Miscellaneous

The One Where I Suck It Up and Endorse Hillary for VP

For the few (or many) of you who, a few days, weeks, or months ago, might have switched your long-held allegiances from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, you might have noticed a weird phenomena: All those things you used to say about the Clintons, in their defense, suddenly felt spectacularly stupid. Moreover (at least for me), it only took a few hours before I began to notice things about Bill and Hillary that I didn't notice before. And since March, as those things mounted, I'd grown doubly angry -- part of me was upset with some of her tactics, the way I thought her and Bill were destroying the party, and the other part was just disappointment -- disappointment that I'd put so much into them, only to slowly realize who, in my mind, they actually were.

But in another way, now that the nomination process has come to an end, I'm also realizing that it wasn't Bill and Hillary who were destroying the Democratic Party. It was Obama. The "change" that Obama is always referring to is not just his approach to policy, and it's not just a nice slogan (though, it is that, too), it's what he's done to the Democratic Party. He's brought in a new order, and it was the old order - Bill, Hillary, Lannie Davis, James Carville, Harold Ickes, and the rest of Bill's entourage (or at least those that didn't abandon them early on, realizing that a sea change was upon us) who were clinging to the old Democratic Party, the one populated largely by moderates, Southern Dems who were a hair's breadth from being a from being a liberalish Republican. And the thing is, when you've had control over something for 20 years, I suspect that -- like a decades long marriage that's slowly unraveled -- it's awfully goddamn hard to let it go, even when all the signs are there.

The point I'm getting at is this: Late or not, Hillary Clinton -- the last in the line of the old-school Democrats -- has finally ceded control. But before she did so, she did a tremendous amount to galvanize this new order. But while she's managed to rally racist Appalachia around her, she's also brought millions of new people into the fold. And for that -- and that alone -- I do think she should be the vice-presidential nominee.

And I'm not just saying that as my small part in party unification; the truth is, the woman deserves it. Were it not for a hundred or so delegates, a small blunder here or there, or a lot of bad luck in Iowa, the New York Times headline the other day would have been "First Woman Presidential Nominee for a Major Party," instead of the first "Black."

And, in case you hadn't noticed, the woman is fucking fierce -- it's something you hate when it's her against your guy, but it is absolutely something I want when it's her against the other guy. If it comes down to a handful of electoral votes in November, or if another 2000 Florida recount situation arises, Hillary won't bend over like our man Gore and butter up her sphincter and let John McCain ram it in; she'll pull out the strap-on and make the Republicans wish they'd never put a dog into this fight. She's a brilliant woman, and she's also dirty -- and for all the shit the Dems have taken for the last eight years for being political wimps, it'd be nice to have the biggest set of balls on our side. And as uncouth as that sounds, she's the one I want sharing the ticket. It not only gives the Dems the best chance to win in November, it gives the Dems the best chance, over the next four years, to actually push through some of that "change" Obama keeps trumpeting.

Full post as published by Quiz Law on June 06, 2008 (boomark / email).