Or at least not unless he changes from who he is today.
The first time I voted in a Presidential election was in 1980. I wasn’t going to. Carter had disappointed me, responding to criticism that he wasn’t warlike enough by ramping up the sabre-rattling. Four months before the election he’d signed Presidential Proclamation 4771, which reinstated registration for the draft. All men born January 1, 1960 or after had to register. I was born just a few days after that cutoff. Carter made me choose between disobeying the dictates of my conscience and becoming a felon. I chose the latter, and the resultant damage to my education and subsequent career unfolds to this day.
But my housemates were heading to the polls as I was heading home from work, and they said the unthinkable: that Reagan was actually winning. Shocked at the unbelievable idiocy of our countrypeople — who would vote for a psychotic monster like Reagan? — we trooped off to the polls to lend our support to Carter getting his share of New York Electoral votes. The historical record shows that we needn’t have bothered: Reagan carried New York rather handily. But I did cast my vote for Carter.
So I am capable of strategic voting even when I am thereby voting against certain of my own direct interests. Just so you know.
I haven’t always voted for the lesser of evils. I mean, I did vote for Mondale in ‘84, Dukakis in ‘88, and Kerry in 2004. But when it’s been prudent to do so — for instance, when my adopted state of California was not in play — I voted my conscience, or or at least I did as closely as I could. I voted for Nader in 1992, ‘96 and even 2000. I might have voted differently in 2000 if I hadn’t been living in a state where Gore got a 12-point lead. I don’t know. Despite the reflexive bleats of Democratic diehards when this topic comes up, NAder didn’t cheat Gore of Florida’s electoral votes nearly as handily as Gore did himself. More than 200,000 registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush in 2000. Gore didn’t even carry his home state of Tennessee. Nader was far from the biggest reason Gore didn’t become President.
In any event, I’ve voted for Democratic Presidential candidates throughout my life when I thought my vote would make a difference. Every time I’ve done so it has been out of fear that if the Democrat lost, things would get worse.
And as it turns out they’ve gotten worse consistently anyway.
When I first started paying attention to national politics in any kind of systematic, critical way, Nixon was President. He was, of course, Evil Personified, an imperialist, reactionary, conniving, amoral, disingenuous, Machiavellian, rabid sweaty weasel in a cheap pinstriped suit. Now I wish I could vote for the 1972 Nixon instead of any of the choices we have now. It took a while to realize that with the exception of Carter, every single President we’ve had since has been to Nixon’s right. Nixon who signed — and more importantly, fought for — the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon, who in between waging undeclared wars in three countries brokered peace with China and detente with the Soviet Union. Nixon, who tried to get universal health care enacted. If not for Watergate, we might have had socialized medicine in the US.
I celebrated when Obama was elected, in part because Bush was such a nightmare and in part because of the historic importance of the US’s First Black President. But Obama, derided by the Know-Nothing Sector of the US electorate as a “Socialist,” who holds Reagan as the former President he most admires, is emphatically to Nixon’s right.
Obama’s administration has continued some of the most heinous practices of the Bush administration, especially with regard to torture. Despite Obama’s pledge to withdraw from Iraq within 18 months of his ascension, 31 months into the Obama administration we still have troops in Iraq and likely will in 2012. With new wars in Libya and Yemen, along with Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has taken Bush’s two wars and doubled the total.
In environmental matters, the arena I know best, Obama is demonstrably worse than Bush. He talks a better game about climate change, but has nonetheless continued to do the bidding of the oil and coal companies, flogging “clean coal” (which does not exist except in coal company PR strategies), pushing to allow Canadian tar sands extractors to pipe their superpolluting oil into the US, and vowing to increase offshore oil drilling even while the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was in progress, on which matter his administration utterly screwed the pooch.
In the realm of endangered species, Obama falls short of Bush as well. As near as I can determine in a short survey of the news, the Obama administration has protected 66 species under the Endangered Species Act in the two and a half years since the inauguration. Of those, 48 are Kauai endemics cleared for listing by the Bush administration for which the Obama administration gets credit due merely to the timing of the paperwork, and six are birds not native to the United States that were listed a few months back so as to streamline enforcement of international trade violations. Listing of domestic species, which is the main point of the ESA and the main irritant to American businesses, ground to a halt in the last two years.
Obama’s one big environmental initiative, a huge program of subsidies for developers of “alternative” energy sources, in fact constitutes one of the largest Federal pushes for de facto privatization of Western public lands in the last 100 years. millions of acres of the West, and of eastern National Forests and shorelines as well, have been put on the auction block for energy developers to choose among. While such a policy might be understandable in the context of a 180-degree U-turn away from fossil fuel development, no such U-turn is happening. Big Solar and Big Wind aren’t replacing anything: they’ve merely become one additional way for business to extract value from public lands while the coal mining and oil drilling and natural gas fracking go on as scheduled.
I’ve been tracking environmental assaults on the western landscape since the late 1980s. Obama’s energy policy is, for the California deserts and a number of other places, pretty much the Apocalypse. We’re talking about the complete industrialization of many millions of acres of public land — your land and my land, as the song has it — on a scale Bush never would have been able to get away with.
On a scale Bush never would have been able to get away with. Why? Because this is what happens in America: Republicans take the White House and progressives and liberals get outraged, we get scared, we band together (in between petty internecine squabbling) and we mostly work to forestall the worst excesses of the GOP. We organize. We harness the better impulses of the American people and make some changes in the names listed on the White House stationery.
And when a Democrat takes the White House, four fifths of that liberal coalition goes to fucking sleep. It happened after Clinton got in, and after Carter got in, and it’s happening now with a vengeance. The Democratic rank and file figures their guy’sin power and they can go back to watching So You Think You Can Dance. Angry progressive blogs that savaged the right wing in 2000-2008 for making the Iraq war happen now seem to have had that same war largely swept from their list of concerns, even though it is now apparently endless and has three siblings.
