I have not yet decided exactly who I'm voting for in the primaries. For several elections it's seemed to me that our only choices were between bad and worse under the two-party system, or irrelevancy, voting with one's conscience. I did choose the latter path.
I voted for Nader. Don't get angry just yet, I had good reasons for doing so.
I remember after the last presidential election, I told my sister I'd voted for Nader ever since high school. She was immediately indignant and scandalised. "That means you voted for Bush!" she whispered, as if I'd just wandered into a high-class dinner party and started shouting obscenities.
"No," I corrected. "I voted for Nader."
"But that took support away from--"
I knew this moment would come. I fixed her with a steely glare over my spectacles. "You mean I'm not supposed to vote for the candidate I think would do the best job? When the hell did that happen?"
Only those with younger siblings will fully understand the warm glow of vindication I felt when she stopped, then nodded, a little chagrined. "The electoral college," she said, and I sighed, poured us both another glass of wine.
Only those with siblings will understand how I followed her train of thought from one subject to the next.
"Those bastards," I agreed. The electoral college made some kind of sense when communications were spotty and roads were bad two hundred years ago. In the age of reliable communication, it's become just another Rich Man's Club, elections bought and sold, nothing to see here people, move along.
Which brings me back to Nader. I honestly thought he'd be the right person for the job each time I voted for him. Don't get me wrong--I did not mind the Clinton presidency at all. He won, fair and square, both times. And it was a relief, after years of Reagan and Bush Sr., to have a President who was literate, well-informed, and had what passed for an actual pulse and brainwaves.
However, I voted for Nader because I liked that he spoke up for consumers, that he tilted at the windmills of corporate interests and big business. There was no way in hell he'd win, really, but voting for him was my small way of protesting the three-ring, flesh-eating, made-for-TV circus that our elections have turned into.
I didn't know what was around the bend.
Let me make it perfectly clear: I wasn't disaffected by SwiftBoating or unaware of Dean and other Dem candidates. I was just disgusted by what I saw in the Democratic party as a lack of, for want of a better word, cojones as much as I was disgusted at the Republican Party's naked greed and pandering to moneyed interests.
My disgust has only grown. Can you imagine Pelosi or Reid standing up for Roe vs. Wade or the Civil Rights movement? It's far more likely they would cave to troglodytes in their need to be seen as "bipartisan" and "Serious." The Democratic Party has seemed to this humble voter to be neutered even during the Clinton presidency, when a group of Republican asshats tried to impeach for adultery and the right-wing talk media fastened on the whole thing like buzzards on a fresh corpse.
Dems sought appeasement. They thought rationality would appeal to rotting cancers on the body politic. The Democratic Party, by and large, seemed oblivious to the fact that they weren't dealing with people basically committed to America who only had ideological differences. They were dealing with violently malignant narcissists who wanted power, primacy, and money at any cost, and had set out to get it, malignant narcissists who (for a variety of reasons outside the scope of this post) found a congenial petri dish in the Republican Party.
I'm not saying the Dems should have stopped playing by the rules of order, the Constitution, and law. I'm saying that they shouldn't have started swallowing the noise churned out by the loud Republican hate machines on talk radio as if it was real food or reasonable discourse. Once progessives start using posioned conservative talking points to frame their half of the debate, the conservatives have struck the coup de grace for the status quo--which is, 99.9 times out of a 100, moneyed interests. At the risk of stating a generalization as a fact, in my considered opinion conservatives fall into two camps: the rich who want to stay that way, and the middle-class or poor who want into the rich treehouse and think conservatism will get them there.
The Democratic Party lost me the moment they started letting the wingnuts set the terms of discourse--when they kept scrambling to "reply" to the Republicans and be "bipartisan." Conservatives are not interested in being rational or bipartisan. Conservatives are interested in power, winning power, and keeping power.
I should know. I grew up around gun-totin', unconsciously racist, flag-waving, homegrown rabid conservatives.
I learned growing up that you cannot be "bipartisan" with rabid conservative wolves. You can use the sheepdog of the courts and the fencing of legal accountability to keep them out of your pens. But reasoning by howl and bark with rabid wolves will only get you bitten.
When Bush Jr. stole the first election, I was still a starry-eyed optimist. It shocked me to find out afterward that the election had been less-than-honorably counted, but I thought the pendulum would swing back or that the evidence would mount until we impeached the Chimp.
Then 9/11 came, and instead of a reasoned response from those in power, the march to war began. And I wrote and protested, and thought, surely the American people aren't stupid. They'll throw that bastard out on his ear and we'll repair our international standing and our consciences.
Cue up another stolen election. The evisceration of our civil rights. The kidnapping of habeas corpus and the rotten fruit of years of conservative work, effort, hot air and attack ads--the sudden flowering of America as a torture state. As an "Endemic Surveillance Society."
As a country where I can no longer vote with my conscience if I want to stop the horrific bleeding. Where I am forced not to vote for the candidate who I think would be best for the job--because I still do think someone like Nader would be best for the job--but for the candidate who is the lesser evil of the two-party system.
Perhaps this election will be stolen too and it won't make a lick of difference. Perhaps things will turn out like my nightmares, where a "terrorist incident" will be manufactured right before the election and martial law will be declared, and the Chimp In Charge will set himself up as a regular good ol' boy fascist dictator. Or rather, the moneyed interests will set the silver-spoon baby up as the fascist dictator, with his handler Cheney as eminence gris.
I don't regret voting for Nader. I am completely, totally unapologetic on that score. I honestly thought I was supposed to vote for the candidate I felt was best for the job of being President.
Now...I don't know. We have a majority in Congress, but the "leaders" of that majority keep trying to reason by howl and bark--and keep getting bitten. We put them in office with a midterm shakeup because we were sick of the thin vitriolic gruel of Republican pablum, and they still are trying to ask for more in a small Oliver Twist voice instead of getting the clue that they're holding the ladle and have the keys to the kitchen now.
I've thought about voting for Obama, since he seems like the candidate least tarred by the brush of appeasement. Hillary Clinton lost me with her record of time and again voting for the occupation of Iraq. I've thought about Edwards off and on, and seeing that Nader threw his weight behind Edwards today started me on this whole long digression-in-the-form-of-a-blog-post.
The thing is, I won't know who I'm going to vote for until the primary ballot arrives in the mail. (Yes, I'm registered as a Democrat because I mostly vote Dem for my Congressional district and Senate seats. It's only in presidential elections that I rock the boat.) It seems like a buffet of mediocrity, all candidates spending increasing time scurrying to respond to conservative noise-machine attacks instead of sticking to a message of what they intend to do once in office and why they're the best candidate for the job.
Once the primaries are over, though, I doubt I'll do anything but settle down and lock in my vote for the Dem candidate. (Even if my vote is lost in attempted vote-suppression fueled by Rovian bloviations, Rumsfeldian "numbers", and Republican shenanigans.) I suppose you could say I've given up the idea that I should vote for the person I honestly think is best for the job of leading America and being our face to the world. Right now I'll settle for the lesser evil. I'll settle for hoping I don't wake up in a totalitarian oligarchy run by Dubya and his friends in January '09.
Hey, a girl can always dream, can't she?