I don’t see more than a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton and Obama. While they’re both better than the Republican alternative, I can’t get excited about either of them. So what’s my problem?
Straight-up, I’ll admit I’m an Edwards partisan. I really thought he was our best shot at turning this country around. I don’t think the money I donated to his campaign is wasted, and I’m glad I got the chance to vote for JRE in the Florida primary. It was worth it because he changed the tone of the debate. If you saw Clinton's victory speech in Florida, she was reading right from JRE's playbook.
And the upside of Edwards’ quitting is I’ll be saving a lot of money going forward, no matter who wins the Democratic nomination. Neither Clinton nor Obama need my money. They're both neck deep in corporate money.
Other similarities include that Obama has pretty much the identical voting record as Hillary. I could go on, but others have made many, many points about why Obama and Hillary are two sides of the same coin.
Other than their not-so-nice similarities, let me tell you more reasons why I don’t find these candidates individually appealing. You tell me why I’m wrong.
HILLARY CLINTON
Hillary’s sins have been listed so many places that I don’t need to go into length. But here are SOME of the reasons why I don’t like her ...
1) She’s way too chummy with corporate lobbyists. Yes, you can say the same thing about Obama, but at least he has enough of a sense of shame not to say things like "A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans." When Clinton said that, I about fell out of my chair.
2) She wants the job so badly you can see the raw hunger on her face. That scares me. Doesn’t it scare you? One of the reasons I supported JRE is I really felt he was in it less for his personal gain or glory than he was to really help people. I felt he was a man on a mission for something other than himself. I can’t say that for the other two.
3) Her campaign uses dirty tricks. It irks me that Clinton’s campaign tried to make it harder for people to vote in Nevada and sent out misleading mailers about Obama in New Hampshire. The Democratic party should be about enabling people to vote and using the truth as a weapon. Leave the lies and smears to Karl Rove.
There are more things I don’t like about Clinton, but these are among my top three. Now let’s talk about what bothers me about Barack Obama ...
BARACK OBAMA
I think Barack Obama is getting a much easier pass from the press than Hillary Clinton. Don’t get so riled up, Obamanites – as long as the press stays on his side, that’s a huge plus in his favor. However, you should be asking yourself if the press will continue to play nice.
The Republican smear machine, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, hasn’t really targeted Obama. Once the wingers start feeding juicy half-truths and falsehoods to lazy reporters, and the overpaid echo chamber starts repeating those lies, the press coverage could change pretty quickly.
But we’ll leave that for another time. Here’s what bothers ME about Obama ...
1) Obama's advisors include corporate lobbyists, Liebercrats and Republicans, along with your usual assortment of right-wing hacks. Heck, he's even had "significant discussions" with Colin Powell. Isn't that who every Democrat wants to get advice from -- the guy who lied us into the Iraq War? Obama advisors include Austan Goolsbee (a right-wing economist from the Chicago School that gave us Alan Greenspan) and other Republican leftovers. Yech!
2) Obama isn’t even close to liberal. As Matt Stoller pointed out, Obama, "has called Social Security a 'crisis', attacked trial lawyers, associated unapologetically with vicious homophobes, portrayed Gore and Kerry as excessively polarizing losers, boasted as his central achievement an irrelevant ethics bill, ran against the DC establishment while taking huge amounts of cash from DC, undermined Ned Lamont in 2006, criticized NAFTA while voting for a NAFTA-style trade agreement, compiled opposition research on the most effective liberal pundit in the country, refused to promise that American troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, and endorsed the central plank of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy doctrine, the war on terror."
To be sure, you can say many of the same things about Clinton, but at least she didn’t say, as Obama did, that "the GOP has been the party of ideas for the past 10 to 15 years." Seriously, how do you explain all this away?
3) His health-care plan is the worst of the Democratic plans. As you might expect, an Edwards supporter like me is very focused on health care plans. Obama’s is the worst of the top three (Obama-Clinton-Edwards). He doesn’t mandate that people have health care coverage and he uses Republican talking points to support his views. You can read Paul Krugman’s takedown of Obama’s plan here.
So these are my top three reasons why I don’t like each candidate. Supporters of each candidate will probably think I’m being too harsh on them. Well, I could list a lot more than three things I don’t like about each one. And yet despite all this, they’re both better than the Republican alternative. The Democratic nominee will have my vote, if not my enthusiasm.
From this list, you can see why I’m not excited about either of them. Make your best case – we’ll see if you can change my mind.