There are differences between the two parties. Despite the usual straw man, no one — except college students new to leftism and maybe Alexander Cockburn — ever really says there’s no difference between the parties except as the most shortened of shorthand. In point of fact, there’s as much difference between the parties as there is between clockwise and counterclockwise on a ratchet wrench turning a bolt. Turning rightward tightens the bolt. But you don’t want to break the handle by pushing too hard, so you relax and turn the handle back to the left. The wrench loosens a bit, if ineffectually — the bolt doesn’t move, but the pressure eases up. And then comes the next push to the right, tightening the bolt still further. Each cycle has its new status quo, its period of tightening up and release, and the result in the end? The leftward relaxation has merely made the rightward clampdown possible.
Democratic loyalists point out that if we don’t vote for their guy, the worse guy gets in. This is clearly true. But it also manifestly creates conditions by which the lesser evil will, over time, get more and more evil. We see this now in that we’re likely to be asked to vote for a man who has us involved in four concurrent wars, continues torture and rendition and denial of habeas corpus, offers up Medicare and Social Security for cuts as a compromise (another victory Bush could have only dreamed of), and would preside over the largest paving of the deserts in history — simply because his likely opponent is fucking batshit insane.
It’s a worse choice every single time. Every single time the difference is clear, and every single time both candidates are more loathsome than their counterparts four years previous. How many people reading this wouldn’t vote for 1972 Nixon in a heartbeat as the Democratic candidate in 2012? How much worse will it have to get before we say “enough!” How many more cranks of the ratchet wrench do we want to go through before we look in the box for a better tool?
A few days ago on Google+ I posted a preliminary list of qualifications a candidate for office must have before my conscience would even consider letting me vote for him or her. It was incomplete and I’m still working on it, thinking that someone out there might care.
In order for me to vote for any candidate for office, that candidate:
- must neither openly nor tacitly support the use of torture in any circumstance.
- must pledge to defend women’s access to abortion against any threatened limitation, whether that obstruction be political, religious or economic.
- must pledge to oppose the enshrining in law of social discrimination against any group of people based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, language, religious belief or lack thereof, disability, social class, or other arbitrary division.
- must agree that the rich – who have after all profited most from the country’s natural wealth, infrastructure and financial policy – ought to pay their fair share of taxes.
- must at least hold as an aspiration the provision of a tolerable standard of living to all people in the US, including shelter, food, clothing, education, health care and access to communication, regardless of the individual’s ability to pay.
- must support the continued existence of labor unions.
- must pledge not to punish individual migrants for the failures of the country’s immigration policy.
- must at least pledge to value the ecological integrity of the United States’ landscapes over the possibility that profit might be extracted from them.
- must possess at least a high-school level understanding of science, especially regarding but not limited to crucial topics such as climate change and evolutionary biology.
- must oppose any interference in the routine and proper teaching of science in our public schools by religious groups.
- must abide by the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
On completing the first draft of this list I had two simultaneous and equally disheartening feelings.
1) This really is an insultingly low bar for my conscience to insist on.
2) There are very few politicians who could satisfy a majority of the conditions set out here, and almost none — maybe Grijalva — who could meet them all.
But we have to start somewhere, because this road goes nowhere good.
And a note to the inflamed: Before you leave a comment consisting of an argument that can be boiled down to “President Bachmann will be your fault!” read the whole post. If you don’t we’ll be able to tell, and you’ll just be embarrassing yourself.
Thank you for making the point about Nader. I’ve been defending his candidacy for years.
As to Obama, I’m disappointed too. I still have hopes, but ... damn.
Well, as far as I’m concerned, Nader isn’t even worthy of consideration given his unabashed racism ( http://bintalshamsa.blogspot.com/2008/11/nader-refers-to-obama-as-uncle-tom.html ). Personally, I wouldn’t vote for 1972 Nixon if he was the candidate today, because I feel sick to my stomach when I think about this nation’s historical racial imbalance with regards to positions of power.
The reality is that no one who is electable will represent my views, so my only options are to stay home on voting day, vote for someone who hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected or vote for someone who will carry out policies that I disagree with. I don’t see how voting for someone who can not be elected is anything other than a waste of time, so it seems that the only real decision I can make is to stay home or vote for someone I disagree with.
For most of my adult life, I’ve felt that it was better to stay home than to help put someone into an office knowing that they would engage in activities that I oppose. I’m still not certain that this isn’t the most ethical stance to take. However, I started to reconsider my position when I started reading about and contemplating the consequences of neutrality. Even if I stay home, I think I bear a certain amount of responsibility for what the person in office is able to get away with.
So, I wonder if it might be worth voting for someone that I disagree with if I think that they are at least capable of making rational decisions and might be open to listening to what people like me have to say about the direction we want this country to take. History has shown that there is absolutely no reason to believe that voting for white, cis*, non-disabled men will result in revolutionary change. I think that the further we get from that model, the more likely we are to see changes in political policies that will prove to be positive for the communities that I identify with. The only way to find out is by having more people of color, more people with disabilities, more queer-identified people put in office. We’ve seen what white, cis, non-disabled men have to offer and I don’t see how people like me have anything to gain by continuing down that road.
Obama’s term in office has certainly encouraged that view. It has changed the lives of those around me in ways that I didn’t even anticipate. It has activated people I knew who had never before expressed an interest in politics. I have seen it motivate young black professionals to run for office in Louisiana. I watched as Michelle Obama almost single-handedly changed the way that young black and brown girls in the USA viewed physical education class. Her presence at the side of the President has made it infinitely easier to tell our daughters that brown skin IS beautiful. These are things that electing a 1972 Nixon would not accomplish.
Barack’s identity as a mixed-race/mixed-ethnicity person of color gave my child something that every white child in America has been able to take for granted their entire lives: the ability to see someone who looks like her in the White House. The exhilaration and triumph that Irish-Catholic Americans felt when they got to see photos of the Kennedy family eating together, playing together, working together, and just being there now gets to be experienced by families like mine. It changed the way the entire nation eventually felt about the idea of having more Irish-American Presidents.
