This is a follow on to altruista's marvelous diary venting at Clinton supporters for their dunder-headedness in threatening to switch their loyalties from Clinton to McCain. Apparently, Obama has a case to make with white boomer women (see, e.g. Matt Stoller's article
White Boomer Women Dropping Support for Obama. Even so, after watching a couple of venomous videos of Clinton supporters from yesterday's Rules meeting, I wasn't sure that some of these folks wouldn't feel more at home with McCain anyway. Sadly, their over-the-top comments and behavior clearly didn't do Hillary's cause any favors.
In any event, while writing a comment to altruista's piece, I realized I have a bit of a different take on these issues. Because my comments were getting long, I thought I should move them over to this diary.
I'm a 56-year old professional white woman. Like other women and minorities of my generation, I know what it's like to be discriminated against because I had no mentors and few role models to help me succeed in playing a game for which I didn't know, understand, or especially care for, the rules.
Despite this, for most of the last year, I supported John Edwards. I am a populist to the core and Edwards was the candidate who seemed most concerned with the issues I care most about. After Edwards left the race, it took me a long time to pick my candidate. I admire Hillary and would be delighted to see a woman elected president. I have no doubt she would be a major improvement over what we've been enduring the past eight year and I would have no problem voting for her if she were my party's nominee. But I don't believe in casting my vote vote based only on considerations of gender, race, or any other such category. For me, leaders of whatever stripe are what they do. In my career, I've encountered many examples where I find women and minorities who have ascended to the top of the heap behaving in that brazen, dismissive, bring-it-on way that our "command and control" institutions and systems seem to demand. Once you've met enough new bosses who are pretty much the same as the old boss, you begin to recognize that the problem is inherent in the system, whoever is commanding, controlling, and deciding for it.
I also confess that I don't always base my political choices strictly on party affiliation. After the voters gave them power in 2006, I've been appalled by the support and cover Congressional Democrats have provided a lawless administration that has sought willfully to dismantle the constitution, laws, and government its ersatz leaders swore to preserve and protect. For example, my state has a senator who I supported in 2006 but because he turned out to be one of those "blue dog" FISA-loving Dems, I will work to oppose him in 2012 even if the best candidate turns out an independent.
Reasonable people can and do disagree on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Clinton and Obama, even apart from the gender/race perspectives. What it all boils down to for me is how desperately I and so many others are desperate for a different kind of politics than what we've been offered these past several decades where so many of our representatives represent only their own ideologies and other interests to which they're beholden regardless of the public good.
From my perspective, Sen. Clinton has conducted her campaign in ways that left me feeling this was just another version of "meet the new boss." Obama, by comparison, is the only presidential candidate I've seen since I began to vote in the early 70s who is offering approaches to politics and governing that seems genuinely different and genuinely better. For example, he has based his campaign on a community organizer model. He relies primarily on small donations and, as I understand, he doesn't take funds from lobbyists. He seeks inclusion and has enticed millions of new voters into the process. The enthusiasm he has sparked among young voters is particularly exciting.
When I've asked myself what kind of qualities I am looking for in someone who will be dealing with a constant flood of overwhelming crises, including having to answer that red phone at 3:00 a.m., I realized that I've come to trust Obama not because of who he says he is but because of how he has conducted himself in this campaign. Besides learning very esoteric primary rules and taking advantage of them, he was very smart in designing his campaign for the long haul. I have come to admire and begun to count on his patience, integrity, forthrightness, decency, discipline, intelligence, concern for people and facts, tempered responses, and his judgment. Unlike Bush and members of his administration, Obama is willing to acknowledge and correct mistakes. I also greatly respect Obama's desire and efforts to defuse as much as possible much of this overwrought, self-defeating, "us against them" drama and spin that, thanks to Karl Rove and his ilk, has dominated and poisoned our political discourse these past eight years, including this past weekend at the Dem's Rules meeting.
Finally, I have never been more moved by any contemporary political oratory than I was by the speech Obama delivered on race in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. In my view, if anyone has a chance to get us working together again, I am confident that Obama has what it takes to facilitate the healing and productive collaboration that is needed for the country to move forward again. And he seems to be doing this while hewing to the progressive principles and practices that have brought him to the forefront as the right leader for these historic times.
I am not starry-eyed or naive about Obama nor about the future we face. The nature and variety of the challenges we now confront as a country, a planet, and a species are unprecedented. And I suspect that we haven't seen anything yet. But if the only way out of this morass is through, we need a leader who is grounded firmly in reality rather than ideology, expediency, spin, and a propensity toward deception, self- and otherwise. We need someone with the commitment and skills to persuade us to do whatever is needed in the circumstances after the necessary fact-finding, analysis and debate points the way. We need a leader whose goal and interest are for solving problems in the larger public interest rather than seeking to exploit our vulnernabilities for political or personal profit or because of arrogance, narcissism, self-interest, greed, denial, short-sightedness, willful ignorance, immaturity, sheer stupidity or any other dysfunction or serious personality disorder.
For all these reasons and more, Obama is by far my first choice to help lead us through the crucible -- moral, constitutional, economic, environmental -- we now face. In choosing Obama, I do not feel that I'm settling for the least worst candidate. Indeed, for the first time since 1994, I am beginning to feel cautiously hopeful for the future.
The amazing thing about democracy is that everybody gets to make their own choices on these matters. Unfortunately, the rest of us, both here and abroad, are paying a huge price for this country's exceedingly poor leadership choices. Short of any deference accorded to the ones whose insights and judgments have proven correct by those whose judgments have proven seriously misguided, we are left with trying to appeal to the better natures of any Clinton supporter who out of spite threatens to support McCain. In all likelihood, this conflict will resolve itself once Obama, Clinton, and other respected, fair-minded Democratic leaders like Alice Huffman create the conditions needed to unify the party, conditions that, however hard fought the election season turns out to be, will lead ultimately to a victory in November for Obama, America and all those around the world who have been waiting for us to regain our senses.