Apr 1st, 2008, 06:28 AM
Wherein I talk about the elections
In the original (and hopefully ONLY) Clinton years, I really disliked Hillary. I disliked the entire administration, but to me it seemed odd that I should develop an opinion of a first lady when such a position should ideally be irrelevant to the political process. I mean this not in a misogynistic sense, since were we to have a female president I would expect the first man (?) to be irrelevant on the grounds that the president should serve the populace per the voice of the populace, not spousal nagging.
By the time I had learned the term “Machiavellian” sometime in my adolescence, I thought it was apt for Hillary. I guess now I’d use the more vogue “Realpolitik”, though.
I desperately want the Democratic Party to win the 2008 election. In all honesty, based on commentary I’ve read comparing voting records and tendencies I doubt that a second Clinton campaign would look different from an Obama one in any legislatively meaningful sense. The problem is that Hillary strikes me and many, many others as being unelectable. Either the American people would choose to elect her because >50% of the electoral college is selected by diehard democrats, which seems virtually impossible right now, or she will lose because of a reputation she solidified eight years ago.
If she gave a shit about ANYTHING other than her own ego—the public good, the good of her party, the ideals she nominally claims—she would have never entered the presidential race on the grounds that she would detract from a legitimate and meaningful dialectic process among valid candidates.
Her original New York senatorial run, topped with a townhouse in Harlem, left me disgusted both with her as a person and the American people’s celebrity fixation that actually put her into that office.
Further aesthetics of the whole thing are even more appalling. I remember in grade school wondering why there was so much inflated rhetoric of our Founding Fathers’ greatness when President John Adams was followed the next generation by President John Quincy Adams. If it had been such a huge deal and verily a purported component of the American psyche that we should abandon the antiquated ideas of dynastic legitimacy, why were we forging our own dynasties with voluntary elections? Fast forward to the past twenty years: when historians look back and see a period of elections the victors of which form the pattern, “Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton”, how fucking ridiculous is that going to look? As if the Iraq War isn’t staining the legacy of our era enough? I guess pre-Norman England saw two incarnations of the House of Wessex within its monarchy separated by a full generation, but nothing of the mercurial idiocy of this magnitude.
Oh, and it doesn’t help her cause as far as I’m concerned in that I happen to like Obama. I first heard of Obama when I was living in the same neighborhood as he; he taught at the university while I was a student there. When he made his senatorial run, what impressed me about the whole situation was that the university, as an institution and as a community, never really said a word about him. The actual neighborhood community, however, couldn’t get enough of him. These were people who generally loathed the dichotomy between the foreign professors making $150k per annum and the minority locals who made $18k per annum to wash chalkboards every two hours. Maybe it was for totally stupid reasons in that they assumed that because he has dark skin he shared in common heritage, but I’d go into the Walgreens down the street from my dorm and there’d be exactly two different books for sale: Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution (maybe ten or so copies) and Obama’s autobiography (numerous stacks wherever room was to be found, frequently emptied and replenished.)
So, yeah, I voted for Obama in 2004. I had wanted to vote absentee on behalf of my home state, but I hadn’t registered to do so in time so I voted locally. When I was amazed to find that he was extremely intelligent, eloquent, and capable, I doubted he could ever become president because he had at least the vestige of integrity. Within a few months of his victory, people talked about Illinois/Indiana unity (I don’t really know why, both states tend to forget that they share a mutual border) with an Obama/Evan Bayh presidential ticket. I thought that would be far too good to be true.
So, yeah, if Hilary fucks this up for America I’ll be somewhat pissed.
Speaking of Indiana senators, though, in preparing for the worst (a Hillary run wins the race for McCain), I would like to see the Republican ticket rounded out by someone I like. I find Evan Bayh pretty unremarkable as a Hoosier, but our Richard Lugar is an amazing beacon of hope within the GOP. In fact, before the presidential bids began in earnest he and Obama made a world tour together. Lugar once visited my father at school and talked about how nuclear proliferation was the greatest threat to the world back when nobody else in congress would say it, and he has consistently held a realistic view of the world scene despite his party holding global realism in deep contempt. Aside from his tacit support of the war and endorsement of torture, Lugar is pretty tolerable. I realized, however, that he could never get the vice presidential nod because the GOP is going to look for batshit extremism in their VP to win back their fold who thinks that McCain is too “liberal”.
So, yeah, fuck politics.
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