Letters to the Editor
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why do you think your vote matters?
1.Frankly the best person for progressives to vote for is still John Edwards-- perhaps even more so at this point. Not because he'll win of course, but because registering the left's profound dissatisfaction with the timid, prowar "choices" we have left is best done by voting for Edwards (or Kucinich, if he's on the ballot)as a loud and clear message that the democratic party is broken and this time we insist they fix it.
First, I'd say stop worrying about having a voice about which of the 2 unsatisfactory corporatist candidates gets chosen. That's an illusion-- it's an irrelevant choice. Looking for the number of dancing angels you can count for each candidate's pin to detect some microscopic significance is the semi-educated person's delusion that when he dutifully votes for one of the vetted before super-Tuesday's-culling choices, her vote means something.
It's the middlebrow equivelant of the goons who voted for Dubya because they like how confident he seems when he walks.
The most effective way to do make them listen at this point is voting for Edwards, a bracing no-confidence vote for how HRC and Obama have presented themselves thus far, and a warning for November.
Whether you see it as a friendly warning or a threat depends on what degree of hope you have that ordinary people can force the hand of the hidebound democratic leadership and teach them to start acting right, instead of just being the Oligarchy Lite party.
Because otherwise why should either HRC or Obama listen to anything we have to say?
2. this is not the same as saying don't vote in November. But if the only substantive difference between voting for Clinton and Obama is how it makes the voter feel about herself, I fail to see how that's a meaningful difference.
Finally--It may sound paradoxical, like voting for Traister the kitty, something others might dismiss as just churlishness or colorful eccentricity.
But isn't voting for HRC vs Obama a little like, say, being told we're having a national lottery, and some people are going to make out like bandits, especially the ones who can afford the access fee, that allows you to purchase 2, 3, 4 or more ... numbers out of 6, while everybody else gets 1 out of 6, and you get a guarantee that one of the numbers will be either, say,
10 or 7, and you can only vote for either 10 or 7, and since you're guaranteed that if the democrats win, one of the winning numbers HAS to be 10 or 7, so you'll feel a false sense of how your input actually mattered?
If you feel invested in voting for whatever joker the dems nominate and will do so in the fall anyway, what do you care if you got 1 out of 6 or zero out of 6 in the preliminary drawing? Because of how it makes you feel about yourself?
A. Did you really have a meaningful effect on the outcome of the preliminary drawing?
B.Is 10 that much better than 7? Or 7 that much better than 10?
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the Mirror ...
I'll be happy to look at it if I vote for McCain.
Could not face it if I voted for Hillary, who is just a republican in sheeps clothing. At least with McCain I know what I am getting.
You know ... really it is the "conservative" democrats urging caution, urging HRC that need to wake up. You are the one who will put McCain in office and whose lilly-livered votes and pandering to the neocon cause have truly soured the Democratic party. I've always gone along with that - never voted for Nader (who I despise as a wannabe anyway). Enough of that crap. Wake up America! Time for a change!
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@Anonymous -- by the way, what's with being anonymous so much?
Somebody "Anonymous" in here keeps replying, but doesn't have the spine to sign his/her name. What's up with that?
Anonymous: "No she didn't vote for the damn war."
Um, yes she did. Only Congress can declare war. That vote sort-of, kind-of said it was "okay" for Bush to go to war if he kinda maybe felt like it. And all signs showed that Bush was heading in that direction. (Now we know he was planning it for nearly a year, if not more.) So yeah, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war -- a war that has killed over 650,000 people (if you read the recent report in Reuters, that number is closer to 1,500,000).
Anonymous: "She like near every other Democrat, voted for the President to go to war at his discretion."
Not all Dems voted for the Iraq war. The ones who voted against it should be lauded. The Dems who voted for the war proved why many Democrats suck, and it's those same spineless Democrats who make me happily Independent. The Dem vote for the war was a cynical vote based on the simple desire not to be further marginalized during a time of patriotic fervor. Each of those Democrats screwed up. Hillary among them.
Anonymous: "After 9/11 with Bush with 98% BIPARTISAN support and the (now established) misinformation the CIA was purporting about Iraq and WMD, it would have been political suicide for the DemocratS not to unless they were the long-term incumbant dinosaurs."
Exactly. A cynical vote not for what's right, but for what was the most politically expedient. You just made your own case against Hillary's Iraq vote. It was a fuck-up on a massive scale. You don't vote for political expedience when hundreds of thousands of lives are on the line. That's incompetency. You don't hand a loaded gun to a crazy person and then ask them to be careful. You're not directly responsible for the outcome, but you're indirectly responsible.
Anonymous: "Obama conveniently was not there for this vote at this time so we'll never know what he would have done."
There are very strong indications that he would have voted against the war. All of his statements prior to and during that time were anti-war. His legislative actions were anti-war. If we had some sort of time machine for hypothetical questions, I would be willing to bet my life savings that he would have voted differently from Hillary on that one.
Anonymous: "What we do know is that he consistently voted for hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the war he supposedly doesn't support."
That's a Hillary argument, trying to deflect from her failure. Sure, he voted to fund the troops. We were already dug in at that point. Even some of the most anti-war politicians now admit that we can't just pull up and leave starting tomorrow, that we have to have some sort of intelligent plan for extricating ourselves.