I suppose if an individual already had what most people of color didn’t experience until Obama became President, his re-election might not be a very thrilling prospect. Maybe there isn’t much for them to personally feel excited about. I can definitely understand that. However, having witnessed unprecedented positive changes rippling through every facet of my communities, I see many reasons why it would be beneficial for Obama to be re-elected.
I think it also needs to be understood that the first person of color to occupy a role in our society is never a true radical. A truly radical person of color would never have been elected President. Even the self-identified liberals and progressives wouldn’t have allowed it. Sadly, it seems that the traits that made Obama electable in the eyes of white America are now the very same ones that many progressives and liberals are unhappy with. I wish that I could explain to some of my loved ones who are white that Obama’s role is not to enact the kind of revolutionary policies needed to fix this society. His role is to make it possible for that revolutionary to be accepted by white America. It isn’t Paul Robeson that changed the way white American sports-lovers viewed black athletes. It took Jackie Robinson to do that. Robeson was too revolutionary for most of white America to accept, but Robinson was malleable enough to endure the kind of abuse that America requires people of color to tolerate in order to achieve new levels of (begrudging) acceptance. Being anything other than a complete milquetoast and even white liberals and progressives will label a person of color “too angry”, “uppity”, or a “loose cannon”.
In my eyes, Obama is doing exactly what people like me need him to do. We need him to be “Jackie Robinson”, so that a “Paul Robeson” can eventually change the problems created over the past few centuries by those who shared more than just superficial traits in common with Nixon.
I voted for Nader in 2000 (and 1996) so I know where you’re coming from. Right now, Al Gore looks like the comparative next coming of Eugene Debs, and Obama seems to be playing GHWB to W’s Reagan. Things have just gotten worse. Neither voting for a candidate who can meet my minimum expectations nor voting for the lesser evil seems to have worked very well.
Republicans consistently fail nearly all of your basic criteria (which more or less match mine), so I feel it’s my duty to vote for even the weakest Democratic alternative so long as it fails at fewer. But really I can only conclude that electoral politics are woefully insignificant. They are a box to check off while the real work happens in our communities and on the streets.
While economic issues aren’t enough, I think they’re what will get people off their asses in large numbers. We ought to be forming alliances across all issues (economic justice, ecological respect, sustainable energy and development, civil rights and civil liberties, you name it) but I think the central focus has to be based on creating a society that provides economic power for as many people as possible. It starts with a defensive protection of the notion of social insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security) and expands to a call for jobs that enable people to provide for their own security within a context that respects broader social and ecological principles. Rhetorically, it means co-opting the concept of the middle class as an organizing idea from the shell it has become under consumer capitalism and transforming it into a vision of sustainable well-being for all. Our current notion of the middle class is built upon the economic poverty of billions of people and on impoverishing our ecological well-being. A just concept of the middle class doesn’t rest on an underclass but provides resources for everyone. It doesn’t rest on destroying the planet for short-term gain but on living in the context of biological and ecological processes. To stop exploitation of the poor you need to provide them with economic power. To stop exploitation of the planet you need that economic power to be sustainable. And the way you do that is by taking on the people and institutions of privilege that enable poverty and ecological destruction. So at core you need a class war division between “regular people/middle class” and the rich, with the other social and ecological principles grouped with the former. This also helps to call people to deal with their own behavioral shortcomings without scolding them for their immorality.
I don’t really know how that translates into action, except that we should be protesting and striking and rebelling whenever it helps to advance the cause, and focusing it all on a central narrative that respects and furthers the needs of most people so that it actually coheres into something beyond the regular background of marginal political activism.
I’ve read your essay, appreciating its mentality and its authoritative tone, supported by plenty of facts.
If your readers were the Annenberg Foundation, would they say this is an unbiased, factually supported piece of journalism, or would they say that the facts fit the beliefs. It should go the other way ‘round.
My grasp of the facts is not secure enough to question your specifics, but before anyone goes on a tear like this, someone should vet the essay for accuracy, that is, very carefully question everything in it. You can be a powerful voice, but I hope to God you’re speaking verity.
Rob, this is in no way an unbiased piece of journalism, nor is any other piece of journalism for which I have been responsible in the last 22 years unbiased. “Factual” and “unbiased” are not the same thing.
People can always vet anything I write for accuracy, whether I’m talking about Obama, desert solar, or bunnies. I welcome factual corrections, and generally edit the piece, usually transparently, when errors are brought to my attention.
However, your “before anyone goes off on a tear like this someone should vet this for accuracy” is weird. It smacks of a Bushian “people need to be careful what they say.” If you disagree with things I’ve said here, say so. If you doubt my facts, check them out for yourself. I’m confident in the factual accuracy of what I say here, having covered national environmental politics for a living since 1989. Still, I’m only human. Or if you don’t feel like doing the dirty work of checking facts you find suspect, and prefer to think I’m off base, that’s your prerogative.
But to say “someone should vet these facts for accuracy” seems like a weirdly passive aggressive way of just shutting down discussion. I vetted them before I wrote them. You have disagreements, put up or, well, you know.
@Bint, you’ve put your finger on the single unambiguous positive effect of the Obama administration as far as I can tell. I remain convinced, however, that there have to be brilliant, impassioned, savvy African-American men and women out there, many of them with charismatic partners, who could be stirring role models for African American youth and still, you know, not accede to torture and war and corporate pandering. I mean, Van Jones is standing RIGHT THERE. And he’s already been pre-attacked by Glenn Beck, so we don’t have to sit around wondering when our shiny new president will get his first supermarket parking lot ding.
Cascadian, as usual I can’t find much to disagree with in what you say.
I occasionally glance at the spam I get on my blog, right before deleting it, and most of it is this strangely uninvolved stuff like “You have some really interesting opinions here! I have bookmarked your site and will be sure to keep an eye on this blog in the future!”
The most common element of the stuff is that it references NOTHING in the post to which it’s attached. You might mistake it for an actual comment only if you’d never seen anything like it.
