With a tip of the hat, and apologies for ripping off his title, to Nordic, for getting a discussion going that really is of the essence. I only attempt here to further that discussion without believing I can really propose an answer to it. Well, maybe I can. You tell me.
What I find most confounding in Nordic's diary is that he put "unelectability" in his title, but then really didn't seem to address that very issue, but only asserted that Cindy Sheehan is doing what the rest of us should be. Read the diary and even some of the comments, as I have to admit is all I did before I started writing this, and I think you'll understand why I'm writing.
Follow me, if you are so inclined.
I'm gonna give you just a little personal history, just so you get my perspective which I really think is a good one as I am, at least in part, who you/we are trying to reach in "electablility".
I was raised in Indiana and when I was eighteen, my first vote for President was for your pal and mine, Ronnie Reagan. The main reason for that was my belief, which may have foretold some of my future, that America needed a confidence boost. Although I was not the political junkie that I've more recently grown into, I was an opinionated little bastard who somewhat resembled Alex P. Keaton. Then I went to college. And studied theatre. Which put me in the company of some of the best fags, misfits, freaks, and other upstanding citizens I've ever had the pleasure to know and my world turned happily upside down. Well, honestly, no so happily as I began to turn into the shell of a man I find myself to be presently.
I am a straddler. I am a reluctant iconoclast who wishes to belong to something somewhere, but has a deep and fundamental distrust of groups, but tends stupidly to trust individuals almost without fail. My political compass rating puts me right about the Dalai Lama which, for a guy with all my sally tissues, is both my greatest point of pride and my worst fear. I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years now and LOVE IT, but am contemplating moving somewhere cheaper as I'm at very real crossroads having sold my businesses and sat on my ass reading this damned blog for way too long living off the proceeds. Feel free to hate me on that one, but you wouldn't like living in my head, so perhaps you can up your compassion. Operating those businesses though tested my ideals and resolve to my progressive agenda and opened my eyes to the real difficulties of attempting to maintain an ongoing business that truly attempts to take proper care of it's workers. I have great socialist tendencies, but absolutely think the government should be more efficient and that that could be achieved through incentivizing it's workers. I live in San Francisco, but can't wear all black without feeling like I'm trying to be Johnny Cash. I am also my own worst enemy for making my very heartfelt points as I am one over the top jackass intense Irish American idiot who will make any sane sensible person run in the opposite direction, when I get excited in a discussion. I literally cannot stay in my seat and I talk like MaryScott writes (hat tip - I love that, too), but now we start the amble to the point. Hallejuhah, says Pastor Dan.
The point is I am part of the choir here and that's why I come. This place is as close as I'm probably ever gonna get to being a joiner. There is still a great deal of personal conservative in this otherwise left wing whacko and so, I believe, it allows me to address some of the essence the "unelectability" of Cindy Sheehan and Martin Luther King.
Nordic was absolutely right in his diary, but his title was misplaced. Cindy is, has, and will be what each of us is, was, and should be, but she is also unelectable. She is an activist who has more than any other individual put the antiwar movement into the press and the public's eye. I pray that she continues. However, like Michael Moore, she is an incredibly polarizing figure. Go read the comments in Nordic's diary and that's all right here in the leftwingnuttiah, with apologies. I honestly could not agree more with what she is doing and even how she is doing it, but I also have to admit that my personal conservative side heard she was going to be at the sotu, I was truly apprehensive that she would do something, like I might, that would undermine her message with the people who really matter the most, again with apologies, the great big old fat center. That is who we are fighting for, after all, ain't it? My own neurotic centrist really pulls away at some of the rhetoric of Cindy and Mr. Moore and myself. The Center, if I may, is just not going to take kindly to having It's President called a murderer, no matter how much you believe that to be true.
So why'd I get Martin Luther King involved in all this rant? To make a point that perhaps I will be disabused of by those greater students of history than myself: if he hadn't been killed, he would have been electable. He stood his ground and made his points and did exactly what Cindy does, but he did it in a way that, ultimately, would have made him palatable to the Center. He was polarizing by content, but not by method. History students, help me out, please. Wasn't his speech always strong and precise, but respectful? Am I wrong or did he always avoid namecalling?
So. From a guy who regularly berates his conservative midwestern high school buddies with emails illustrating the newspeak of this administration and congressional leadership, who truly believes the rethugs have set such a nasty tone to the discourse and need to be attacked in like fashion, who wears a little tinfoil now and again and can truly entertain the idea that we may have had two stolen elections, who goes so far sometimes as to wonder if our model should actually be john brown, please understand that that kid from Indiana still bristles when he hears his idiotic Preznit called a murderer. Cindy is a great American doing exactly what she should be doing and is a great example to each of us in exercising her rights, but I sure as fuck don't think that makes her suited to actually govern anything and though I agree with her wholeheartedly, I would honestly fear her in power some as she seems to me as incautious as myself.
