Back in May, before the candidate wars had really heated up, I asked Can't We All Just Get Along ... for Five Minutes?. Indulge me while I excerpt myself:
So here we are, on the cusp of an election 40 years removed from those days when another murderous, imperialist war raged, shredding both the nation's soul and the bodies of its young people, at what it is no exaggeration to say is another defining moment in U.S. history, beating the shit out of each other, each day adding to a tally of acrimony that will be hard to expunge in the post-Denver months leading directly to November 2008.
Before anybody gets the wrong idea (again), let me make clear that I am not against criticism of Democratic candidates, whether they seek the Presidency or other office. Far from it. Although I think a month before election day is a bad time for such critiquing, we damage our personal integrity and our party's chances not just for victory but also for transforming America if we do not critically, comprehensively and fairly examine the records, statements and proposals of those who would represent and lead us. We should blast to smithereens that which seems to us the same old, same old.
However ... emphasis on comprehensively and fairly. We owe it to the candidates and to ourselves not only to challenge where we think they've gone astray, to express concern about how trustworthy they may be (always dicey when dealing with professional politicians of any stripe), and to evaluate their ideas for the future of America, Americans, and, because this country is, as the French say, a hyperpower, for the future of the whole planet.
But ignoring the good qualities or good ideas of a candidate we don't like in order to boost the fortunes of one we prefer is dishonest.
So, let me offer this Diary as the initiatory forum for something I hope gets more play in the next several months - candidate praise.
Since then, the vituperation-retaliation cycle in the battle to choose who will be the Democrats' presidential nominee has stepped up. This isn't to say that Campaign 2008 is so very different from Campaign 2004. Anybody who visited Daily Kos or the comparative handful of other progressive blogs in operation in those days will remember that put-downs and attacks were not for the fainthearted or mealy-mouthed. I doubt anyone has the proper meter to gauge whether it's worse now than it was then.
Indeed, if political blogs had been around in '92 or '80 or '68, I suspect the comment sections would have been as full of flame wars as today's. As I wrote in May:
None of the 1968 Democratic candidates was free of contradictions and inconsistencies. None came even close to what those of us on the far left of the party wanted in a President. Kennedy, who was transformed after his brother's assassination, had been a hard-core Cold War hawk. Although he had founded McCarthy's Marauders, a sort of ancestor of the Progressive Caucus, the man from Minnesota sometimes seemed more up for a good rhetorical smackdown than a down-in-the-mud fight. Hubert Humphrey, with sparkling civil rights credentials, failed to free himself from the war legacy of LBJ until the very last minute.
Each of them believed in the poisonous myth of American exceptionalism.
Thus, for many on the left who had given up on two-party politics but still cast ballots, the choice that year was Dick Gregory of the Freedom and Peace Party, a principled but quixotic choice drawing fewer than 50,000 votes. Many on the left refused to participate in the election at all.
And yet RFK or Gene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey would have been vast improvements over LBJ, the racist spoiler George Wallace, and, of course, the fellow who eventually won the election - what was his name again?
Here we are, mere weeks away from real votes being cast in what may well be the most crucial presidential election since '68, and, not surprisingly, we're shrieking at each other. Again. That's politics, leftist-style, progressive-style, Democratic-style. Perhaps it could be done without shrieking, but it isn't, and I doubt it ever will be.
For the moment, however, for one brief pause, I'd like to see everyone who's already selected a presidential candidate to write one positive and substantive thing about the policies and/or political behavior of a candidate s/he doesn't support. Something positive and substantive about which your candidate isn't as good.
Not a compliment that conceals a slap. Not a yes, but... Rather something that you wish your chosen candidate would adopt without reservation. Something that, if the time comes when your favored choice fails to get the nomination, will make you feel better about voting in November 2008 for that other candidate.
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