Rob Bender’s comment has that same off-kilter feel, to me. I’m about half convinced it’s not a real post.
I was getting ready to say something snarky about Obama after reading your post, but Bint Alshamsa’s comment completely stopped me in my tracks. I too knew that what she said was exactly the positive that Obama’s election had wrought, but to have someone from within the community that benefited lay it out so thoughtfully and articulately really makes me pause and soften my anti-Obama sentiment.
Also, Van Jones hellz yeah! The other day on facebook, someone was bashing Van Jones and I totally chewed them out.
Chris, it isn’t a single positive effect. It’s many positive effects brought on by a single variation from the Presidential model that we’ve had for hundreds of years in this country. It’s true that there are many brilliant, impassioned black and mixed-race/mixed-ethnicity Americans. However, when has those traits ever been enough to satisfy the majority of white Americans? It isn’t brilliance and passion that makes it possible for a person of color to succeed in overwhelmingly white-dominated fields.
The reality is that in order to be among the firsts, a person of color has to be perceived as non-threatening. In order to ensure that the next person of color who wants that job will have even a snowball’s chance in hell of obtaining it, white Americans in power must be able to look back at how the first to fill that roll conducted themselves and seamlessly fit in with the establishment.
You’ll never be the first black person in a powerful law firm if you’re a woman with an afro or a man with dreadlocks. You’ll never be the first black person to become the dean of any department at a prominent university if your skin is the same color as Wesley Snipes’. These factors have nothing to do with intelligence, experience, or passion, but they might as well be on the listing for job requirements because they make that much of a difference in who gets to be the first person of color to come into a position of power.
The result of this sad state of affairs is that there are very few people of color who meet the unwritten requirements for the Presidency. Even Obama barely meets them. Just his name would be enough to prevent him from getting many jobs in this country. Someone like Van Jones will never be President within our lifetime. They’d never even choose someone like him to be the nominee for Democratic Party. That much I know for sure. White America would never allow it. Look at all of the brilliant revolutionaries who were people of color in the USA. There’s a reason why not a single one of them became President and it would be naive for anyone to believe that it’s just because none of them were interested in the job.
“In the awesome design of things you’ll secure a B- for effort. Where exactly you actually misplaced me ended up being on the details. You know, people say, the devil is in the details… And it couldn’t be more accurate in this article. Having said that, let me say to you just what exactly did deliver the results. The article (parts of it) is certainly extremely convincing and that is most likely why I am making the effort in order to comment. I do not really make it a regular habit of doing that. 2nd, even though I can see a jumps in logic you come up with, I am not necessarily convinced of just how you appear to unite the points which help to make your final result. For the moment I will yield to your point however hope in the foreseeable future you actually link your facts much better.”
I follow you’re logic, but it seems to me that you’re missing a step in there. The real problem isn’t Obama. It’s the United States. “The lesser evil” is getting more evil because the United States is getting more evil. It’s nothing but a dead sparrow, and there’s no sense in blaming Obama for that. When there’s no one you can vote for in good conscience, there’s not much to do but leave (if you can).
Argh, ‘your’ not ‘you’re’. That’ll show me not to proofread.
Hank wrote I still have hopes, but ... damn.
I’m curious about where your hopes come from, Hank. My hopes for your country started at an unprecedented high when Obama was elected (and I never thought he was a progressive), and they’ve been dashed repeatedly and monotonically. I really don’t understand the source of residual optimism in the light of unrelieved concessions (some initiated by Obama!) to corporate interests at the expense of the middle and working classes.
My point stands that I’m neither willing to abandon defending the desert by moving out of the country, nor throw it under a bus to achieve gains on someone else’s agenda.
Well, I’d maintain that you don’t have to throw it under a bus, because it’s already there. There’s nothing you (or even Obama) can do about that, long-term. Hey, if you can think of something that would actually work, within the current system, that would end up giving you a fairer, better, more ethical United States than Obama’s been able to provide, I will cheer you on. I just don’t think that exists. That’s why I left, and it’s only gotten worse (oh, SO much worse) since.
Don’t think I’m happy about that, either. I’m not being the smug emigré, here. I have enough people I love back there that I’m very worried about what the U.S. has become/is becoming, not to mention the effects it will inevitably have on the rest of the world (and especially its closest trading partner).
I, too, feel beyond disappointed with President Obama. That he won’t tow the line for the left and compromises way beyond the center with the far right is of great concern. That he is so clueless about the environment (BP oil spill, delisting several critical endangered species because of political pressure, his really insanestand on the LOCATION of solar electric facilities….the list goes on and on) is nearly unforgivable. Perhaps it is because he is an urbanite and does not see the inherent value of the natural world. Perhaps he wants to be elected again at any cost. Perhaps he is just ignorant. And although he talks a good game about global warming he has chose to put the major resources into war and power rather than a solid energy policy and alternative energy that has little or no impact on sensitive environments.
I’m with you. I have not chosen a candidate yet, but there has to be one out there who is not a walking disaster.
I’ve completely had it with Obama! The guy campaigned as a progressive but as soon as he was elected he moved center-right. He won’t get anywhere acting like a faux Republican, he’ll get somewhere if he can find his balls and start fighting for the people who put him in office. Frankly, after waiting for ‘the real Obama’ for two and a half years, I realize ‘this is the real Obama’, a gutless wimp who wouldn’t fight if his life depended on it. I don’t know if it’s a reticence to come across as an ‘angry urban male’ or what it is, but I’M SICK OF IT!!! If this guy came home and found Mitch McConnell boning Michelle he wouldn’t fight. He’d probably commission a study group to investigate the feasibility of asking McConnell, politely, if he wouldn’t mind using lube, or, shorter strokes! The man sickens me! I don’t want to get into a whole ‘macho’ thing here, but “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” had more balls that this waste of oxygen!
Sorry about the typo. It should have read ‘than this waste of oxygen’ not ‘that this waste of oxygen’. My Journalism degree is blushing. I can hear it shouting ‘proofread you idiot, proofread!’ Ooops!
