(Also posted at my own blog, Nothing New Under The Sun)
A while ago, looking in my old Merriam-Webster dictionary for something, I stumbled over the word "spoilsman" - something which I don't recall ever hearing used, in political blogging, during all these years. It's a curious thing that this concept has gone from modern political discourse, and that the rediscovery of the thing itself - "OMG! Look at all these fiscal connections to various industry! Look at these paybacks! How the hell do they get away with this!" has come as such a shock. But that loss does explain a great deal how corporatism has been allowed to creep in and control politics unchecked for so long, before and since Nixon took undisclosed donations from Democrat tycoons in exchange for promises to make sure the EPA was toothless...
So how does this affect today's landscape? (Call me cynical if you like, but prove me wrong.)
The naivete amazes me of the people out there wondering, and lamenting, over the fact that the intrapartisan battles over who will be the Democratic party nominee are so heated, saying "Aren't we all Democrats? Shouldn't the most important thing be getting a Democrat - any Democrat - elected, instead of wasting our energies fighting each other?
Well, no - the thing is, there is a tremendous amount of power at stake.
Not just potential wealth, for one's self and one's friends - past presidents lack no end of backscratchers - and not just the ability to affect the policies of the country in such a way as will assist your and your friends' and supporters' fortunes, but also the social/psychological power of being effectively The Most Powerful Person In The Whole World, the closest thing there is to a Caesar nowdays. Nevermind that a POTUS doesn't have the kind of glory or glamor of a Roman caesar - a lot of the real wearers of the purple didn't either, or much power of any sort (being figureheads), and even the victorious generals like Vespasian spend much of their time being glorified bureaucrats - it's the beau ideal of being The President Of The United States, The Greatest Superpower Of All Time™ that is the lodestone which holds the imagination, the thing that all of us kids are told from day one in grade school that we can, and should, aspire to, the best thing anyone could ever be--
And it isn't just the candidates - when you elect a candidate you also elect their inner circle, their Association, to borrow Cherryh's term, those who have been working for and with them for years, those who are their longstanding supporters who (justifiably) expect to be rewarded for their services, and whose advice will be privileged over everyone else's, whether or not this is justified objectively - e.g. Ulysses S. Grant, let alone GWB.
There is a huge, decades-old Association which has formed around the Clintons - those who actually are movers and shakers within their group, and those who are merely hangers-on and foot-soldiers, but who feel like they are vested in it - and there is a tremendous amount of money involved, for consulting and advising fees, and there is also the power, the prestige of being part of it - if it is victorious.
It is not linked with other candidates' associations - in fact, the Mark Penn situation shows that there is more cross-aisle cameraderie than there is with ordinary rank-and-file Dems, something which shouldn't come as any shock to anyone who watched the last four-five years of DNC politics - and so will not benefit directly - that is to say, its members will not benefit directly at all from a win by some other candidate. They will be just as much on the outs as any Republican, unless they jump ship and succeed in ingratiating themselves with their former rivals, and that's easier said than done. (Whereas smaller candidates, like Dodd or even Edwards, have nothing much to lose and a great deal to gain, by supporting a victorious rival.)
Why on earth SHOULD they want a rival to win? What will they gain from it? "The good of the whole country," you say, "they should put aside their personal desires and just work in the trenches like the rest of us," - but that's a very naive and fluffy attitude to have towards what is essentially a hostile business takeover going on. "Just be a good loser, give up everything you have expended all this energy in striving for," is not something that most of us, unless we are truly Enlightened saints or sages who have transcended our desires, are ever going to be able to accept tamely - not even the kindergarten teachers who preach it to their little charges, but then picket when their own jobs are at stake without ever considering any hypocrisy.
And of course it's more complicated than just "We want W00T!" - because everybody trying out for a leadership role on some level thinks they're doing it for The Common Good, there's always some level of "I'm sacrificing to get this brass ring, for the Good of America " going on - even the Bushco/Cheneyburton Association think that way, only what they think The Good of America is an America as close to the Gilded Age as possible, that the only America that matters is that top capstone of the fiscal pyramid.
