if this all comes down to obama vs huckabee i may in fact kill myself.
posted by anne @ 9:56 AM
aleatory contract
my own personal Waterloo
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17 Comments:
I'm guessing that you don't need me to repeat my reasoning for supporting Obama. I'd guess, further, that this is because you don't share any of my reasoning, and therefore don't find my support of him surprising. Would you be interested in explaining why you find the possibility of his candidacy depressing?
to be honest, nate, you've provided more reasoning for your support than most other people i've asked who support obama, and i truly appreciate that. actually, i asked to have a conversation over here because i think you have thought about your choice, i honour that, and i didn't want to start any squabbling. i'm not trying to talk you out of obama. knowing your beliefs, i think obama is a good match for you.
mostly i'm confused by the groundswell of support by people who, based on what i know about their views, would seem a better match for edwards. i will say that i prefer the plan edwards has for dealing with the aftermath of iraq, and that, on iraq and on torture, they're pretty similar. to me, there's no clear reason why one would support obama's policy over edwards', there.
my dislike of obama comes primarily from his warmed-over, vague, triangulatey statements of Bipartisanship and Hope and all that. his record in congress has confirmed that for me. he seems to be running mostly on his charisma, and personability is a horrible way to choose a presidential candidate. i'm uncomfortable with his religious pandering. i'd really, really appreciate a break from God As Politics. with obama as nominee, i'm not going to get that.
i don't feel that obama is willing or able to act where it's necessary. he seems to be banking on goodwill that, frankly, isn't there.
my mistake, nate -- on rereading your post, i see that you were speaking of iran, not iraq. edwards is maybe a bit more aggressive than i'd like, but i have yet to see much of a plan from obama, other than 'we will talk to them!', which is a nice plan, but i'd like to know more. and there never seems to *be* more. that's how i feel with most of obama's platform.
I don't strongly dislike Obama, I just think he's more conservative than me and I'm not sure I completely trust him--as you say, he has spelled out very few policy plans and it's hard to know what he'll actually do.
The plans Edwards has spelled out by and large make a lot of sense to me. He's no Josiah Bartlet, but I think he's mostly liberal and I mostly trust him.
I'm probably not your target audience either: Edwards more than loses any gains he might have elsewhere with his position on trade, and I don't trust him on immigration (Making english a requirement for citizenship?). I'm not at all suprised he won the conservative democratic vote in Iowa: he's the sanest proponent the Perot/Buchanan types have had in years. However, I would vote for Obama before my own mother because of the clarity and volume of his 'government before politics' message, and because, having read his book, I trust his non-ideological seriousness and his approach to issues. In the corner of policy I know about, he's practical, and well-informed. The practical bit can't be overvalued. There are all kinds of head-smackingly obvious reforms to how CMS operates that haven't happened, occasionally because they're politically difficult, but often simply because they're politically useless, and our government is indifferent, utterly distracted by politics. So accusations of his vapidity seem shallow to me: chrisma does not imply stupidity, nor does inspiration imply duplicity. Nor do I think he's a centrist, in the pejorative way. I don't hear him advocating compromise. I hear him advocating making progress where we can, shifting the focus away from debates that exist primarily for electoral reasons and towards the real problems that face our country. All three candidates may agree about torture, but to my ears, only Obama can make the case presuasively enough. In some ways, he seems to be the only one who wants to persuade Bush voters that they don't need to vote their fears but can instead vote their hopes. You dismiss the hope talk, but that's the fundemental challenge of liberalism: to convince people that government can work. I don't always believe it myself, but I do when I read or listen to Obama.
I'd say the populist, protectionist impulse of Edwards and the netroots, anti-globalisation, is really just the latest conservative ideology, the latest case of a group of people looking at history and reaching for the brakes, pining for a past that never was. I see trade as fundementally tied up with peace. I hope there will be a party realignment, that Ron Paul's disciples will win over the Republican party, and Michael Moore will join them. But this is why I don't like Edwards, not why I like Obama. My desire for open borders and global governance is one I'm still waiting to see in american politics, unless you count Ron Paul's paranoid nightmares.