Obama has one last chance with us, based on how he votes on the Tar Sands pipeline. If he isn’t swayed by the folks in DC this month, he won’t be getting our votes either. Fuck it.
Nice essay. Thanks for your list. Maybe Grijalva.
Bint Alshamsa, thanks for bringing into clear focus ‘the elephant in the room’ that is the closet racism in this country. We may act ‘race neutral’ in public, but there’s a lot of us who are “Bull Conner” at home. The only one’s I see who are willing to even hint at this obvious point is Chris Matthews on ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC, or a few of his guests. Let’s face it people; after an all-to-brief ‘kumbaya moment’ that was more of an invention of the media than a reality, the GOP went into a state akin to the old boy network at the country club, circling the wagons, or in their case, the Caddilacs, against ‘the invasion of the darkies’.
The only ones they are comfortable with are the ones serving drinks off of a silver tray with a white gloved hand. Your mention of Wesley Snipes is well put. The trouble is, ‘they’ see all black people as Snipes, no matter how they do on the ‘paper bag test. Yes, we’ve made progress, but it’s important to know, especially on this, the 150th aniversary of the civil war (the one that some crackers still refer to as ‘the war between the states for some moronic reason) how far we still have to go.
Responding to Ted A., I’d like to point out that how far we have come in 150 years has little to do with my use of the term ‘cracker’. Cracker is not an ethnic slur, it is a less than flattering term to describe a certain segment of the white population. To belabor the obvious, what would you call a guy in a pickup truck with ‘stars ‘n’ bars’ mudflaps, Klan stickers, etc.? Not all white people are crackers, but most crackers are white people. It’s a fact.
The whole point of my deleting trolls like Ted A is so that people don’t muddy up a thread by responding to them.
Do you want to know why things keep getting worse? The answer is here:
“For most of my adult life, I’ve felt that it was better to stay home than to help put someone into an office knowing that they would engage in activities that I oppose.”
That is a deontological moral position, a position that says your personal spiritual purity is more important than real world out-comes. Luckily it seems that Bint has outgrown that childish view of morality; now if only the rest of the country would grow up, then things might start getting better.
The Religious Right and the Progressive Left share one thing in common: this obsession with purity, this desire to have a supernatural hero come in and brush away all the dull real-world facts. The only difference is that cold-eyed billionaires have financed and exploited the Right to advance their agenda. Hence the nation has drifted to the Right, driven by people who don’t believe in evolution or basic economics or simple math. And your response is… to hold your breath until your purity demands are met.
I would say good luck with that, but you owe Bint more than that. You owe her the civic responsibility of doing the best you can with what you have, of slowing down the rate of sinking even if you can’t actually make the boat float. You owe it to her and all your fellow citizens. You owe it to yourself.
Yahzi, a quick - even cursory - read of the post would show that I’ve been working my ass off to change things in the real world for a long time. A very small piece of that work has been in the voting booth. The overwhelming majority of that work has been in the real world.
If you want to call that “holding my breath until my purity demands are met,” that’s your choice. I will say that the post I wrote is chock fucking full of “dull real-world facts,” whereas your comment is pretty much composed entirely of fact-free condescension. But perhaps that’s an artifact of the medium.
So you’re willing to vote for a torturer to be pragmatic. Fine. What ELSE do you do in the world? ON days on which ballots are not cast?
Sadly, it does not matter how long or hard you have worked. As soon as you quit, the enemy wins. I do not say this to discount your efforts. I say it because you seem to have forgotten. Perhaps you were only venting, and will, in time, come back to your senses. I hope so.
The point I was making - that deontology makes one feel good at the expense of actually making good - still stands as the root cause of America’s decline. Too many people choosing their beliefs based on how they feel rather than on they think.
And yes, I am willing to vote for a torturer when the option is a murderer. So are you, if you wish to remain in the camp of morality. It is an unpleasant but necessary constraint.
Now you might say it’s easy for me to tell you to buck up, since I live in a civilized country, and you’d be right. It is not fair of me to belittle your accomplishments (oh wait - I didn’t!) or discount your discouragement. I just visited the USA again, and I was shocked at how depressing the aura of permanent crazy is. But that does not change facts.
You can bitch about Obama all you want. When it comes to civil liberties and the Justice department, I will join you. But abdicating your responsibility is beyond the pale. Worse, using your blog to encourage others to abandon hard reality in favor of childish fantasy does the work of the Republicans. I assure you there is no group more pleased with your headline than the Tea Party.
Yahzi, your concerns have been noted. Now take your odd, narcissistic mix of condescension and lack of reading comprehension somewhere else. We welcome disagreement here, but only that of the honest sort; your presumption that you can see inside people’s hearts and your willingness to level insults, as amusingly pompous as they might be, marks you as Not Quite Coyote Crossing Material.
And as a parting note: you may want to look up “deontological” somewhere other than Wikipedia. You’re using it to mean the opposite of what It actually does mean.
Yahzi, Apparently you know the theory of everything but the context and value of ‘NOTHING!’. Have you been running into walls lately? As in head first? Huffing gasoline perhaps? Or perhaps it’s congenital? Mommy had to many post-preggers drinky-poos?
Steve: Not helping. Seriously.
Yes Chris, you’re right. Sometimes I just get so cheese off I just sort of ‘vent’ without thinking. Now that I think of it, isn’t it sort of a mirror image of Teabagger ramblings and that sort of thing? I’ve got to be more aware of that. Got to pay more attention of the sober yin than the raging yang…
‘Before you leave a comment consisting of an argument that can be boiled down to “President Bachmann will be your fault!” read the whole post. If you don’t we’ll be able to tell, and you’ll just be embarrassing yourself. ‘
I read the whole post, and I still don’t agree that you completely counter that argument, specifically when it comes to the prospect of President (Bachmann) Perry having the next couple of S CT appointments. Things are bad enough there already, all we need are more young, neocon jurists.
I read the whole post. You are wrong, disastrously wrong, insanely wrong, and a danger to all of civilization.
