Let me state up front that I support Barack Obama's bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Philosophically, I wish he were more in the Kusinich and Edwards vein, and I was really torn in the California primary over who to vote for. Ultimately, I voted for Obama, because I trust him. Which is just ridiculous, but there it is. I trust him. I believe that he loves our country, and that he understands the concerns of middle and working class Americans. I also believe that he will people his cabinet with those who deeply understand the course ahead.
I'm a real sucker for idealism. I get teary-eyed reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I'm not kidding. I carried a copy of them around with me for years, during my tenure in social services. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution as a worker in the old VISTA program, and as far as I'm concerned, that oath is good for the rest of my life. I deplore people who wrap themselves in the flag, but I mist up when I say the Pledge of Allegiance.
And coming from an economically-depressed downstate Illinois city that saw its strong union job base rapidly decline in the Reagan years, I have a love of my own class. The working class. The blue collar class. One of the biggest frustrations of my life has been that my kind of people can't see that they are often played for fools by preachers and politicians.
I'm one of those people, because I believed in Bill Clinton. I cried, and I mean sobbed, when he won the election. And as time went on, even though I was uneasy about NAFTA and some of the social program changes he advocated, I continued to support him. Through budget deadlocks and shutdowns of Congress and Contracts with America and Monica-gate, I was there.
Prior to Clinton, I would vote for Republicans at times. I believed myself to be a moderate and largely non-partisan. I could not see what the Republicans were howling about, and my opinion of them became more and more negative, especially if anyone quoted Rush Limbaugh, who I thought was a self-serving buffoon.
Let's just skip ahead through the past 8 years. Suffice it to say that I moved from shocked numbness, through apathy and withdrawel, to shame and accountability and a re-engagement with the political process.
So, here we are again. And the more I hear from Obama, the more I like the guy. And sometimes, in fact a LOT of times, he makes me cry. When you get to be my age, a lot of your hopes and dreams have fallen by the wayside, and you begin to think that things will never change and that you just have to make the best of it and pass it on to the next generation and maybe they will be able to make progress. You settle. You learn to live with the machine and the inevitable. I believed, right up until recently, that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable machine President. Just like Bush in process, if not politics, and just as unlikely to give any credibility to anyone without a few hundred thousand dollars of influence money. I believed her to be benign, but also to feel entitled to the Presidency.
This is a far cry from the Hillary of my youth, a woman who challenged the role of a First Lady and who many of us as women admired (and others felt very threatened by). I admired her stab at healthcare reform, and her strong and outspoken advocacy of her husband's administration.
Maybe she and Bill were always the manipulative double-talkers that the Right was so frothy about, and I just didn't see it. I think to a certain extent that all politicians are manipulative double-talkers, and most of us accept that -- to a certain extent. But I am really beginning to see some truth in some of the obvious vitriol of the Right.
For many of us, one of the saddest casualties of this primary season may be the loss of the Clinton legacy. We've clung to it for 8 years, to this time of relative peace and demonstrable prosperity, when our wages were going up and our deficit was going down. We've looked fondly on Bill's work post-Presidency in the world community. We've mocked the conservatives who seemed to cling to a "Blame Clinton" outlook through the last 8 years of an increasingly incompetent and flawed W presidency. And let me be clear here: I believe that Bush's tax cuts and pandering to corporations, theocrats and Neo-cons has wrecked our economy and catapulted the US far down the road to the inevitable decline of what has been our empire. But the bottom line is that yes, I believe that some of Clinton's economic policies -- just like Reagan's -- have had and continue to have a negative impact on our middle and working class. Bush's policies have gone beyond "negative impact". We are all in for an epic struggle to move this country forward in a new age; one in which we are no longer ascendant. We can do it. We didn't need all those flat screen teevees and Hummers, anyway. We didn't need to live 50 miles from our jobs just so we could have a huge house on a small lot in a sterile "community". Besides, we couldn't really afford it. That's why we're all in such deep debt. Time to grow up.
But it would have been nice for the Clintons to have left us with that memory of good times. Instead, we are now forced to watch Bill live up to every accusation of duplicitous speech that the Right has been screaming about for years, and to watch Hillary skip merrily down the path of the triangulating neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council that believed that the way to beat the Republicans was to be just like them -- only without the bathroom sex and comb-overs and pince nez glasses.
I mean, come on, people!
No one owes you the Presidency, just because your name is Bush or Clinton or Kennedy or Roosevelt. Didn't we found our country on that premise? That "all men are created equal"?
But years of machine politics and Beltway scheming lead people to become out of touch with the electorate that put them in power in the first place. Massive money and generations of political influence can buy you a Supreme Court, but unfortunately the Clintons are a first-generation political dynasty trying to make a horizontal power move vs. the more typical vertical one, and at this point it seems doomed to failure and it's taking their legacy down with it.
My prediction, and I have to admit that a year ago this would have seemed pretty far-fetched, is that Obama will win the nomination and will win the Presidency. Again, I have hope. I believe that the more you see of him, the better you like him. And yes, I realize that he's not all that far left and that we're going to have to help him a lot to get to a solution to healthcare reform and to economic reform. But we'll get there. We have to. We have no choice.
Things won't be easy, but whether you vote for change or not, it is inevitable. Our lives are different from those of our parents and our grandparents. Some of those changes have not been beneficial. We've fallen behind in education, in work ethic, in sense of community and interdependence on one another. To paraphrase Obama, we reach for a video controller instead of a book or a hammer or our neighbor's hand. We WILL change; our choice is whether to embrace the inevitability and move forward, or fight it and let the world move further and further away from us.
