A prolix argument for an Obama-Clinton ticket
Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 04:37:35 PM PDT
I want to think about an Obama-Clinton 2008 ticket. There’s no better place to imagine that than here at dKos, the fertile crescent of the Democratic Party (my opinion and a disclaimer).
Here’s another opinion: I don’t think enough of us realize this, a lot of us feel it but don’t know how to quantify it, and some of us are waiting for corporate media to acknowledge it: our Democratic primary contest is the real 2008 presidential election. November starts the denoument of a sordid era of American history.
McCain, the GOP, the neoconservative movement and (to our eventual detriment) traditional conservative principles---vital ideas today’s "conservatives" abandoned a generation ago in favor of jingoism---are all but irrelevant. With each passing day, the high priests of PNAC are exposing the degeneracy of their goals, and the facile propaganda of our corporate media is too banal to mask it any longer.
Consider: Sen. Clinton draws more supporters to her appearances than all the Republican contenders combined and Sen. Obama’s crowds triple and quadruple Sen. Clinton’s.
The mood, as they say, is shifting.
That’s cause for rejoicing, but not for long.
We Americans are finally coming face to face with the onerous future we have charted for ourselves. The shrill propaganda that powered our politics for the past two decades has---finally--- numbed enough ears. For enough of us, the stark reality of suffocating debt, runaway deficits and promises of perpetual war is palpable. The thin veneer that covered over a national policy of imperial greed and public pillaging is worn through.
Where once we Americans were admired for our principles and values---and possessed sufficient moral capital to marginalize our critics---we are now feared, hated or mistrusted. "America"---once an ideal in most of the world---is today a sneer.
Where once our currency served as the world’s standard, today it loses value with each transaction, and the poohbahs among us are contemplating our worst economic cycle since the Great Depression.
And where once America’s free press, universal suffrage and equality before the law stood as idealistic paragons other nations struggled to imitate, corporatization, corruption and cronyism have soiled our American fabric and threaten to rot it through.
At its idealistic apex, American democracy promised to perfect the human project. Today, a plague of nihilistic demagoguery seems bent on bringing Armageddon into being.
Unless we stop them. Unless enough of us throw off the shackles of corporate propaganda and political bullying and seize the rudder of our ship of state.
You can certainly argue I’m way too idealistic, and I can’t refute that. Way too many of us rush the latest Fox News meme into diary form here, as if anything Rupert Murdoch’s drones have to say is worth our consideration.
But there’s plenty of proof that I’m right, too. No one in my lifetime has so energized the vast middle of America to take up its dire responsibility as Barack Obama---and lived to see it through. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys---all three of them, in my opinion---came closest, but their enemies---our enemies---murdered our noblest vision.
Barack Obama is a creature of our time and place, a profound expression of American will in the face of our declining circumstance. Obama would not likely have succeeded in 1974, or in 1992, or even in 2000, but in 2008, Obama is articulating a thoroughly American demand for tectonic change in the way we express our ideals and conduct our affairs.
Given that our choice is between hope and hate, absent Barack Obama Hillary Clinton would sound just as electrifying, just as energizing. And absent Sen. Clinton, John Edwards voices the same powerful promise of substantive change, progressive change, a future for America that’s worth working for, and worth dying for.
To the man---and they are all men---our opponents promise a future we will want to hide from. Their alternative---the "future" our opponents hope we will embrace---is doom.
For my money, Barack Obama is captain of our most desperate cruise because the course he proposes will take us farther faster. Sen. Clinton has the same general heading, though her many encumbrances---made in good faith, with the best of intentions---will slow our progress. Despite that, I can’t think of a better first mate, and I can’t think of a better future for America than 16 years of Obama-Clinton policies.
I’m 56 years old. The America I came of age in held a remarkable promise for the rest of the world. It was far from perfect, to be sure, and I’m far too idealistic, but the best that it offered was just about the best we humans could be, and promised only better.
That’s not evident anywhere today. It’s as if we’ve been hypnotized by the siren songs of an antichrist. Too many of us baby boomers have shirked our responsibilities for too long. We’ve shut our gates and tended our gardens and let the rabid run wild outside. For the past decade, we have subjected ourselves to a sordid, septic mirage illuminated by greed and vanity.
We got what we deserved. Probably, it was a necessary step, an object lesson on the folly of our conceits.
But as I look at the primary returns, the rally crowds, the opinion polls, the shrill tone and idiotic tack of what passes for professional punditry these days, and especially the morbid threats of our enemies, when I contrast all that with the rhetoric of progress and promise articulated by all of our Democratic candidates, I think we---our nation, our Democratic Party and even a few among this web community---have learned our lesson. We’ve been called out, and we are answering.
I sense, on the part of Sen. Obama, a willingness to consider new ways to address our issues. If that includes a new kind of presidency---one that fully incorporates the skills and talents of a worthy vice president as part of a powerful administrative team---I doubt he could do better than Sen. Clinton. And given the nihilistic bent of our opponents, Vice President Clinton represents a valuable 'insurance policy' against right wing concupiscence.
I want an "O-Hillary" bumper sticker.
Please feel free to disabuse me of my naivety, prolixity, and idealism. Why not Obama-Clinton?
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