If you have a viable strategy to elect a more progressive candidate than Obama in 2012, then let’s see it. I am certain as I have ever been certain of anything in politics that an 11 point progressive purity pledge is not it.
DFS, that’s not by any means am unreasonable point. Still, I’m not entirely sure having a 4-5 edge on SCOTUS is all that much better than a 3-6 or a 2-7.
John Casey, thanks for the hyperbolic take on my own political importance, but if you think conditions like “must not support torture” are indicative of a desire for progressive purity, then I am afraid there’s nothing you and I can say to each other.
A general note: welcome to visitors from Pharyngula and thanks to PZ for the linkage. Be aware that PZ has a much more laissez faire approach to comment moderation than I do. Disagree thoughtfully and I have no problem with you. Be a dick and you’re gone. That applies to people arguing against my views or in defense of them. 99 percent of you don’t need to have read this, of course, but John Casey’s post makes me think I should say it anyway.
I agree with your assessment of the situation, but is it actually the case that not voting for Obama is BETTER than voting for Obama? I mean, sure, voting for Obama helps perpetuate the problem, but maybe voting for someone else does so even more.
I think that who we vote for as President is only an extremely small part of any solution to the seemingly unstoppable rightward drift that you note. I don’t believe voting for Obama, the Republican, or a third party makes any significant difference to that particular problem. So I’m going to vote for Obama because it means that a crazy Republican won’t have the opportunity to destroy the country for 4 years, and I don’t think it contributes to the rightward drift of politics any more than voting for a third party does.
You are wrong, disastrously wrong, insanely wrong, and a danger to all of civilization.
It could be argued, even demonstrated, that the danger to civilization is being continually forced to choose the lesser of two evils, especially when the “lesser” keeps getting gets worse. Who was it said something about insanity, doing the same things, and expecting different results?
It could also be argued (as Chris did) that liberals achieve more when Democrats are not in power.
What you cannot argue with is a person’s conscience.
Rob G, that bit of john’s comment you quoted would make a great Coyote Crossing t-shirt, don’t you think?
Look, I know that it seems like a purity pledge to you, but there is such a thing as having standards. If you can’t imagine a candidate you wouldn’t vote for, you haven’t been paying much attention the last 47 years or your morality is deeply weird.
And besides: Do you get it? Do you get it at all? The republicans have relentlessly imposed “purity tests” of an explicit and stringent nature.
What did that get them? F*ing ELECTED. The country has moved more & more in the direction of those republican purity tests. Because they say, honestly, that they’re willing to vote for no one on election day, and they follow through on their threat if a candidate that represents their minimal standards does not exist. Now the republicans not only desperately seek to prove how devoted they are to the purity test, but the democrats go out of their way to treat the purity test as a serious negotiating position to which one must concede something significant.
It sounds to me like purity tests have been accomplishing an AWFUL LOT in the real world.
One wonders why the right has been better at it than the left? Well, the rights had the energy of racism on their side. The people who felt that , for instance, there was just no friggin way that they would allow their beautiful white babies to go to school with those *black folk* (as if that was the worst thing you could say about some one), had a minimum standard, a hard no. The repubs said, “we respect your hard no” right at the very beginning of the process of desegregation. The democrats wavered, with the Dixie dems ALSO saying that they respected the hard no, while the rest of the dems said, f* that, your hard no doesn’t mean anything to us because your position is frankly immoral.
It was a defining moment.
I’m not saying the dems made the wrong call - segregation is immoral - but repubs effectively told their base, “If you give us a purity test, we’ll respect it because we know you feel so certain about it that it will affect your voting habits.”
And the repub base responded by elaborating on their purity tests and getting what they wanted.
The proof is in the pudding, and purity tests, baby, they accomplish something in the real world. Don’t think for a second that they don’t.
a great Coyote Crossing t-shirt
Bit more expensive than the last one, but probably worth it. Would John get royalties, or has he public-domained himself?
I’m not voting for Obama in 2012 either but not because I have been disappointed by him - I really didn’t have any positive expectations of him and I think anyone who did much like many of McCain is a maverick crowd just weren’t paying attention -his rhetoric was always just that -his association with Rahm Emanuel if nothing else should have been a clue. I like your list of qualifications although I would prefer to have a Labor Department that would render unions moot but until that happens we do indeed need them. I didn’t vote for Obama last time around but as I live in ID it didn’t really matter but I would not have voted for him even if it did. I firmly believe until we stop showing up for the lesser of evils things will continue to slide to the increasingly evil. But, yeah, good luck finding a qualified candidate to run.
Apologies to those who tried to comment over the last 18 hours or so. I was away from the desktop, and after an abusive comment came through I decided I wouldn’t be able to snag such comments efficiently while I was away.
It may seem like a small point, but I remain convinced that Internet discussions are possible even among people of differing views in which people’s basic humanity can be respected.
Disagree, tell me you think I’m wrong, say you agree but you can’t bring yourself not to vote for Obama given the alternatives, whatever. All that’s fine, as you can see from the contents of the thread so far. Make assumptions and construct bad-faith arguments out of them and you’re gone.
Specifically:
• If you are neither older than 45 nor work professionally as a political organizer, you are unlikely to have a better working familiarity with how politics work in the country than I do. That doesn’t make me right, but it does mean you ought to avoid basing your argument on my presumed youthful idealistic ignorance.
• If you are going to target “magical thinking” on the part of people who are uncomfortable voting for Obama given his atrocious record, you may want to rethink your attacking people for not voting even if they live in non-swing states. My vote for Obama, or against him, or not voting at all will make absolutely no difference in the final electoral outcome — not even statistically — and this is true of many readers of this thread.
• Even if you’re completely right and I’m completely wrong, screaming at people and calling them idiots is not an effective way to persuade them to do what you want them to do. Obama doesn’t need your help, in other words.
Again, apologies to the vast majority of you who know how to act both online and off, and who don’t need to be lectured on deportment as if you were three years old. I really have appreciated even the critical comments from the majority of you.
