There's a primary today. It's a nuisance, top to bottom, pitting a candidate who has been vetted every which way and fervently supported by every legitimate body in the district and state against a person who has been trying to pre-empt and subvert the process at every turn and who espouses views that in many cases are very little short of bizarre, and whose personality has been described in similar words (and worse). So why should it even matter that people show up and vote for Jim Himes today?
- Unity. Isn't it time to break the decades-long Will Rogers "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat" meme?
- Purpose. There is a GOAL in 2008 unlike any I have ever seen, and Jim Himes is--in my opinion--the ideal candidate to exemplify this. From Greenwich, Ivy and Oxford-educated, former investment banker who gave it up for non-profit work. We are a district that elected liberal Republicans (not just moderate or center-right, but guys who were honest-to-goodness progressives before the word was disinterred) for decades. Chris Shays was in that mold 21 years ago, now he's just grown moldy. I voted for him myself several times, just as I voted for the late and much lamented Stew McKinney before him, but this isn't the Chris Shays we sent to Washington in 1987 to fill McKinney's seat, and his opponents have had my vote in the last five elections.
- Unfair Use Doctrine. Given the nature of Himes' opponent (who I will not even grace by naming), anything other than an extraordinary landslide can be used by the GOP in the general election campaign, along the lines of --and I paraphrase the eventual message here, I hope--"if he can only squeak past that whackjob, how much confidence can his own party have in him? And if they don't, why should the rest of us?"
- Change Comes In All Shapes and Sizes and Colors, Including Pink and Green. 20 years ago you'd have looked at the brief bio for Jim Himes and automatically assumed from his background "this guy must be a Republican." In fact, people--mainly progressives, sad to say-- look at me and automatically assume the same thing because of how I look and talk and where I grew up and what I've done for a living. The Democratic party has an opportunity to turn 2008 into the year it became the broad tent and to throw off the cliquishness that has often made it seem more like a high school cafeteria than anything else.
I fervently believe that a massive victory is necessary as a springboard to November in order to neutralize the ability for the Shays camp to use the primary as a campaigning tool. This is not in the least impossible, given the nature of the match-up, but perhaps difficult, given that enough people will not take Himes' opponent seriously and a traditionally low-turnout event could be even lower.
So please please please PLEASE get out there and vote. Serious victories begin with being taken seriously. Don't give them a laughing point.