Fight the Fight

So after the weekend dramatics, I can’t go any longer without weighing in on the state of the democratic candidate process.

Disclaimers… I voted Obama in the Indiana primary. My wife gave money to his campaign. He’s got me hoping for a better way of doing things. For the record, I had my hope tattoo long before I ever heard of Obama.

So what really brought me to the place to write this was a piece I heard on NPR last friday before the nasty weather here. Here’s a link to a page where you can go read about it or listen to the actual piece I heard via a link. What it boils down to is that every time there is a party without a clear candidate before the convention, and bitter fighting for the nomination – the opposing party wins pretty easily. The piece talks about this happening in ’72, ’76, ’80, ’84.

If you would have asked me leading up to the first primary of the whole process I would have told you that Hillary is going to win because from what I knew she was the best candidate, and I was completely fine with that. I wasn’t sure if she was electable because of how polarizing she was to moderates, but I was more than happy to vote for her. I knew of Obama from his ’04 convention speech, so I knew he had a nice future ahead of him.

Then I started hearing what he had to say. It took very little time for me to look at him as someone I’d like to have represent me as the president, and not because I didn’t like Hillary any less. Then she went negative against her own party in nasty ways. That negativity from her, her husband, and her campaign in general as soured me in a big, big way many times.

Now we’re at a place where Clinton is threatening to take the fight for the nomination to the convention. Doing so will severely handicap the ability of any democratic nominee to get elected.

Here’s what I understand as the facts of some cases that haven’t been really hammered into the minds of the public. Clinton agreed before any primary that the delegates from Michigan and Florida would not count. She even agreed not to campaign in the states. There are signed documents to that effect. She’s also claiming a win in the popular vote despite NOT counting votes in caucus states (which she lost the majority of) and counting the votes from Puerto Rico which can’t vote in the general election.  Again, she signed documents agreeing to rules and such for the whole primary process before it all began, and said absolutely nothing about anything she had a problem with until she was loosing badly.

Now I’m at the point where there I see no good outcome for the ’08 general election. She has poisoned FLA against Obama if he gets the nod. There is supposedly throngs of Clinton supporters that won’t vote for Obama. I can assure you that there are many Obama supporters that either won’t vote or vote McCain. The moderate vote could very likely swing to the right.  At the very least, the democratic party is looking less and less like a cohesive, organized party and more like some weird election from a backwoods country who spends it’s time making spittoons for Wall Mart.

And I used to like McCain, but he went and flipped on many topics and turned into a war-advocating stooge of the current administration. I can’t advocate his policies.

I have hope for change.