Closing the Deal: it’s not up to Obama or Hillary now
Rather than an extended essay, I’ll just ask you to mull over this. Put down the sniper rifles, oil them up for the fight with McCain ahead. No matter what motions they go through, the nominee is chosen. Celebrate quickly. But stop the sniping: if Obama’s for real, his promise of real change to the status quo is a challenge to each of us to match his capacity to cross seemingly impassable divides.
In short, kill the habit of intra-party sniping for now. Honorable folks don’t aim at unarmed opponents. Gloating winners are insufferable to most. It’s time to extend olive branches and set aside differences with supporters of the other camp. Making peace is not easy, and Obama cannot do that alone.
As we’ve asserted that we, the citizens, control the party, let’s not take it on a drunken joyride. Many progressives backed Clinton for many logical reasons. They are not really our enemies. They’ve been temporary opponents, which is distinctly different.
We need each other, to beat McCain. We’ll need each other next year, to push Obama to a progressive course when he’s tempted to over-compromise if and after we get him elected. He has proven again to be most appealling when he resisted the temptation to be snarky and dismissive and took the high road.
We should take that thoroughfare, too. Be considerate. Be classy. Forgive the sniping that has come back our way. I know for a fact that many great and nice people took the other side of this contest. Set aside the impulses to gloat, rub it in or to think of them as lessers. They are our natural allies, grant them dignity and respect. There’s immeasurable value to the Golden Rule.
We owe it to each other, to Obama and especially to the country, to overcome the rifts, to end the war, to restore the economy, to fix the dysfunctions in our government.
Stop and regain perspective. The catastrophe in Myanmar requires us to reach out with our humanity. I have a little I can donate but I intend to donate it have donated it to Thirst Aid in the name of Jeralyn Merritt. The distance that grew between us due to the primaries has never caused me to conclude she was any less a progressive nor any less a good person.
Let’s change Washington DC. It can be classier. So can we. If Obama is to represent us, let’s have him represent us at our finest.
The road to peace in Iraq will not be without peril. Restoring a decent economy after the looting of our Treasury by BushCo will take time. But today, we can match the investment of Obama in those efforts by investing similar efforts into our dealings with our fellow progressive Democrats.
Yes, we sure as hell can.
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Note: I should note that I discovered Thirst Aid because of the website put up by Richard Blair. You may already know him as the chief proprietor of the blog, The All Spin Zone. He’s another excellent example of progressives reaching out with their best.
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May 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Barring any “Summer Surprize”, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee.
I am not very hopeful, not that I think that he would do much better or worse than Clinton.
He’s running a different campaign, one that has taken the high road. He should be lauded for that. He has benefited from the fact that Democrats are prone to idealism and nuanced ideas. He has, also, benefited from having opponents who were hobbled to some extent by not being able to fight a full-out dirty campaign for fear of having it backfire, due to the sense of fair-play in the Democratic electorate.
This is not to say that all Democrats are prone to idealism, nuanced ideas and fair play. But enough of them are to swing the nomination to Obama.
The general election will be different.
The Rovian playbook will be at work in full throttle. They will throw everything at him, every negative comment by anyone, any small error in judgement, both real and imagined.
And it won’t be a frontal assault from McCain. They will have an agreement to play nice and the Republican Presidential campaign will play by the rules. But the 527’s and other groups including Senate and Congressional campaigns will be overfunded for the effort. McCain will, mildly, criticize the ads when they come, but they won’t stop.
And whisper campaigns will do what the main assault doesn’t.
And Obama, having pledged to be above it all, will have only the positive message.
You have to remember what is rule one in the Rovian world. “You don’t go negative on a candidate to win votes. You go negative to depress the number of voters for your opponent.”
Obama will be playing defense for the whole campaign, answering one charge after another and, sooner or later, true or not, enough could stick on him that the voters on the edge, the ones that don’t vote every time or are voting for the first time won’t come out and vote for him. And, without all of the new voters that have come out of the woodwork, he won’t have a chance. He needs them just to offset what he will lose just by being b