If you are fired up about voting this year, you can skip this diary. You probably won't like it very much. But that's OK. I'm trying to preach to my own choir: the disappointed and disaffected and disgruntled progressives out there. I feel their pain because it's mine. And I strongly suspect that, like me, most will unethusiastically cast their votes for Democrats during these midterm elections.
Many seem to think that if you express dismay with the Democrats, you're part of the unenthused block that will stay home.
Not so.
You don't have to be head over heels in love with President Obama and the Democratic party to get your ass to the polls on Tuesday and vote.
I'm living proof of that.
I was a committed Democrat for 32 years until the primaries in 2008. While the rest of the country swooned, I became less and less enchanted with Barack Obama: Donnie McClurkin, calling unions "special interests" in Iowa, vowing to do the right thing on FISA and then flipping without batting an eye. After at first being enthralled by his book and his initial speeches, soon I wondered what he really believed in. I wondered what he would not compromise on, what he would fight for. (I still don't know.)
Obama's more rabid supporters in the blogosphere alienated me further. Dems no longer needed the working class vote? The new Dem voter was someone in "the creative class"? Well, OK, but that creative class voter seemed mighty hostile to unions and somewhat amenable to at least partial privatization of social security--not to mention a little classist. So those folks reminded me of the young Reaganites who drove SAABs in the 80s. They just finally got tired of war and gay-bashing--to their credit.
Of course, despite my lack of enthusiasm for Obama, I voted for him in 2008. There was no question that I'd vote for the Democrat. Just as there is no question now in the Pennsylvania races. (And I actually am excited about voting for Sestak in PA.)
Today, after the deeply compromised deal-cutting in HCR and "finance reform,"I am totally cynical about Barack Obama and the Democrats. The Democratic party, with its large Blue Dog contingent and its national organization committed to winning conservative and corporate support, doesn't fool me anymore. Increasingly, I am convinced that we need a third, progressive party to speak for the poor and working class and a fourth, crazy-assed Tea Party to speak for all the deranged folks out there who live to be in a talk radio-induced state of perpetual outrage.
But for now, we have what we have. And what we have is a dilemma that isn't false. If we do not vote for the Democrat, we empower the Republican he or she is running against. In 99 cases out of a hundred, that means empowering someone who would happily blur the lines between church and state, outlaw abortion under all circumstances, amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, build a Berlin-style wall at our Southern border, and go to war with any country that looked at us funny. Oh and they'll shred the social safety net, disband public education, the Fed, and so on.
I'm angry with the Democrats for treating these people as though they were rational. Obama's "bipartisanship" has only ceded territory to them--and set the tone to legitimize them despite their utterly lunatic positions.
BUT even more disastrous than that, if I STAY HOME I DO EVEN MORE TO EMPOWER THEM. That's right. Obama and the Dems can bend over too far for the rightwing, but to hold office, those extremists still need more votes than the Democrats who run against them.
I'm certain that most who share my disappointment with the Democrats have decided that, as ugly as it is, staying home is a way to empower the right wing, not the more progressive wing of the party. People who stayed home or voted for Nader in 2000 only helped us get the worst president ever--a disaster that we're still trying to recover from.
However, if you're considering staying home, I'm begging: Please vote. Be mad as hell, too, but please vote. If you don't, you'll be even madder when Boehner is Speaker of the House. And you'll be furious when we have a Congress packed with the same kind of sanctimonious hypocrites who grandstand on issues like "Intelligent Design," "snowflakes," and private matters like the one that involved poor Terri Schiavo.
Be angry. Be critical. But please vote to block the right's access to even more power. And then, on the day after the elections, continue to fight the good fight and exhort Democrats not to toss a few bones to the working-class and poor and gays and the rapidly disappearing middle class, but to actually do the right thing and fight the corporatism that has corrupted our government--to tear it out by its roots so that democracy can flourish in its place.