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The year started off for Dems as a pretty exciting one, but sadly, that didn't last long. The most disconcerting thing has come from fora like this (also, comments on NYT and other online rags throughout Left Blogistan).
I like Obama. A lot. He's a natural leader, a thrilling speaker, and shows a capability to build consensus and motivate people in the right direction. It's exciting to think about the possibility that, with the support of a big Dem majority, he could take the country in a new direction, and start to unravel the serious problems that are now choking the life out of us.
The prospect of a new beginning, or a desperately needed solution, can make us forget just how big the problems are, and how entrenched are the interests that keep them getting bigger. None of these things, groups, people, tendencies are going to just disappear because we all decide we want change.
When I see and hear Clinton, read the specifics of her platform and examine her record, I have a good sense of the flavor, at least, of how this would actually work. Having seen her in the fight before, which has been desperate and dirty for sixteen plus years, I have a sense of how she'll fight. It won't always be inspiring (sometimes downright dispiriting), or clean: sometimes the groups I think are 'enemies' will be left standing. We all have a tendency to want our enemies annihilated, their lands sewn with salt, their bones scattered and their names erased. But reality isn't like that. With Clinton, I know what reality to expect.
The things that make Obama so appealing have nothing to do with his experience, which is minimal. Balloon it all you want, but it's thin. It's in spite of this, and because of his other qualities, that he invites this kind of hope. Gleen Greenwald also wrote about this today; there is the prospect, at least, that Obama might prove immune to the VRW machine; if he does, it will be, almost like magic, as if those kinds of attacks have lost all their power, and they'll be behind us for a time.
If you're in your mid-late 40s like I am, though, you have seen this movie before. The story does not end at the election; the biggest heartbreak can come after the new president is seated. That doesn't mean it'll work out this way again, or that anyone should stop believing; but if you've been through it, you want to know the specifics of how things are going to change. You don't need the whole game plan, just enough to convince you it's possible.
I want to believe. But for all the pleasure it gives me and others like me to think about what might be, we have not yet seen the substance from Camp Obama that would enable us to take the leap.
Worse still is the behavior of those, in venues like this, who identify themselves as Obama supporters. Questions or skepticism about Obama's substance are treated as attacks and countered in the most personal ways; differing viewpoints are treated as moral failings (I'm talking to you, Michael Chabon); everything is evidence that everyone is biased against Obama. In Salon comments, people use words like "treason" to describe these purportedly anti-Obama "slurs".
These people sound less like supporters swept forward on a tide of hope and longing for change than like Freepers from the Bizarro world.
If Obama gets the nod, as it appears increasingly likely that he will, I'll be glad, hopeful, but cautious. More substantively, I'll be gearing up for battle up until the election ... not against my fellow Dems but against the right wing mouth-breathing machine, which will take the kid gloves off. Those of you who think Obama is some kind of beseiged saint will really get to see what nasty is, then. And I hope you'll be there with me, fighting for him with some substance, and not stamping your feet and feeding on your own.
And I hope you'll still be with him after the new year, as I will be, when the problems turn out to be a lot harder than just downloading a new politics to your iPod, and what turns out to be practical and realistic does not look much like what you thought you were being promised between now and the Fall.