But you're asking that all those advisors, no matter how they have failed utterly to bring about any of their stated ideals, to win any victories, just quietly fade away in surrender to somebody else. Would you? Or maybe you, personally, won't fight or hard for your ambitions, but how many people do you know who won't? School, family, work, hobby/fandom - politics is no different, from any of these. It's just the same on either side.
Which Horse To Back - And How?
Now, how to deal? Assuming you don't feel any strong man'chi to any candidate (whether you never had, or you had and lost in disillusionment and haven't found another target for it) and you're not willing to resign your limited, mostly-formal participation in the process altogether, how do you decide who to support?
We are picking a mount - not a racehorse to bet on passively from the sidelines, entirely out of our control, whose direction and outcome is firstly in the hands of fate/chance and secondly of kings/desperate men (because jockeys and trainers must always yield to mud, thrown bottles, a twisted fetlock, another pair's blunder or block), where we the voters have nothing but a faux, sympathetic-magic effect as we cheer from the sidelines or rub our lucky rabbits' feet or pray and hope that "our" horse will win this time (and by "win" I do not merely mean get elected, but accomplish our aims during the subsequent tenure) - but a horse to ride through an endurance competition over hill and dale, we doing the jockeying and guiding, and countering the random and deliberate obstacles in so far as we can. We must be riders, and not mere passengers, or worse yet bystanders as the liberal electorate has historically been in most of my lifetime, while the conservatives have been actively reining and adjusting their weight to affect the trajectory of their steeds, during election and office-holding alike.
If you are picking a mount for a trail ride, you would ideally take the "flawless" one - but such a horse doesn't exist. The choice is always between flaws, and deciding which flaw is most likely to prove disastrous under the present specific circumstances. Here is a horse with much experience on trails, but an iron mouth and a bad temper. Here is another with less experience, but responsive to the reins and attentive to its rider - which do you take? The experienced mount might seem better, but if it decides to take a path that you can see is going to lose you the race, and makes you waste time fighting it back to the better route, then throws a bucking fit in temper (assuming you CAN wrest it back, depending on how iron-mouthed it is) you aren't going to be better off than with the less-experienced, but willing-to-be-guided and less-arrogant one.
Or here is a horse which is big and muscular, and looks like a better choice, able to bestride or bull through any obstacle in its path, versus one which is smaller and lighter - but it might turn out that our big hefty beast is fussy and timid, and won't jump a brook or crash through brush, while the bantam-weight is a fire-eater who will find a way over, around, or through where the visibly-overpowered horse balks, losing valuable ground to the competition. Or any combination of these - and the more examples of past performance, the more chances you have to assess the behavior of all of the remuda, the more rational your assessment of a potential mount will be - not the childish, sentimental liking/disliking for a name or a blaze or a palomino or a paint, but the likelihood of this particular campaigner to make good choices and to respect yours too, or to fly to pieces under stress, or to ignore you completely, or to stop to have a biting, kicking fight with another competitor's horse, or dump you off and thus effectively join the competition--
You're always going to be backing a Lesser Evil™ - we're voting for humans, not unfallen angels, and always will be - but the question always remains, how much lesser, and in which specific ways...and what steps you plan to take, individually and in association with other like-minded souls, to counter those faults in your chosen mount. Is your crop ready, are you vigilant to apply a correction with reins or stick, or are you just going to fling up your hands and let the reins dangle and allow your mount to do whatever the hell it wants, now that you've backed it?