Oh, and if — like the commenter whose turd I nuked from my metaphorical living room floor last night — you are curious enough to find out that I live in Palm Springs these days, but too incurious to read further and find out that I live here at around a poverty level income, and you make assumptions about my level of insulation from economic collapse based on your stereotype of Palm Springs as an affluent resort town, then be advised that:
1) per capita income in Palm Springs is just under 26K/annum;
2) I expect to gross half that this year;
3) my girlfriend’s unemployment checks make things a lot easier, though I really wish we could afford to see the doctor;
4) her unemployment checks run out in a couple months;
5) in the meantime I work a huge number of pro bono hours to defeat the environmental devastation Obama’s policies will cause to the region where I live, so
6) bite me.
I am 100% behind you writing this and promoting this. I am 100% against you not actually voting for the Dem nominee.
“But it also manifestly creates conditions by which the lesser evil will, over time, get more and more evil.”
You’ve stated that - and I don’t agree - but even if I did you’ve made no argument that not voting changes that anymore than voting. You’ve simply said you’re not going to vote. What did I miss?
By “I don’t agree” I mean that Obama is clearly less “evil” than Bush. The Iraq War was a crime, literally, of colossal scope that Obama will not come close to regarding any issue. And ending the pre-existing conditions clause in health care was a really big positive that Bush never came close to.
Dang. My email addy was wrong in last comment. It’s correct here.
It was raised earlier in this thread, but I think it deserves another mention: Chris, I think you’re drastically underestimating the potential impact of giving President Perry/Bachmann/Insane Troll the opportunity to nominate probably two more archconservative activist ideologues to the Supreme Court from 2012-2016.
You said “I don’t think the difference between a 4-5 and a 3-6 or 2-7 Supreme Court is significant,” but as far as I can tell, the next two justices to retire (or die) are Ginsburg (liberal) and Anthony Kennedy (center-right). Next on deck is probably Thomas, if you’re an optimist.
There’s a huge difference between Obama replacing Kennedy and Ginsburg and President Insane Troll replacing those two.
That’s a fair point, Andrew. I’ll think on that. Still, one would like for the President of the United States to be more than just a preferred Human Resources manager for the Supreme Court. If that’s the one bulletproof argument in favor of voting for the candidate then things are seriously broken.
LT, it’s not a question for me of voting for Obama or not voting. I may vote for a third-party candidate for POTUS, or I may decline to vote for that office and vote for local and state candidates where my vote will make any difference at all — which my vote for Obama will not.
Most importantly, Voting Day is one day out of 365.24. Voting takes me maybe an hour if I count putting on pants before I leave. I spend more than three thousand times that amount of time each year working for political change, mainly in the environmental arena but by no means exclusively. Voting is quite literally the least important thing I do in my political life.
So it’s not a question of voting for Obama or not voting — as if not voting for Obama means doing nothing. If a person votes for Obama and does nothing else to make the world a better place, they haven’t done squat.
As a Black blogger on the left of a number of years, I feel the need to call out what I see as garbage from bint alshamsa. Ralph Nader, an Arab-American, is not racist. He called Barack Obama out for acting like an Uncle Tom. Barack was acting that way. The reaction to that, the faux outrage, made me rethink the ‘right on!‘s I’d given White people who called Condi or Powell Uncle Toms. I no longer use “Uncle Tom” myself as a result of the incident but there was a context for it when Nader did it. (I voted for Ralph Nader, disclosure. First time I did not vote Democrat.)
bint alshama lives in a removed world. I grew up in Atlanta and now live in California. The disappointment in Barack is felt no matter how much bint alshama wants to pretend otherwise. Check out the Black Agenda Report or the great Cynthia McKinney’s many comments this year on the war crimes.
As for the ludicrous b.s. that Michelle Obama introduced phys ed to Black girls, stop your lying. I played basketball throughout middle and high school. My mother played it when girls’ basketball was 1/2 court. My grandmother played it.
Many of bint alshama’s remarks that get right ons here, strike me as curious and as the statements that a White woman posing as Black might make.
Again, I will be writing about this at my site tonight, I will also forward to community Black bloggers Marcia, Stan, Ann and Cedric so they can weigh in as well.
What bint alshama wrote is at best good fiction.
(And before anyone visits my blog and says, “Oh, she loves Thomas Friedman!” No. My blog started out, in 2005, as a comic online novel commenting on globalization through the main character Betinna who was forced to parrot that phrase—“Thomas Friedman is a great man.” As time went on, she discovered not only the truth about him but the truth about herself. In 2008, as Betinna would have died in the novel, I had to drop the storyline for a number of reasons including to call out the rank sexism aimed at Hillary Clinton. Since then, it’s just been a blog. I’ve kept the title the same because after six years, I do have a small following.)
While I certainly appreciate the sentiment, particularly at the Presidential level the lesser of two evils is still a monumentally important difference (Supreme Court appointments being one example).
I also commend your environmental activism, which is desperately needed.
When we are disappointed in our Presidential candidates, we shouldn’t just neglect to vote, however, we should get out there and get some better candidates elected to Congress. Imagine if a majority of the House and Senate met more or even all of your criteria. I expect that Obama’s presidency would have been a lot different to date.
Democracy requires participation. The more citizens fail to participate, the more power for corporations and the wealthy.
A wise man once told me “in this country, you vote with your money”.
Of course, that’s what’s wrong.
Chris, any phrases of mine you wish to adopt are free for the taking.
And you kind of dodged my point, didn’t you. I didn’t condemn your first point, but your idea that if a candidate isn’t 100% politically pure, all eleven points, you couldn’t vote for him/her. If you wish never to sully your conscience by casting a vote, that’s for you to decide. But it is an awful political principal.
And don’t talk to me about doing things other than voting. You’re the one who put down the marker on voting.
I didn’t dodge anything, John. My response was that if you can honestly dismiss a requirement that a candidate not support torture as a “purity test,” then there is something seriously wrong with your political and ethical standards. I stand by that statement.
