Obama & the left's romanticism with defeat

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Tuesday July 01, 2008 · 2:08 PM PDT

2008/07/01 · 14:08

I'm sick and tired of reading all the lefty blogs freaking out that Obama isn't a mindless surrogate for every one of the netroots' pet policy-positions. He's not a living breathing manifestation of the liberal movement, he's a shrewd and brilliant progressive politician. Liberal ideological purity has been causing us to eat our own for decades, and I'm sick of losing.

If Kos, HuffPost, Think Progress, Crooks & Liars, Jesus General, MoveOn etc keep this shit up, defeating a 72 year old war-monger guaranteed to continue the policies of the most unpopular president in modern memory will turn into a bizarre curiosity that historians look back at and say "Wow...how could Obama have possibly lost?".

The American left has a romanticism with being the principled losers that never take power because we're just too pure in our convictions to win in such a corrupted system. Well, has that bullshit run it's course, yet? We cant do any good in the world with these elections always so close that the GOP can get away with stealing them, while we stand off to the side every four years and say "We could've won if only the system weren't so screwed up". Well, the system is screwed up. Always has been. And we cant change it without first playing the game, so that we can get inside it, and begin to change it.

This is why Nader supporters drive me up the wall. They're naive and childish (just like I was when I voted for him in 2000). They think by pulling the lever for someone that is ideologically pure, but who has no chance in winning, is making some kind of point. Well, it's not. Not in this country. Not in our winner-take-all system. The only point being made by such an action is that the voter is just too selfish to have the patience it takes to build a movement. Change takes time, lots and lots of time.

And if Obama has to come out in favor of executing child molesters, compromise with the GOP and the Bluedogs/DLC/Republicans-lite on the FISA fight, and throw an occasional bone to the evangelicals in order to get into the White House...then so be it. This is our system. This is American politics. It cant be changed overnight. Hell, it cant even be all that radically changed in eight years. But it can slowly change incrementally over a generation. However, it cant even begin to happen without first getting a progressive into the white house for at least two terms.

So we can either work within the only framework we have available to us, and change things slowly...or we can start a civil war. Left-wing ideological purists seem to think there is some magical third option. There isn't. There's only two. One is change brought about slowly and peacefully inside the system. The other is forcing change through violence.

I'll take the first option.

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