My mission is to get my policy interests carried out in Washington. However long it takes, however many obstacles are thrown in my way, I will fight to make sure that my political causes will win out.
I believe that my vote is important, and that it will gain importance as I motivate others to vote for my side. I believe that to gain influence over the politicians in this country and what their default assumptions are, I have to make my party a permanently more powerful force in politics.
I say this facing tough times and tough issues myself, having lived virtually all my life in a Red State, among Conservatives. The question of who wins in politics doesn't always resolve itself on the merits, but often who stays in the ring and keeps on fighting. If you want to see the Republicans efforts blunted, or better yet made futile, you have to summon up the will to win.
In short you must decide that you are going to vote, and that you are going to go in their to kick ass. The corporations and the conservatives want to win, and they want to win badly, and you have seen the lengths they have gone to to win.
So, if you don't show up, or don't fight wholeheartedly, you know they will win.
They don't deserve it, really, not with what they've done to this country. It would be nice to send them a message that even at their most demoralized, most weakened by the economy and the Republican's obstructionism, the Democrats can still send the GOP to defeat.
The sooner Republicans lose heart, lose faith in their movement, lose faith in the nation's responsiveness to their BS, the better, because that's the point where the throttle will open on all the things you want. It was their plan all along to leave you sitting at home, a blank look on their faces, as the Republicans rise again. That's been the point to hundreds of filibusters, to hundreds of appointments blocked, to 420 bills blocked by the GOP. They wanted to make you suffer, to make the country wonder where our people were.
I will not pull the self-defeating bullshit of saying that this is the apocalyptic showdown. That's a cheap, disrespectful argument to make. The real argument to make is that power does not accrue to those who give it up willingly. Those who sit at home and do not vote will not win any elections, will not be the constituencies to which survival-oriented politicians play. Nobody is going to cater to a group of voters who will not come in and vote for them.
You have to make the decision in this and the coming days about whether you will resign yourselves to two more years of purgatory, or whether you will rise up and maked the deliberate, willful decision to fight for what you believe in and for the government you want. Now in two years, you can make the same decision, and in two years, you can do the same. But mark my words: you will never get a second chance to make THIS VOTE!