Why don't I take my ball and go home???
My first memory of any news event was being physically pushed in front of a TV at the age of 8 to watch Richard Nixon's resignation speech. Mom, who had voted for Tricky Dick both times, was in tears. And she never voted Republican again.
Politics brings out passions in people. Maturity is being able to accept that people have passions. Follow, if you will, below the fold.
My first experience as a 'young voter' was in 1983-84. I was just old enough to vote in the primaries. The president of my college was a former governor of New Hampshire, so Fritz Hollings, John Glenn, John Anderson and Jesse Jackson paraded into our common rooms and fieldhouse. It was heady stuff, being one of 23 people in a room, listening to Fritz Hollings talk about how the Senate 'really' worked. Jesse revved up the fieldhouse. The first black candidate on a national level, in my young life, had us all going. Then he said 'say Amen!' and got a paltry response from the nearly all-white audience. He just got smirked at us and said 'oh, it's that kind of place.' It was good stuff.
My mom called me that fall and told me she was voting for Mondale because he wanted to increase college financial aid -I worked my way through, so this was a big deal for me. Mondale, as you may remember, got crushed.
In '88, Gary Hart http://en.wikipedia.org/... broke my heart. A smart pre-internet young and charismatic senator, we went gaga over him. So did Donna Rice. This was the year Governor Cuomo was running as well, and that Mike Dukakis gave part of his convention nomination speech in Spanish (America hated Hispanics less back then).
You all know what happened next in the GE.
The in 1992 I got my chance to be active and to *actually vote for a winner.' Again I did so in 1996. In between I voted for a Republican for governor of Mass. (Weld) because he had stood up to the 'just say no' idiocy when Reagan was purging his own justice department. Fascinating Stuff:
http://query.nytimes.com/...
A bit of history, courtesy of the bbcworldnews.com:
John Quincy Adams was nicknamed "The Pimp" by the campaign of his opponent General Andrew Jackson, based on a rumour that he had once coerced a young woman into an affair with a Russian nobleman when he had been American ambassador to Russia.
Adams' supporters hit back with a pamphlet which claimed: "General Jackson's mother was a common prostitute brought to this country by British solders! She afterwards married a mulatto man with whom she had several children of which number General Jackson is one!!" Jackson won anyway.
And just to show that this kind of thing goes right back to the start of American campaigning, we have the election of 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson was accused of favouring the teaching of "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest." Jefferson won. He did not teach the offending subjects.
It's been said over and over here: This nastiness, this internacine name-calling and bitterness is nothing new. Nor is the lament that we 'should be fighting the Republicans instead of amongst ourselves.
History shows us that people do indeed get over these slights and eventually pull together to put their man/woman in power.
Madisonian democracy is messy. Clean, passion-less, six-week campaigns, ala the UK, may be what you're after if you're looking for something neater. I'm not excusing any campaign for its dirty tricks. What I am saying is that taking your ball and going home, while protecting your own sensibilities, frees you of the need and the responsibility to witness or participate in the disucssion at dKos.
You don't do much growing up, either emotionally or intellectually, by associating only with those who agree with you and put things in ways that protect your feelings
So, if you choose to take your ball and go home because 'it's just too emotional and nasty here at dKos' that your prerogative.
Just don't expect the grownups that are left to come with you.