Ok, ok. I can't take this anymore. This tired old routine of, "if gender were not a factor in this race, this wouldn't be a race." This is generally followed with: "Hillary all the way."
No, not Hillary all the way. And it wouldn't have been Edwards either. It wouldn't have been either of those two - in fact, it couldn't have been, Barack or no Barack - because they both voted for the war. That's it. End of Story. If you want to know why, keep reading.
Hi. Remember us? Back in '04, we all jumped on the Dean bandwagon at the same time and broke every single Democratic fundraising record in the books (records which lasted an astonishing 4 years!). We're what you might call, the "anti-war vote." 'But' you say, 'I'm anti-war!' No, no you are not. You call yourself anti-war, because now that the Dixie Chicks won a Grammy it's cool to be anti-war, but you're voting for the people who voted for the war. Therefore, you're not the anti-war vote. If you were the anti-war vote, you would be so pissed off at the way the Democratic Power structure, put into place by the Clintons 16 years ago, treated us last time, that there is no way you could look a candidate who voted for that Resolution in the face and take anything he or she has to say with any kind of seriousness whatsoever. We're out here, by the tens and now, it seems, the hundreds of thousands.
You see what happened was, the people who were anti-war, who should have been voting for Howard Dean in '04 but didn't think they had the numbers on their side to get a truly anti-war guy into office all got together and said, "you know, this war is going so badly, I do think we could get our guys into office." In 2006, it was Ned Lamont. But when Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the primary, the Independants and Republicans and definately the media all panicked and did their best to make sure he was beaten. Imagine that, Republicans forced into voting FOR the guy we ran for VP 6 years before! They were scared out of their minds. And we had them on the run. There are more of us every day, you see, with every dead soldier whose name gets flashed across the evening news, at least one person watching says "enough." These bastards are being done in by their own evil creation, and the fact that 4,000 American young men and women had to die for their idiocy is revolting.
There was no way we were settling for Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, no way. Nor were we going to go for Joe Biden or any other Senator from that Congress who voted for the Iraq War Resolution. We were going to choose from among the best of the rest. If it weren't for Obama, it's easy to imagine us pouring our cash into the Bill Richardson's campaign. He had a lot of good anti-war voters following him.
But Barack Obama is just too good right now. The guy is on fire. He arrives in Chicago 23 years ago and takes a job as a community organizer. That is politics at it's most basic, ladies and gentlemen. When did Hillary, who is from Illinois (another thing I don't get ... according to traditional Illinois politics, Barack Obama should be seen as some carpetbagging Ivy Leaguer type - how can we write off Barack's huge victory over her in the state that she is from. The pride the people of Illinois swallowed, when they voted en masse for their adopted son, over their native daughter!), go to Chicago and help with community organizing? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm? You don't think that that experience might help him with that job? It might help to have the leader of this Party and the Chief Executive of the government be someone versed in local politics, who knows how what he does will affect everyone on down the line, to the poorest guy in the poorest little corner of nowhere. The one who has no one on his side. Barack knows how what he does affects that guy. Imagine a President like that! But this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel, as far as the corporate political structure. Barack Obama is a guy who just recently (in political time, which, I am sure you have noticed, moves at about .5 speed as real time, if that), took the equivalent of the mail room job. Maybe he started as the mail room supervisor, in the company's Kansas City facility. The political middle of nowhere, especially as Presidential politics go.
Now look at him. He shot up through middle management like a cannon ball. The Illinois Democratic Party took one look at this guy and said - "oh, this guy, right here, he's good" and promoted him from State Rep. to U.S. Senator! Not state Senator, not governor or Representative. Right from state rep. to the US Senate. Skipping grades is what I believe they used to call that, back in elementary school. As I recall, it was the ones who were perceived to be really really talented who were doing that. And it would be one thing if he were sulking around Congress like some kind of jackass the last 4 years, instead of working with people like Lugar on legislation concerning rounding up missing nukes - that seems to me like a pretty noble objective, I don't know about you! - and leading the call for ethics reform.
So he said he was gonna run. And we said, "sure! You said you were against the war back when it mattered and it was unpopular and those of us who were saying it were being accused of being unpatriotic or out-of-the-mainstream extremists. Political outliers. Whackos."
And maybe we are whackos. We sure can hold a grudge. And this one ain't going away, folks. I am never voting in any primary again for someone who did not stand up against the war when it counted. I didn't do it in '04 - after Dean dropped out, I switched to Kucinich, even though he had no hope of winning because I could not bring myself to vote for John Kerry OR John Edwards until there was a Republican on the other side of the ticket (and then I had to vote for both of them! I was a good Democrat, though. I had my Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on my car, right up until the day after the election, when I could finally take it off. I fought with my Republican friends about what a great President he would be, again, right up till the election).
