In an ideal world, only the best people are chosen to represent us.
As the think pieces and tweets nitpicking the democratic party's 2020 candidates pile up and voters decide who they find likable and who they don't, it's important to remember something quite crucial about our next presidential election—it is an election unlike any we've ever had, probably in our entire 239 (or 242, depending on whether you think we became a nation before or after the American Revolution) years of existence as a nation.
Such weighty statements, of course, have become ubiquitous as we have been in damage control mode since the fateful day that one of the worst—if not the worst—presidents our country has ever seen took office. Last year's midterm election was touted as the most important one of our lives, the very-necessary alarmist tone allowing for a democratic blue wave to sweep into Congress and give us some glimmer of hope that we might be able to save our nation from an imploding GOP and their senile leader, after all.
But what I'm talking about here is not just how we vote come Election Day 2020—and you better vote blue or else!—but also how we navigate the waters leading us to that then and there.
It's a challenge to keep up with the news cycle in general these days, but it's even more difficult to keep up with what ruffles people's feathers about each candidate vying for the Democratic ticket. The latest candidate to announce a run is Bernie Sanders whose announcement earlier this week was not met well by many, the general consensus being that he is not the answer to Trumpism.
Be that as it may, along with Bernie’s problematic gun voting record (he voted down the Brady Bill five times) and Kamala Harris's faults (the latest of which was her refusal during her time as California's Attorney General to allow DNA testing in the case of a man believed to be wrongfully convicted of murdering a family and their 11-year-old neighbor in 1983), the fact of the matter is we, as a party, cannot afford to nitpick our candidates. We cannot grade candidates the same way we used to before one could become president without a basic understanding of the function of NATO, or the difference between climate and weather.
Though we still can't decide what actually and really got us here with a president plagued by multiple scandals that would've ejected a democratic president from the White House faster than his/her hair turned the inevitable presidential gray at the mere mention of one, it is safe to say that the 2016 election was one that was, well, not handled correctly.
We really botched up the 2016 election.
From clueless punditry to James Comey's untimely Hillary Clinton email probe, to the planned third-party pawns that were Jill Stein and that one insignificant libertarian guy, the 2016 election was a mess from start to finish, and in hindsight, we all got hung up on the wrong things. Instead of taking humanity's propensity for abject stupidity seriously and working against it, we laughed it off and assumed that everything would be okay, because how could someone who boasts about grabbing women by their genitals and mocks a disabled reporter, become president?
Well, now everything is stupid.
Our country is broken and its leader a dangerous and unstable liability. It hardly matters anymore exactly how we got here. What does matter, and a lot, however, is how we save ourselves and our country.
It’s time to get real: we do not live in an ideal world.
These are the very desperate times in which desperate measures are required, folks, and the truth is, I won't give a flying fig about the level of crazy Amy Klobuchar reaches when she's hangry (come on, have you been on an airplane since 2001?), come Election Day 2020. Come Election Day 2020, I also won't care whether Elizabeth Warren is likable or not (I think she is plenty likable, but whatever).
Come Election Day 2020, my vote will be for the democratic party, and I urge you to approach the 2020 election with this same philosophy.
Instead of focusing on the flaws of the candidates we’re not crazy about right now, we could do something constructive to ensure that our preferred candidates make it to the final round. There is so much constructive stuff we can do for our party before the presidential primaries in 2020 than to strain to put our finger on the exact thing we don't like about Cory Booker or Kirsten Gillibrand. We could educate ourselves on each candidate, donate to the campaigns we feel represent us; volunteer, knock on doors, raise money; we could do our best to get the best person on that ballot. More importantly, even when the candidate we don’t like is the democratic choice, our vote should be for our party, even if our candidate is the devil himself.
Third-party is just not an option in 2020, and neither is another four years of Trump.
I urge you to get Trump out of the White House now and nitpick later.
Let's not botch this up again, America.