Shorter, less negative me: American Liberalism is in dire need of a prophet to convert the masses, both here and abroad, and the presidency is the largest podium in the world, and Obama sounds and looks the part.
to tim, long response:
most of what i've read on obama's website has been All-Compromise, All-The-Time. am i misreading? every two seconds there's something about reaching across aisles or uniting somebody-or-other.
i don't think there really are "Bush voters", anymore, and to the extent they exist, they're not going to be persuadable. those who are still supporting the administration are going to be put off by the fact that obama is not pro-torture. that's a deal-breaker from the start, and he's not going to win them over. no one is.
obama to me is purely playing politics here, the endless, tedious politics of hope and bipartisanship and centrism and all the other endless buzzwords that lack meaning. "bipartisanship" as an idea exists primarily as an electoral issue; it's meaningless outside a rhetorical context. obama's talk of New Politics is just another campaign schtick, to me.
i find your views on globalisation... puzzling, i must say, tim. can you give me a bit of background, there? i have a hard time believing that globalisation is ever going to be anything more than a nice word for corporate imperialism, and history seems to be on my side, here, as far as i know it, at least. i'm rather baffled by your assertion that anti-globalisation is the new conservatism, since conservatives have been in league with the forces of the "free" global markets since the late 50s. hell, the National Review was pro-globalisation before we had the word "globalisation". free and fair trade with other countries can happen alongside policies some label "protectionist"; cambodia's a good example of that, but the gains being made there are being eroded now in the name of free trade.
shorter, still-negative me:
i'm suspicious of prophets. i'm sick and bloody tired of prophets. i don't want a prophet. i just want competent government. are we ever going to get beyond politics on a revival-tent model? i believe the only way to convince people that government can work, to really, truly convince them, is to start making government work. this has the added benefit of providing, you know, a functional government, instead of just fine talk.
i want to dispense with all the hope-talk. it's a constant part of politics, and it never gets us anywhere. by indulging in it, obama's not doing anything new. i'd just like an open, spirited debate about actual issues affecting actual people, with policies decided on the basis of what does the most good for the most people. i don't give two shits about the ideology behind it. that alone is going to give me hope. all the rhetoric about an end to politics as usual is, at the end, just more politics as usual.
That's just it. He is the only politician I've seen who seems honestly interested and capable of changing our system to make it capable of good government before the apocolypse comes and the other party vanished off the face of the earth. By Bush voters I meant people who voted for Bush. They're still there, and they aren't stupid or evil, just frightened and deluded. I think Clinton and Edwards are just trying to frighten and delude just enough of them to get into office. I think talk of hope is new, and ginning up fear around a set of shadowy baddies is what is old.
As for globalization: I've been over it before, but I think global interdependency is the greatest protection we have against war, and I think I have history on my side. I also think the flow of capital to the third world is actually what we owe the world for colonialism, not the extension of it; the cruelty of british india was that it kept capital from flowing to india. (see Gandhi's spinning wheel, etc.)
I'm not saying, say, the local and organic farm movements, or the desire to save textile mills, or maintain traditional ways of life are wrong, or that progress is always good, but do you see why I call these movements small-c conservative? Maybe I should have used a different word, but the only other one that comes to mind is reactionary, and that's just as loaded and less accurate.
(disclaimer: my own bizarre cosmopolitan notions of justice and readiness to embrace the NWO should not be held against Obama, except that offends them less than Edwards, about the same as Clinton, and far less than all the Republicans except maybe McCain)
Hi Anne, I'm also an Obama supporter. I won't go into the details right now, maybe I'll be able to clear my head and get it down a little later.