And I'll tell you what. If Hillary had wanted our vote, she could have had it, oh boy, and then some. If Hillary Clinton had stood up in the Senate that day and instead of lamenting over "the hardest decision I jave ever had to make"...
- This part here is really important, too important for paranthesis. It must be read to comprehend what Obama is and what he represents to us. The IWR was
the most important decision Hillary Clinton ever had to make. It was not, however, the 'hardest one'. It was, in fact, the
easiest one. Do you go to war with a country even though:
a) they're not doing anything that remotely justifies invasion. They are, in fact, just sitting there. And besides, what the hell could they even possibly be doing? What Iran didn't take out of the Iraqi military over the course of the 8 year war they had with them, we blew to smithereens back in the MC Hammer days. And THEY are a threat to us?
b) President Bush is baseing his case for war to the American people on, "Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Oh, he might not have been the guy, but he was pulling strings, let me tell ya!" A "fact" which is so contrary to reality you wonder how anyone who pushes the idea can sleep at night.
c) The President has, in official government positions, people who have signed a document stating that it would REALLY be in the United States' best interests to make up some bullshit reason to go into Iraq, knock out Saddam and install a pro-West government that sells us oil for good prices. And, oh, by the way, the President and Vice President both owe their fortunes to oil and oil companies.
d) Those people are all idiots, though, because once we succeed in knocking out Saddam, shit is going to go south HARDCORE. Nobody doubts for a second that our military is going to pound the Iraqi military into the sand, in both the proverbial and literal sense. The problem is, once that happens, all of those Arabic terrorist groups over there, who are actually being held in check by despots like Saddam, whom most of these guys want dead, they roam free. If we grant their wish we are going to open up Pandora's Box. As bad as it would be for our environment were that Republican fantasy to come true, it would be a goddam miracle in comparison to what is actually going to happen once all these crazies are running around with no iron-fist to boil them in oil if he heard peep about them.
The answer is no. You don't vote for war. You don't say to yourself, "Well, the President REALLY wants to do this, and the American people seem to follow him, so here I go on the bandwagon!" The hardest decision she ever had to make? Unbelievable. And absolutely unforgivable, that she made the wrong choice. She can stay in the Senate for now, although she should know that if we decide we want to, we can primary her in 4 years, and probably take her down by then, easy as pie; she'd do well to curry favor from us and stop this charade. She can continue to fight there as long as we let her, fighting the good fight on issues like health care, and education. But there is a black mark on her record that will remain with her, forever. Like Lady MacBeth, her spot will not go away. Ok, back to my thought from before I started this 6 paragraph paranthetical -
said something like, "Enough of this madness! We are the United States of America, and in the United States of America, since the day we have been founded, we stood ourselves up to the ideal that war was a last resort. And as an officer of the government, sworn to honor and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God, I will not stand in favor of this farce! This war is going to cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and the fact that you can not see that is more proof than anyone could ask for that you and your cronies are the last people on Earth who should be given the authority to do whatever you please in this matter" - if she had said that, there would be no Barack Obama. There would be no Howard Dean, either. The Democratic Party would have begged her to run back in '04. She would have had the Party Power Structure AND the Grassroots on her side. She would have been a shoe-in. And if Bush would have beaten her then we would have had no problem running her again in '08. It could have all been hers.
But no. She voted for the war. And so, she lost us, for good. And the thing of it is, we are tearing down the last vestiges of the power structure that used to be her support beams. They were so powerful that we still talk about them like it's they're in their prime. "Oooh, the Clinton machine, they always find a way!" They're the New York Yankees of politics. And like the New York Yankees, all of the evidence that they are old and decrepit will be swept under the rug for as long as the media can get a story on the pennant race. That's being torn down, now. James Carville wouldn't know the internet from Ted Stevens' proverbial dumptruck full of tubes, or whatever the hell it was. We're in control, now.
It's been that way since '06. Well, really it's been that way ever since Dr. Dean took the DNC Chair, but I think the moment of doubt as to who was dominating time at the wheel passed after Lamont beat Lieberman. Once that happened, this was an inevitability. It's very nice that Barack Obama is the amazing candidate that he is, but rest assured, if he hadn't been around, someone else would be running her through the ringer right now. And it wouldn't have had a thing to do with the "fact" that we don't want a woman in charge.