- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
As the primary unfolded, watching what happened to Clinton was the greatest lesson for me.
She had to "vote for" the war given her position both as the first woman candidate, and as a sitting senator from the state of NY given the information Bush "provided" and later was found to have manipulated.
It was Obama's opening, and he took it--effectively biting the hand that fed him, and appealing to a new, still idealistic generation. That connected his wheels to the road, and once the consensus formed there was no stopping it even given the skills of the Clintons.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet, has complaints about the media, but this was egregious. The talking heads were both insidious and deceptive, playing to a crowd that was disillusioned for reasons that had nothing to do with politics, but with her husband's personal problems--so yeah, he finds it hard to accept her defeat because it was his defeat too.
No amount of reason and no sense of gratitude was going to reach the hotheads among Obama's early constituency. After all, they carried the dreams that had once belonged to the Clintons alone on the national level. It was a pitiful thing to watch, remorseless, like an animal released into the wild who doesn't know how to hunt, so they too attacked the hand that fed them--whether they knew it or not.
Will they be disillusioned too? The way their parents were when their "war" raged on and the right took over due to their own defection? Will they be as naive and self-righteous? It is after all a nation that refuses to take responsibility for itself. Will they actually manage to pull this election off now that it has begun, and the demons that lurk in the national consciousness are also released from their pens?
And if they lose will they sit back with their hands folded and say "I told you so," while yet another generation of loyal Republicans walk off with the prize? They now are the ones who have something to prove, and they don't have much time left.
