June 7, 2008
"Go ahead...throw your vote away!"
Posted by pete at June 7, 2008 8:12 AM
I admit, I've always thought it'd be neat - in a creepy kind of way - if things like the Loch Ness monster or werewolves or the Wellborn Goat Man actually existed. My inner skeptic prevents from really believing, in the Mulderian sense, but I still keep an eye open for news stories about such phenomena, just in case.
And then there are those phantasmagorical creatures I never thought I'd encounter:
A hard core of Hillary Clinton's supporters are threatening to resist Barack Obama's nomination right up to the party's convention in August, leaving the Democrats dangerously divided ahead of next November's elections. Some may even abstain or vote for Republican John McCain in protest against Obama's candidacy.
The long Democratic contest exposed sharp divisions in support between Obama and Clinton. In contest after contest, Clinton beat Obama among middle-aged and older white women, white working class men, Latinos, and Jewish voters.
Mass defections to McCain are unlikely, said Thomas Mann, a politics expert at the Brookings Institution. "The vast, vast majority will just automatically come over," he said. "What we are talking about is only the hard core - 20% or below of her supporters will be angry enough to vote for McCain or not at all."
I've been hearing this stuff for a couple of weeks, but always put it down to a few loud cranks with a sore loser complex getting excessive airtime on Fox News. That was until I heard one of them at dinner last night. She was an older woman, eating with her husband and another couple. Everybody talks pretty loud in Tony's, and we were sitting right next to them so I heard most of their conversation regarding the election primaries and Obama's impending nomination. That was when the woman said, plain as day, that she - a lifelong Democrat - would sooner vote for McCain than Obama.
We all say things when we're pissed off that we regret later, so I'm hoping that was the case with this person. And yet I almost couldn't resist the urge to grab her by the padded shoulders and shake her while politely asking:
Are you out of your fucking mind?! John Paul Stevens is almost 90 years old! Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75! McCain has marched in lockstep with Bush for almost eight years and will continue embracing religious intolerance and rolling back civil liberties in the name of "security," and you're going to vote for him because your candidate never apologized for helping send us to Iraq? I hope you choke on that flauta!
But then, it was just me and my daughter, so I contented myself with flicking borracho beans in her hair and blaming She Who Shall Not Be Named.
I tend to think Clinton's hardcore faithful are just blowing off steam and will come back on board by November. At least I hope so, because you can bet your ass McCain will be dangling Obama's "inexperience" and "naivete" like bass lures over them for the next five months.
Obama is going to have a very tough fight. I know that seems counter intuitive to those of us who are actually sane, but, well, about the only thing the Democratic Party could have done in 2008 to put the White House in jeapardy was to run either a woman or a black man, and… um…
Anyway, at my new blogpage over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I’ve gone into some detail as to both my hopes and fears for Senator Obama’s campaign, and you can find that here. And in case that buried link won’t show up for some reason, the link is:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/06/these-are-the-days-of-miracle.php
Recently, I was talking to a co-worker. I don’t have much respect for this co-worker’s opinions, generally, but she’s a pretty staunch Democrat. However, she advised me that Obama was going to have to pick a Vice Presidential candidate that would ‘reassure’ a lot of people. This baffled me, so I asked her exactly what Obama had to ‘reassure’ a lot of people about. She looked vague and said “Well, he just makes me uneasy. Very uneasy.”
We’ve certainly made progress in this country on racial issues, but a lot of that progress is simply in how racism is no longer generally or publicly acceptable. It’s not that it’s not there any more, people simply no longer want to admit to it. This makes me very worried; yeah, Obama’s poll numbers are always pretty good, but I have to imagine a significant percentage of that is from people who are lying, because even to an anonymous pollster, they don’t want to come off racist. Still, I have to imagine there are at least a few million potential Obama voters who are waiting to be ‘reassured’ by him. Exactly what it is they need to be reassured regarding, and how he’s supposed to do it, I doubt anyone knows, since what I feel they are mostly ‘uneasy’ about is his skin color, and he can’t do much about that.
On another subject, Rush Limbaush is still stirring shit up with as big a stick as he can get his hands on. Now he’s claiming to be sympathetic to Clinton and her hardcore supporters, and urging them to stick with their guns straight through to the convention. You have to have either a serious birth defect or a terrible brain injury to actually listen to anything Limbaugh says, but christ knows there’s no shortage of those among Democrats, especially among Democrats pissed off about Hillary losing the nomination.
I think if anyone can pull it off it’s Obama — he strikes me as a once in a generation candidate. But it’s going to be a squeaker. And unfortunately, the Repubs have gotten very good at stealing squeakers.