, she’s seen as too ruthless, yet somehow also fearful that she can’t win an argument/debate/primary on her own merit and so must try to “level the playing field” by blasting her opponent’s character apart before addressing their stance on the actual issues.
I won’t even get into the havoc Bill Clinton (a president who I always admired during his time in office despite the hoo-hah in his personal life), is wreaking on her campaign the last several times he’s opened his big yap.
But again, I say that if one listens closely to the speeches she’s been making in the wake of the last few primaries, they are actually incredibly articulate, well-thought-out, and fair. I had been doubtful about her positions on several key issues prior to her appearance on Meet the Press a few weeks ago, but listening to her speak proved that she has plans – good ones – for how to fix some key things that the current administration has fouled up beyond belief.
Just because she may be pragmatic, and *may* take the view that the presidency is primarily about negotiating the existing systems to the best of one’s ability *before* turning one’s gaze to more sweeping changes, doesn’t mean that she is anti-progress, as has been suggested by several in the media. She seems to espouse the belief that you have to know the field you’re playing on, and she also seems to be honoring the old adage of “know thine enemy.” She realizes and accepts that any politician is entitled to their ideas and their plans, but they MUST also remember that there are hundreds of other legislators and lobbyists, many of whom will actively try to block anything that the president attempts to put into action – especially if it is new.
She recognizes the difficulty of making sweeping changes immediately because she has seen the process up close and personal before, and she *does* have the experience of being very close to the political crossfire surrounding the presidency and coming out the other side (relatively) intact. Meanwhile, the TV news has tried to portray her as a harbinger of “doom and gloom” merely because she is extolling a more cautious approach to her presidential plan. They automatically equate this realism and pragmatism with fear and an unwillingness to *ever* take risks, and this is neither fair nor accurate.
Okay. So they’re *both* better suited to the job than the TV coverage is leading us to believe…but if that’s true, why does thinking about voting for Obama in November fill me with the fear that his candidacy would be perceived as too weak and we would be inaugurating “President McCain” come January? And why does the thought of voting for Hillary in the fall cause me to feel somewhat depressed and disappointed with myself – as though I have not done my duty to myself or my country because I didn’t have a great enough power of *belief*?
This is a choice between unsupportable optimism and soul-sucking pragmatism.
Or at least that’s what watching the TV news would make us all believe.Hmmm…
Perhaps the problem lies with neither candidate.
Perhaps it’s the same old story…the candidates are not nearly as bad for the country as the demonizing entities of Bad Journalism and Irresponsible Media Spin are.
All I know is that I voted, and it doesn’t count.
It’s just another chapter in the ongoing love/hate affair of Florida and the Democratic Party….
Sigh.Post-Script: I’m not trying to slam all the media here. Journalism, when done well and without the intent to create a pointless feeding frenzy out of thin air, is an eminently respectable profession. My Dad is one of the *best* and fairest journalists I know, and I have learned tons about how reporting *should* be done from him. My intent was to point out the level of confusion this Democratic race has reached and the detrimental effects several members of the media have had on the campaigns by practicing shoddy, *bad* journalism. (Or in the case of the National Review’s Byron York’s comments on Rudy Giuliani’s concession…*shockingly* bad journalism).
Post-Post-Script: I started this post on Wednesday, and worked further on it on Thursday evening. As I did, I had MSNBC’s “Countdown” on in the background. I realized that I must amend my post to say that, along with my Dad, Keith Olbermann is one of the good journalists. One of the *really* good ones. Take a gander at this to see him channel Edward R. Murrow as he excoriates President Bush’s history with FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ay_ykrMJL0Can we elect him?!