But as for his record and concrete achievements, I think it might be a good idea to look further than his pretty short Senate career: here is an article that digs up some of his activity in the Illinois legislature.
i just don't understand what makes him somehow different, somehow uniquely qualified to change the system. everyone wants to change the system, and everyone has a different slogan for it, but he's not even willing to say *how* he'd change the system. what does he offer us? he's just the newest in the long line of neatly packaged tagline politicians. it's Morning in America, he's a Man From Hope, he's a Uniter, Not A Divider: long on smiles and short on substance, a nice man in a nice suit with a nice smile who keeps telling me to trust him. why should i? when i ask, people just tell me he's a very trustworthy man. and how do they know? because he says he is.
everyone campaigns on hope, to some extent. it just seems to be the extent of obama's campaign. i think in office, at best, we could expect a repeat of clinton, with no real progressive policy made but bones thrown to the moderates and conservatives on a fairly regular basis. people who run the way he's running tend to sell themselves as moderates and swing right to get re-elected, i think. i certainly don't see him swinging left.
on globalism, naomi klein's shock doctrine is an incredibly thoroughgoing examination of the free market's track record. can foreign investment be done in a humane, responsible way? yes. has it been, historically? no. will it ever be? no, probably not.
thanks, patrick, i'll give it a read.
I would be very happy with either Edwards or Obama on the ticket. (And I'd be delighted with Huckabee on there. Dismayed and disturbed, but still delighted in a way I'm not proud of.)
I respect Edwards a lot more now than I did four years ago, but I can't completely forget how he pretty-boyed for Kerry. I'm willing to believe he really is a populist at heart - though there is, of course, no way of knowing any politician's heart, and when people think they do they usually wind up disappointed - but the fact is that he dropped his populist hat in a heartbeart just for a chance at the most meaningless position in the entire executive branch. Maybe he jumped on Kerry's bandwagon just so that he would have a chance to run for the real job someday and get some actual work done, I don't know. But whatever his motivations, he did sell out. That doesn't in itself turn me against him - Gore sold out ten times harder, and he's now probably my favorite person in American politics* - but it does serve as a reminder that at the end of the day he is a politician.
I'm sure Obama is too, of course. (For whatever reason, national politics tends to attract a lot of politicians.) But a side effect of his relative lack of experience is that he hasn't had a chance to whore himself on a national stage. But I don't like Obama just because he's failed to fuck everyone over yet, and I don't think that, if elected, he would never fuck us ten ways from Sunday. I believe he doesn't want to fuck the human race ten ways from Sunday, which puts him in an alarmingly small subset of American politicians. But most of all, I think there's a good chance America will start getting better if we elect Obama, not because of anything he does necessarily, but because of what we will have done in electing him. If America chooses Obama, it means we're sorry. It means we know we fucked up and we want to fix it. It means we still have hope for the future of America and the world. Voting for Edwards would send a similar message, but not, I don't think, quite as strongly.
That said, I have no idea who I'd vote for if I lived in a state where my opinion was actually relevant.
Shorter, every bit as doe-eyedly-optimistic me: They're both good choices, much better than we have any reason to expect, given the last quarter-century of presidential campaigns. They both represent, though admittedly in slightly different ways, an America that rejects what America has become. This is something to be happy about.
On the subject of globalization: it is as inherently good or evil as plate tectonics. We have three choices - try to make it happen to the benefit of the many (good!), try to make it happen to the benefit of the few (bad!), and try to not make it happen (utterly futile and likely to blow up in our faces).
* Though I'm glad he's not running. I like him better as an advocate than as a politician.
in terms of current selling-out, edwards has the distinction of having taken the least money from Big Pharma, among others. he got second-place in iowa, despite having far less money than either clinton or obama, and he has less money because he's taking less money from corporate interests.
he could surprise me, if elected, but it would be a big surprise indeed. i'll vote for him in the general, certainly, if he's the candidate. but i don't expect much from him. i'd fully expect him to sell us out and fuck us over, and to be more likely to sell us out than edwards, smiling charmingly all the while. fucking people over is the centrist thing to do.
we're in too big a mess, at this point, to make 'sending a message' our goal in an election, i think. we're sliding into a recession, likely a big one, and the social safety nets we had back in the early 90s are gone. even if we were politically able to bring back those safety nets, we don't have the money to do so, as it's all gone to iraq and to corporate subsidy. we have bigger things to worry about.
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