So, you might not like Obama, but you certainly don't like the Republican candidates, right? You have a choice between two theories of action. One theory says that if you let Obama lose, you'll teach him and other purity-challenged Democrats a lesson, and they'll be good next election.
Another theory would say that it's not a coincidence that Democratic defeats have been followed up with rightward swings in rhetoric and policy, that when you teach Democrats that lesson, they learn another lesson: trying to be a liberal is political suicide. At least, that's what politicians who have lived most of their careers under the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions get.
It's not a question of who deserves what, whether we're talking the politicians unworthy of our vote, or the American people who deserve better from their Congress and (yes) their president. It's a question of who is in what position with the ability to do what, and how soon.
For me, it's a simple matter of mathematics: how many people in Congress do we have who are willing to vote a certain way. If our idea is to increase our ability to bring about our policy changes in the near term, then we can't get so choosy or purist about Democrats that we let Republicans win seats. We've seen what happens when we express our disappointment with our votes, rather than building the ranks of Democratic Party politicians necessary to win those votes.
With the Republicans insisting even in the best of times on sixty vote majorities, the importance both of party loyalty and party numbers becomes all the more apparent, and the need to strike the best compromise between both becomes all the more critical. We need Democrats who vote like Democrats, but we also need enough of them to win the votes that need to be won.
And damn it, after eight years of Bush, don't tell me that voting for an imperfect Democratic President isn't preferable to staying home. Compromised is better than nuts or beholden to those who are nuts. If you dislike having somebody in the oval office who tries too much to strike deals with the Republicans, then why aren't you foaming at the mouth in violent hatred of an actual Republican who agrees with all that stupidity being there?
The problem for those who aren't considering these things is that they're thinking in adversarial terms not unlike those of the Republicans, where the need to get somebody in absolute agreement overrules the need to get somebody in there who is actually closest to your beliefs.
Frankly, I would find it the stupidest thing to react against an insufficiently liberal president, only to ensure the election of a not at all liberal president instead. It's worse than putting the cart before the horse, it's putting the cart on top of the horse and trying to pull all of that by the horse's front legs. In short, it's a political strategy that makes absolutely no fucking sense at all.
Yes, too much of that means you get insufficiently loyal politicians. But that's what primaries are for, when they are appropriate. In this case, we're talking the Presidency, where primaries don't tend to get the desired result of a more ideologically satisfying President, so there's no point.
Even if we get Romney, folks, we'll get somebody who will have no spine to stand up to the crazies and the extremists in Congress, who won't even force a bargain with them. He'll be on their side, and he'll show up with bells on to do their bidding.
You want an end to this stupidity Congress has inflicted on us, you need to keep the Senate Democratic, and add the House of Representatives back. You're not going to get what you want in any timely fashion any other way.
We can motivate the winners of this election to be better Democrats once they're elected much more easily than we can motivate the Republicans to behave like liberals in the years ahead.
The GOP isn't targeting the Youth vote, the black vote, and the poor vote because they feel Democrats will be no different than Republicans. They know Democrats will act much more liberally, pass much more of what Obama wants, not force crazy showdowns like the GOP has this past year. They know that even if the differences seem slight in the election, the policy difference is like night and day. They want to obscure that. It needs to be made plain.
If the Republicans defeat us, so be it. Let's not defeat ourselves, trying to get a perfect Democratic Party in Washington. Let's not wait for perfect candidates to fight to get back Congress.