There are a LOT of liberals, and also "moderates"/Sensible Centrists™ who think that this last is the way to go, even after seeing what eight years of doing so during the Clinton administration resulted in, nationally, and what generations of doing so, abdicating influence to the party machines, locally - sins of omission and commission both, and a widespread disdain and conviction that no political party or personage can be counted on to look out for the little folks, or keep their promises to do so, or that it makes a damn bit of difference which is in power. The Clintons certainly convinced me of that, altho' in a sort of ass-backwards way at first - I was still culturally a conservative Catholic, even if I was increasingly disinclined to publically self-identify that way (or even privately) and after Bill and his entourage were elected, and so I couldn't avoid hearing all the dire warnings of how TEOTWAWKI was now bound to fall upon us, that Gay Commie Pagan Atheist Feminist Environmentalist Secular-Humanists were going to Destroy Everything America Stood For and bring rainbow-hued sparkly armageddon upon us with mandatory Political Correctness and Legalized Drugs and Women In Combat and outlawing Christianity and requiring polymorphously-perverse orgies (contracepted of course) on every streetcorner (in the newly-built temples to Aphrodite, of course) until the Strong Manly Rest Of The World overran us by virtue of not having handed in their testicles to the liberals and given up all their money to help the Unworthy Poor before joining hands to sing Kumbayas in our new Socialist Big Brother society (where abortions would be required by the humanity-hating Left) and tearing down all our factories to grow pandas and spotted owls instead - and by that point I kind of felt like hey, obliterating Western Civilization™ and Letting In The Jungle might not be such a bad idea (better than bringing in the Death Star, after all, my then-favorite cathartic proto-feminist fantasy) even if I never expressed such disloyal views aloud - but I did watch in keen observation to see if any of the loudly-promulgated claims I'd heard all my life were going to happen, kind of like a skeptical-but-still-curious reporter standing on the sidelines of one of those Victorian prophets of the Rapture watching to see if the sky really would unroll and so forth this time--
Only, you know, none of that happened. There were some timid administration noises made in support of GLBT rights - until conservatives and the SCLM squawked about it - but what we got was DADT and, well, nothing; there was no widespread increase in sex ed and contraception availability, despite the "safe, legal, rare" rhetoric; there were some qualified noises made in support of environmental protection, but serious (and at-all effective) environmental activists have been far harsher on the Clinton administration than even the gibbering of the Scaife-provoked Drudge-believers; there was no end to the War On [Some] Drugs (only the ludicrous hypocrisy of 'didn't inhale'); there was the Security Theatre approved by HRC in re postal regulations after the Unibomber; there was Welfare Reform, which did nothing to actually improve the lots of poor women and their children, by the admissions even of the privileged, clueless social workers interviewed by NPR upon its anniversary a couple years ago (who nevertheless almost to a woman insisted that it was a good thing still), but much to make their lives more brutal and harsh; there was the ongoing bombing and sanctions against Iraq, without regard for human suffering; there was the blind eye turned toward Rwanda; there was failure of moral leadership on all levels, national and international, and there was no discernable difference in everyday life down here in the lower-income brackets at all, for good or bad, whether as defined by conservative crank standards or by liberal-progressive standards, between Bush I and Clinton-maybe-I.
Which is why I felt it the only moral thing to do in 2000 was not to vote to satisfy my Catholic obligation to be "prolife" and obey the bishops, and my personal ethical obligation to not vote for callous hypocritical Puritan plutocrats - and that this was all right because there really wasn't any difference between Democrat or Republican so it wouldn't matter in the end that I'd abdicated my ballot.
Which was wrong, but made sense, because back then ordinary joes and janes like me couldn't affect the doings in DC, hardly at all. We've all seen how much writing letters and making phone calls to your senators does - it's only when you can build up a critical mass and use this mass to publically shame OR laud the recipients via the blogosphere that it has any impact at all. But we have got leverage, even if it takes a huge amount of people shoving hard to get any traction at all.
Not voting these days, out of "principle" and proclaimed high-mindedness - a fear of Sin Cooties, really - is to throw the race entirely, to declare that it doesn't matter to you, or that you'd rather like Jonah in his bower watch the world go down in flames from your self-righteous perch; but to vote and then assume, like my Blue Dog relations and WAY too many bloggers, that this is the limit of your obligation, that after this point, having bought your ticket and backed your silks, all you are required to do is stand by the sidelines and cheer, is equally to throw the race - the real race, the long-term contest to change the world we live in - you know, that whole reason why we bother with all this expensive, chaotic, exhausting and messy thing called "democracy" at all...
So the question IMHO comes down to which horse can we likely rein in, and which one can't we? I don't see us reining in Clinton; I have seen us reining in Obama; and the reason lies in the fact of the vast, long-established Clinton Association, where a relative newcomer to the scene - much less one who owes much to the blogosphere (remember 7-of-9's stalker ex and how his campaign melted down?) - does not have the immunity from public input that such a base allows.
But we will have to stay "on" the reins at all times, crop in hand, no matter who wins the nomination, and no matter if a Democrat wins the election in November. Not to do so, is likewise to abdicate the responsibility of democracy.