C'mon, Folks, it's Politics
Wed Dec 05, 2007 at 04:54:08 PM PDT
These candidate and anti-candidate diaries are getting to be toxic cesspools--just about all of them--and I'd have to think that none of them are doing your respective candidates any good whatsoever. The name calling and the backbiting at Democrats is bad enough, but nonetheless expected in a primary season. For many, I'd imagine, the first reflex is to find the scroll bar. Perhaps that's why some try to skirt the scroll bar by resorting to the photobucket image of headline-sized type--red, of course--imploring those fucking fucks who that fucker does not agree with to, rather expectedly, fuck off. My, how the level of what passes for political discourse on this site has been elevated.
The point of this diary, though, centers on the fact that for too many here, it seems, the slings and arrows of political campaigning are so virulent so as to cause grown adults to loose all sense of proportion and to melt into fetid pools of sludge every time a cross word is directed toward our beloved candidates by one of his or her rivals. Well, enough of that. It's time to toughen up a little. Yes, it's time we all lost our political virginity and look like we've been through this before.
Before going any further in demonstrating to the readers of this site (participants and lurkers, alike) that we still haven't lost our political, um, innocence, don't you think we should all take a step back and first come to understand--and I mean really get it--that elections are not moral purity contests and that every candidate has an obligation to exploit--that's not a bad word--every legal advantage available to her or him that may be seen as leading to success? Where is it written that the purest of heart and most incorruptible of deed will win this nomination and thereby gain the right to at least ask for our vote to be nothing short of the most powerful person in the world?
Now I'm not advocating that we turn a blind eye to anything illegal or even anything grossly immoral. But what I am saying is that there are things that get done in political campaigns that are well within the rules of engagement that are going to happen because the stakes could not be higher and people with the best of intentions but surely lacking in judgment are going to make decisions that are, in the end, not wise--especially if you get caught.
Take for instance the planted question at the Clinton campaign event in Iowa. The staffer who made the request that Ms. Gallo-Chasanoff ask the global warming question likely did so because she thought it would help get her candidate's message out, and it probably would have had Gallo-Chasanoff not been uncomfortable enough about the thing to talk about it to the press. But, c'mon, do you really believe that this is the first time that a question was planted by a campaign? Is it so shocking that campaigns manage events to their best advantage? Judging from the weeks' worth of comments professing outrage here, you'd have thought the staffer, before handing off the question to Gallo-Chasanoff, had killed off the several people who had turned down her request that they ask it.
And so, too, with this flap over Obama's decision to bus in Iowa college students so they can now participate and vote--hopefully for him, yes, that's their plan--in a caucus that has now been rescheduled to a date where many of them will still be out of state for the holidays. If it's legal for these kids to vote in the Iowa caucuses--yes, the only qualification is whether it's legal--then Obama would be a fool not to try to get as many of them back into the state to vote as possible. What is so damn difficult about that? If it looks unseemly, there's a risk his campaign will have to take in looking opportunistic and unfairly exploitative in the eyes of the Iowa voters. If Clinton wants to make a stink over it, fine, she has a right to respond to Obama's move. She's the one who risks looking as though she's attempting to disinfranchise voters.
And, yes, it's fair game that we comment on it here, but, my friends, the "Oh, I'm so offended s/he did that" attitude that sweeps through this site every time one candidate does something that falls just the other side of angelic evinces nothing but a political neophyte's naïvete that is frankly embarrassing. We don't need five days of recommended diaries the plow the same ground as the four days that preceeded it. Aren't we that so-called reality-based community that supposedly understands politics and the way it is played?
So, let's be real about a few things, okay?
No candidate has any exclusive hold on the truth or some higher right to the nomination, and not everyone who supports some candidate other than yours--whomever you are for--is some deluded rube or right-winger-in-training. Hillary Clinton is not the spawn of Karl Rove and Ann Coulter. Barak Obama is not inspirational successor to John F. Kennedy. And Diogenes did not leave his lamp on John Edwards' door step the night before he announced his candidacy.
These are all fairly flawed candidates, who each in their own way is going to have problems convincing rather large swaths of the Democratic electorate to first support them, then get out and vote for them, and in the meantime to do what they can to get others to do likewise. Yes, Clinton is polarizing and there are none too few here who wouldn't dream of supporting her unless she's the nominee (and even then then, should she win the nomination, there are far too many here who profess they won't vote for her). But fine; let's accept that for what it is. But does it do our party any good to read ad nauseum that Clinton is so despicable, or as one kossack said, that the hostage incident is emblematic of what we can expect for the next four years if she is elected? I don't think so.
The top diary of the day for most of last Sunday--not that it was much different from any other--was another in the long succession of anti-Clinton diatribes. It was posted, of course, as an invective-laden answer to an earlier anti-Obama diary that centered on the latter's student mobilization plan. (I could do a busing joke here but will forbear.) Anyway, each of these rants does little but invoke outrage and lend further credence to the idea that we are the angry, unthinking "activists" who in reality sit at home in our jammies pounding out red meat rantings to stir up the emotionality that turns up more heat than it produces light.
Moreover, when one of these candidates shows yet another gaping chink in his or her electoral armor, talking about it is not verboten, and calling that candidate to task for it in an effort to effect the narrative is not tantamount to defending the indefensible. Thus, when John Edwards' campaign releases a video on the the senator from New York's way with language, or when Hillary Clinton takes umbrage at Barak Omama's health care plan, those statements are generally fair commentary on the a rival's perceived gaffe or failure of policy. It is not, as one said in a recent diary, the pathetic last gasps of a candidate's (Clinton's as it turned out) campaign (assumedly before she falls from current front-runner to sub-Gravellian numbers by next week). That said, do we really need to see John Edwards' Greatest YouTube Hits for weeks on end. Honestly, the first couple dozen times was sufficient.
Folks, all this moral outrage and juvenile sniping is not getting us anywhere toward electing one of these folks to office. And while I'm not looking for someone who can play guitar well enough so we can sit around the campfire and sing Kumbaya, it would be nice to think that what we're taking so much time out of the day to write is actually leading to something productive. I mean, really: how many minds are being changed or motivated to action by what is written in these diaries? Any? Does someone really think that if he finds Hillary Clinton to be a candidate he may support that he'll change his mind if you call her supporters Clintonistas? Are those the same people you're going to be excited to go out on GOTV efforts with next fall if Clinton does manage to win this thing?
Can we put aside the ideological purity and the over-the-top moral affrontery, and get on with doing something positive?
Come on, this is a long hard slog, and while the primary process can be bloodier than a Kansas City slaughterhouse killing floor, can we at least try to be a little more politically hardened about what is written here between now and the time we have a candidate? I honestly believe it will help elect that person after he or she is chosen if we are.
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