I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream has gone from me.
Plenty of people have said that since Nebuchadnezzar. So perhaps it suffers from being a little unoriginal.
Howard Dean dropped out of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination on Tuesday, and America lost probably it's best shot at moving toward real, fundamental change.
There are a lot of reasons I supported Howard Dean; we lined up pretty well ideologically. I believe that of the candidates, Dean stood the best chance agains the S-Factor; the number of people Dean brought into the process, and the number his campaign educated with regard to it, was and is staggering. There's been nothing like it, ever, and I was proud to be a part of it.
I could go on longer about this, but it really seems sort of pointless now. For whatever you decide were the relevant reasons, Dean lost, and now I'm faced with the very real possibility of having to vote for Lurch in the general election.
I'm perfectly cognizant of the compelling argument that however much John Kerry sucks, Bush is worse. I understand that, and that's why I'm on the record saying that if and when it does come down to Kerry and Bush, my vote goes to the former. But the idea of voting for a Democrat who supported the Patriot Act, and war in Iraq, as well as several other pieces of legislation that I consider fundamentally broken and wrong, turns my stomach.
Dean's campaign lives on, and is soon to be reborn as a sort of national organizing force. Dean's name will be on the ballot in the Oregon primary, and I will vote for him. But he won't be president. I believe that we had a chance this presidential election to prove, even if the proof lasted only four years, that the people still do matter.
And we fucked it all up.
Editor's Note: After a couple hours more intermittent thoughts on this subject, I decided this post was insufficient. So rather than do serious editing, I'm going to jump in right where my train of thought is right now.
Our goal (mine, anyway) in supporting Howard Dean was not simply to undo three years of unchecked Bush exploitation and falsehood; my goal was to undo the last quarter-centuary of America's slide into uncaring. vicarious depravity. We don't give a shit about things anymore, as long as they don't get in the way of fucking American Idol.
"Hey, there are some problems with America."
"Fuck you. I'd rather just walk to my next class. They're not giving me any trouble."
The only Democrats to win the Presidency in the last forty years have been accidents and flukes. And Nixon, after all, probably won in 1960. The same people have been voting along sectional lines laid out in the 1860's for socially conservative, backwards, exploitative, and evil men for at least half a century, and the first person in years with a realistic chance to do something about it was Howard Dean.
It was pretty damn obvious to anyone paying attention that Dean was going to lose in Wisconsin, by all accounts one of the states that should have been an incubator for a new something.
I'm faced with something of a personal choice, now. Dean convinced me to go back to being a Democrat, and after I've voted for him it'll be time to sit down and decide (possibly while drunk) whether or not that lame duck of a party is worth my time any longer. The Democratic Party is broken, and the only question is whether or not it should be left to wither and die or be blown apart from the inside.
Remember the Whigs? They were an up and coming group of politicians, with some forward ideas about trade and economics. But then they lost touch with their base, and a young gun named Abe Lincoln stole a bunch of their best young guns and ideas, and they weren't around for very much longer.
And remember what happened to Lyndon Johnson? He tried to keep the Democratic Party together, but he wound up driving the segregationalists out, and he got run out of the oval office by McCarthy for his trouble.
Non-affiliated is looking pretty good, right at the moment. At least until another game comes along.
Posted by slade at February 19, 2004 11:32 PM