Perhaps the mad rush of all the states to move their primaries and caucuses to the front end of the calendar, and the resulting move of Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary to even earlier dates in January, was the right thing to do after all.
For it means that soon, maybe within sixty days, the Second Primary War here at Daily Kos will be over.
What a joyous day that will be. At least it will be for those like me who are yellow dog Democratic partisans who really do not have a passionate preference among Clinton, Obama, Edwards and the rest.
Sure, I have my own personal views on the candidates, and I have my own opinions as to how each would fare in a general election. Indeed, I have my own disagreements with all of them. But I discovered long ago that I would be happy voting for any of them to be President. Yes, that includes even Gravel and Kucinich, although I would wonder what castrophic event or scandal transpired to allow either of them to win the nomination.
Actually, I am lying a little bit in that I would prefer that the winner of our nomination not be a candidate who has severely handicapped himself by accepting public financing. For in my mind, it guarantees a general election loss as it would allow the GOP and all of its allied 527s to define our candidate during six month lull between the clinching of the nomination to the nominating convention.
But even that preference is a preference against a candidate or candidates rather than a passion for a preferred candidate. If one of those candidates does in fact win the nomination, I would still be in his corner, looking for ways to respond to the right wing attacks.
Being a yellow dog Democratic partisan means you support all Democrats, with very few and limited exceptions that you can count on one hand (i.e. Lieberman in 2006, Lipinski and Wynn in 2008). Thus, the primary wars fought among the candidate partisans here at Daily Kos makes people like me uncomfortable, for it is like a family fighting at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It makes you want to hide under the table. Yes we recognize that primaries are necessary and beneficial, and indeed essential to not only our efforts to reform the Party into a more forceful advocate for progressive policies and values, but also essential to our democracy itself.
With respect to Daily Kos, those Kossacks who have been engaged in and have nurtured the ever growing community here also do not like the very open warfare among the Obamamaniacs, the Edwardsians and the Clintonites for they view it as destructive to the community. And don't get us started on the those who just hate one candidate and post diary after diary about the many perceived faults that hated candidate possesses.
Yes, yes, open advocacy, debate and discussion among candidate partisans is essential (so long as it does not devolve into troll and flame wars), but that doesn't mean we have to like it in the meantime.
So people like me tire of the great Second Primary War, and we long for it to be completed.