My feelings about the election are messy. I haven't come to any grand realization or new perspective. I'm not moving on with a new sense of hope and optimism and confidence in my fellow man. heh. So my response is going to be a little messy.
I voted for Obama and I'm not happy about it. I felt a lot of pressure, being in Ohio, to try to cancel out at least one of the assholes I have to hear all day talking about how Obama is OMGSOCIALIST. Maybe I should have just pushed the button for the ACTUAL FOR REAL socialist party. But I'm okay with not being happy about it. It was a shitty decision made in a shitty situation. There was no right thing to do, except doing the best I could and being honest with myself.
We have no progressive party in the US. Obama won by courting the center. He won, in part, by taking advantage of homophobia and misogyny. He won, in part, by emphasizing religion and further blurring the line between what government does and what organized religion does. Pelosi has determined that the country must now be governed from the middle.
That a centrist won against a man who could barely be said to have "won" the Republican primaries and whose campaign was a complete disaster is not something I can celebrate.
I was reading back through old posts from Anglachel, who said it better than I can:
What the campaign lacks, however, and why it cannot achieve what Bill Clinton did, is an unswerving dedication to bettering the lives of ordinary people. It is trading on the most shallow of all political impulses (Oh, please, stop arguing about stuff and making me feel uncomfortable! Stop with the partisan bickering! Won't somebody think of the children?) and deliberately sidesteps the tough work of coalition building. Saying that you will seek common ground with the right - who wants no such thing - builds no coalition to promote progressive causes. It just gets you an inside track with David Broder and the Blogger Boyz who all want to become the next Tim Russert. Getting a bunch of college students with free time to swarm caucuses is not building a coalition, either, btw. ...And Kate Harding said it perfectly on Shakesville:
Too many times, when asked about progressive issues, he's said he just doesn't think that's the best place to put his energies--and even more gallingly, that the activists working tirelessly on these issues are going about it all wrong.
I'm relieved that McCain didn't win. But I can't be happy for a victory won on the backs of all the people the Obama campaign and his supporters walked over.
3 comments:
Nice post.
My experience of this election, the thinking process that went into my vote, and my various reactions to the outcome have been very similar to what you express here. On the one hand, I view Obama's victory with respect, admiration, and pride; the nation has soundly rejected BushCo's policies, at least for the moment, and we have elected the first person of color to our highest office. Those are milestones of monumental importance and opportunity, and I want our nation to capitalize on both of them.
But on the other hand, there's everything you mention in this post. I've never been a Democrat because I've always been too far to the left of the party, so I am not feeling as emotionally wrecked as it seems many lefties who are Democrats are feeling right now, but I am feeling totally fucked over as a queer person, freaked out as a woman, and extremely ambivalent about how to move forward as a political animal in general.
Ultimately I still believe that the most important work to do is through progressive organizations to push the debate to the left. This is an area where we definitely lag behind the right wing, and which is too often undermined by the politicians who are supposedly on our side.
I voted for Obama and I'm not happy about it. . . . But I'm okay with not being happy about it. It was a shitty decision made in a shitty situation. There was no right thing to do, except doing the best I could and being honest with myself.
Oh Cthulhu on a Cracker, yes. This.
I also blogged about it over at my place.
I've also always felt to the left of the party, but then again, I founded College Democrats when I was an undergrad, and some of our members were Wallace Democrats. (Yes, that Wallace.) So for all I know, I could be a centrist, since the right in Alabama is so far to the right that it routinely accuses its own of being leftist for not supporting gun rights enough. After three months of constant fighting during the '04 election season that universal healthcare, reproductive rights, and an end to the Iraq war were, in fact, part of the Democratic platform, they quit because we were too liberal for them.
Now I feel totally fucked by this, because I'm still living in a Republican state where I should be feeling schadenfreude glee at their melancholy, and yet, on the local level, Democrats are still being kicked around like soccer balls so nothing's changing there. (There are no garden-variety liberals in my state. The Green party wasn't even on the damn ticket.)
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