By next Tuesday, I have to decide who to vote for in the Democratic presidential primary. I thought I had made my choice earlier in the year, when Dennis Kucinich came out with a solid plan for national healthcare. But then he dropped out of the race.
As the primary neared, I considered switching my vote to John Edwards, who has made the working poor such a core part of his campaign. Putting him over the 15% threshold might be worthwhile even by itself. But then, he dropped out too.
So, now I’m faced with deciding whether to cast a vote for one of the remaining declared candidates. I’m not that enthusiastic about it, and I’m leaning toward just casting my vote for Edwards, anyway. He could get delegates, even though his campaign is "suspended". And what is my vote worth, anyway?
It’s pretty disappointing that our vaunted political system took a field of eight attractive candidates and narrowed it down to the two who least represent Democrats. Speaks volumes. It doesn’t make me hopeful we can fix the U.S. system when the Democratic primary mechanisms need so much attention.
If I had to vote for one of the two remaining hardworking candidates, Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama, I don’t have much problem picking between the two. Whatever Obama’s deficiencies (some call it "lack of experience", some call it "lack of mistakes"), we all know he will be President, the only question really is "When?" Is it going to be this time, or is that too early?
Clinton, on the other hand, has never convinced me that she should be President. The whole notion of "experience" brings up bad memories for me. I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton either time I had the chance, and I don’t see his tenure as much better than that of a moderate Republican.
And it isn’t like I automatically associate "experience" with "Hillary Clinton". In fact, I have to question the candidacy of someone who picks a theme of experience when, basically, her experience doesn’t trump her opponent’s. This is a direction she will regret if she does win the nomination and faces John McCain. I can’t use the metaphor I want here, but suffice to say he would have a field day comparing his experience to hers.
It would have been much more appealing to me, and perhaps persuaded me to back her, if she’d simply run on who she is. She missed a huge missed opportunity. Like many men in this country and quite a number of women I’m, at heart, a feminist. I marched for the ERA. I stood watch (although in California, that wasn’t much of an act of courage). I believe that in order to have integrity and to be a liberal you have to support the rights of all who have them challenged.
So, why didn’t she use a winning theme, like "I’m not your daddy’s Clinton" with slogans like "I’m my own girl" and "After the boys have their fun seems like it’s always a woman who cleans up the mess."
Well, the answer to that is, of course, that you will never see a bold initiative from Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, after many years of political devastation that’s exactly what the country needs. It needs bold plans. It needs cunning political initiatives, ones that outflank and overwhelm the Republican opposition, likely after outflanking and overwhelming the Democratic resistance to begin with.
Not that I think that she would be a bad President, and we can count it progress to have a Democrat in the White House, even the least Democratic of the Democrats. But look, if you have to pick one of the two, then Obama offers a breadth of vision that we will need, the political savvy to pull it off, and the opportunity to field a winning team. The ideal outcome, from my point of view (just picking from the field of two) would be for him to win and appoint her as his Secretary of State. Imagine Bill and Hillary Clinton going around the world repairing the image of the United States while Barak Hussein Obama sits as President! The collective sigh would knock the world temperature down by one degree.
So, should I vote for Obama? No. I don’t think so.
My vote won’t make the difference between whether he or she is the nominee. It has no value as the decider. I’m no George Bush.
Where it has value is when I cast it to show what kind of President I want. I can use it to show what policies I want, what makes a difference to me. And in that I have to choose from the other candidates, the ones who were stifled in the campaign by a pathetic media and an apathetic public. I have to look at people like Biden, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, Edwards and Richardson.
Biden and Gravel brought sanity to many of the debates. When the other candidates would present unrealistic plans or wild theories, these guys would quickly reel in their kites. But knowing what not to do isn’t the salient characteristic I’m looking for this year. We don’t need a negative President, especially not a passive negative one.
Richardson likewise doesn’t startle me with his bold ideas. I love that he has experience, especially abroad, and I’m sure he’s a superb governor, but not the President of the moment.
Dodd didn’t impress me until December when he stood up to the establishment and put a spanner in the gears of telecom amnesty. How I’ve longed these many years for a Democrat who had read the Constitution and understood what it meant! If a single Democrat had done to the so-called "War on Drugs" what Dodd did in this case, I might have voted for that guy Clinton in the ’90s. His stand weighs on the back of my mind as I make my decision, and perhaps, just like a vote for the Constitution itself, perhaps my vote on Tuesday should go to him. If not, there are two others.
Of Kucinich and Edwards, I confess a hard time deciding. They have both worked in the trenches so long for labor and for the very core of the Democratic Party that they have earned a place on any ticket struck to represent the working class. I respect hard work. Perhaps that just betrays my origins or maybe it’s part of my Midwestern soul. Perhaps it’s the memory of the orange steel as it pours from the furnace or the smell of fresh-turned soil ready for two or three kernels of corn or the feel of the striking iron running between rows of bricks.
Which of them more closely represents the essence of being a Democrat? In the end, I think that’s where my vote will have to be cast. It’s a close decision, one I’m still considering. What is your opinion? If you had but three of the original candidates to vote for, and those candidates were the most Democratic of the pack, which would you chose?