And I didn’t “put the marker down on voting.” I talked about voting in the context of my larger political life, as will be abundantly obvious to anyone reading the entire post.
Chris, thanks for the response. I’m in agreement with you on voting being a tiny part of one’s political life, but you do at least acknowledge its importance by doing an entire post about not voting for someone.
But you responded to something other than what I said.
“LT, it’s not a question for me of voting for Obama or not voting. I may vote for a third-party candidate for POTUS, or I may decline to vote for that office and vote for local and state candidates where my vote will make any difference at all — which my vote for Obama will not.”
I said I 100% disagree with you not voting *for the Dem nominee*, not voting at all. For reasons I already explained.
Well, LT, I’m not sure I know what to say other than there are millions of people in the US who would likely disagree on every single vote I’ve ever cast. The only person who gets to decide my vote is me.
I mean, I understand and respect your disagreement. But I disagree with it.
I registered Democratic this year for the first time in decades but the Democratic Party doesn’t own my vote. Nor, in the state of California, does it need my vote. My voting for Obama in California will have precisely the effect on the election that my praying for Obama would. The Democratic nominee is going to carry California in 2012 whether I vote or not. My vote will make no difference outside the state of California, and to say otherwise is to engage in magical thinking. So why does it matter if I vote for Winona La Duke, or whoever the Greens front in 2012?
Oh, LT: I see where I may have missed answering you, when you asked:
I didn’t spell this out explicitly, I see.
The Democrats figure they can count on the votes of the left, so they don’t cater to the left. When the Democratic mainstream *does* pay attention to the Left, it’s to browbeat us into voting for them because they consider our votes theirs.
If they can’t count on our votes, and if they need our votes to win, they stop their inexorable rightward slide. It’s that simple.
I’m with you. He got my vote the first time, but not following through on even minimal promises, continuing and expanding wars, and turning his back on women’s and environmental causes has lost it for any second term. I’ve had it with the hippie punching, too. Here’s hoping the Greens or Peace and Freedom can float someone who’s not completely off, or I’ll be writing someone’s name in. Maybe yours!
I don’t know if I will vote for Obama or not. It saddens me when I say that, with the exception of voting once for Nader, I haven’t voted for a single candidate in my adult life, since I cast my first vote in 1992; I have only voted against people. I have always taken the “lesser evil” route. At this point I don’t know if I’ve done good, ill or nothing. I certainly felt that I had to vote for Obama, as the McCain/Palin ticket was an entry fee to theocratic, war-mongering feudalism. But now what to do we have? A President that, while less evangelically mad or imperial-minded, has continued to diminish the separation of church and state, has engaged in additional Middle East warfare, though probably in a more limited fashion than a Republican, and has clearly shown that his promises were empty. (It’s almost—I know this sounds crazy—like he only said progressive things to get elected!) He’s had some fine ideas, but, at the least, lacks the backbone to do anything with them.
So do I stay home? Do I say that I did nothing when Rick Perry, that sleazy, lying, science-denying corporate aristocrat is barreling headlong for the Presidency? Or Michelle Bachmann? Or Mitt Romney? All three of them are downright horrible people. How do I not cast a vote for, instead, an ineffective fool like Obama, who may be a failure, but isn’t actually out to destroy the fabric of American democracy?
But you have me thinking, Chris, and I’ll reread this article and discuss the idea thoroughly with all of my bleeding heart liberal friends.
Michael, my only quibble with your post is this
an ineffective fool like Obama
I think “effective tool” would be more accurate. The more time passes, the closer I get to being convinced (as many people are) that the Universe is unfolding as Obama wants it to. The latest item.
I am sick to my stomach. I voted for Obama because he “promised to end the war in the Middle East. He “LIED”. He then “started even more wars”! He refuses to fix the infrastructure or bring jobs back from China and India. He does absolutely nothing for the working class “or” this country. The “worst” president ever! Once again, I apologize for my vote and will “never” vote again! I will never vote again, plus I am looking for work now overseas. I am totally embarrassed to be called an American these days.
“Well, LT, I’m not sure I know what to say other than there are millions of people in the US who would likely disagree on every single vote I’ve ever cast. The only person who gets to decide my vote is me.
I mean, I understand and respect your disagreement. But I disagree with it.”
All in all fair enough. But I say what I say to you the Leftie, not just you the voter, you understand, right?
And, well, there is that - on the California thing.
“If they can’t count on our votes, and if they need our votes to win, they stop their inexorable rightward slide. It’s that simple.”
I had a conversation with an Aussie the other day (here in Oz wher I live sine last year), and she said something about “when a third party becomes viable in the U.S.” I responded without hesitation, “Not in 200 years.” I honestly think that’s close to true. Just my thoughts on it.
So I guess my question is, how long of a slide project are you on here? It looks too long to me.
Thanks for this hilarious post!
Well, you could have voted for me. I think it’s too bad so few people got the chance to, although I’m proud of Senator Coons.
As bad as Obama is, he is still better than any Republican. While that is not saying a lot, it is enough for me to do everything in my power to see that NO Rethugican gets elected. Sad, but I will vote for the lesser of two evils Unless, I have a viable progressive candidate to vote for.
As bad as Obama is, he is still better than any Republican. While that is not saying a lot, it is enough for me to do everything in my power to see that NO Rethugican gets elected. Sad, but I will vote for the lesser of two evils Unless, I have a viable progressive candidate to vote for.
I’d add one more item to the list of qualifications, and for me, it’s at the very top of my list: The candidate must let science, reason and reality-based evidence inform their decisions. There are wway too many candidates (pretty much the entire field on the Republican presidential primary side for example, with the possible exception of Huntsman) so severely disconnected from Reality™... it frightens me. Major decisions being made, decisions which will effect generations, decisions made based upon woo. Terrifying.
Voting for people who cannot be elected is valuable.
Ask John Fremont, candidate of the Free Soil Party.
So, what with Obama being a right-wing lunatic (just not *as* lunatic as the ones in the other party), I’m in protest-vote mode. I hope we have even a decent *protest* candidate for President.