There's no help for it. Tomorrow I vote (in the first Democrats Abroad online primary). My ballot and PIN numbers arrived via e-mail this morning. After months of sitting on the fence I must choose a candidate and leap into the primary fray. I have read candidate diaries, and poll diaries, and endorsement diaries, occasionally feeling older than God, because I was a passionate Dean supporter four years ago, and knew all about the heartbreak of settling on a candidate too early. As it turns out, the seeds of my decision were sown months ago (on Wednesday, September 26, to be exact), during the MSNBC-hosted Democratic debate, when I was startled by one of the answers and had to ask, "Is our candidates learning?"
Joan Didion opens a delightful essay about Hollywood with a bit of dialogue from a monster movie. A monster has just destroyed the United Nations, and bobs up from a pond, attempting to carry off a little girl. The girl's young mother, seated moodily on her veranda later, is asked by her brother what's wrong. "It's nothing," she says. "I just can't get that monster out of my mind."
So, a bit more than four months after the MSNBC debate, I sit musing in Guatemala this morning, unable to get a monster out of my mind.
Tim Russert had asked Hillary Clinton about Israel's recent air strike on Syria, and this was her reply:
We don't have as much information as we wish we did. But what we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out. I strongly support that.
We don't have any more information than what I have just described. It is highly classified; it is not being shared.
Then he asked Barack Obama, and this was his reply:
I think it's important to back up for a second, Tim, and just understand, number one, Iran is in a stronger position now than it was before the Iraq war because the Congress authorized the president to go in. And so it indicates the degree to which we've got to make sure, before we launch attacks or make judgments of the sort, that we actually understand the intelligence and we have done a good job in sorting it through.
Now, we don't know exactly what happened with respect to Syria . We've gotten general reports, but we don't know all the specifics. We got general reports in the run-up to the Iraq war that proved erroneous, and a lot of people voted for that war as a consequence.
So, Senator Clinton "strongly supported" a military action, based on the same "what we think we knows" and "apparentlys" that took us into Iraq. She hadn't learned a thing from the experience. (Intelligence experts at the time were vigorously questioning the nuclear claim and Seymour Hersh will be publishing an article soon that examines the case more closely.)
Senator Obama's answer was (and this is his genius as a politician, I think) quietly reasoned: we've made these mistakes before, let's be careful not to make them again. It was, for me, the right answer.
I have a lot of issues I'd like the president to address, primarily gay rights and health care, but certain prerequisites have to be met before we can, as a nation, ever get down to considering them. One of those is the assurance that there will be no more bogus wars, no more bogus intelligence, no more distracting campaigns of fear, that we will deal in truth, not rumor and propaganda, and that we can make informed decisions because information is not witheld from us. This is the monster I can't quite get out of my mind, that one candidate will not free us from those political bonds and move our country forward. For that reason I will log onto the Democrats Abroad website bright and early tomorrow morning, punch in my 10-digit ballot number and 8-digit PIN as the sun tops the garden wall, and vote for Barack Obama.