Super Tuesday!

As an independent voter and a person who has long distasted group-think, I have to admit that, watching the Democratic debate the other night, and listening to the crowd react to Hillary’s “It took a Clinton to clean-up after the first Bush…” line, I was stunned. As someone who voted for Bush in 2000 (and has had to live with it for 8 years), I found the fact that Clinton could be so glib and slightly delusional regarding her husband's (and, by a proxy she is attempting to assert, her) role in helping W. Bush to power, arrogant and insidious. No person of sound mind and body would claim that Clinton (and Obama) are not benefiting from Bush fatigue. Is there anyone who doesn’t think that the Democrats will win the White House? If Hillary plans to trot out and celebrate the Bush fatigue that propelled her husband into the White House, than she had better—by Zeus’ beard!—be willing to answer the tough question of whether or not eight years of her husband Bill helped Bush-Part-Deux into the White House. Can she seriously claim that Clinton fatigue did not help W. Bush into the White House over the more “qualified/experienced” (those fancy Hillary cards) Al Gore? I know it mattered to me in 2000. I was, quite frankly, so over the shameless politics of Bill Clinton: the impeachment, the lies, the false modesty, the smugness that could only have resulted from taking on Congress and winning, the pardons, the investigations, the arrogant infidelity, the careless humiliation of poor Chelsea at the hand of a media who wanted to see the sins of the father vested on her, that aggravating lack of humility. Let’s not forget that many people in the Clinton White House (Hillary included, although off-screen) inferred that Paula Jones was too “unattractive” to ever have ever been harassed the President—after all Jennifer Flowers made it into Playboy! Take that patriarchy! How many Americans were tired of their duplicity and shameless politics and instead saw a neutered, poor-speaking, governor from Texas as an outsider (as ivy league and as privileged as they come), who, at the time, seemed to offer up a cabinet that we might have assumed had integrity (sadly, how wrong I/we were—but there was that dash of pepper that was Colin Powell: forever to be remembered now as an awful politician, out of his element against Cheney and Rumsfeild, rather than a four star general he was). Bush’s crimes have clearly dwarfed Clinton’s. There can be no debate about that. But I can’t help but recall the comedian Joe Rogan's bit in which powerful politicos sit in a dark room looking at the farce that is the Bush presidency (we’ll substitute if for Clinton in this instance) and say, “You know… I think we can go dumber.” Let’s not kid ourselves that things were so much better back then, and all of it was directly a result of the Clinton’s and not the exploding tech market and shady accounting that came to light in 01. I seem to remember Rwanda, Somalia, “Don’t ask don’t tell”, a spectacular health care debacle, blow jobs on my tax dollars in the room that has the red button, lies under oath. But here, eight years later, I still can never forgive them for one of the biggest crimes against humanity: Fox News. Let’s face facts, would Fox News and Rush Limbaugh be what it was today if the Clinton arrogance hadn’t so appalled the average Americans who still consider human decency to be one of the most important traits of a president that they found solace in a news channel that seemed to (over) react to as much? As successful a politician as Clinton was (one of the best ever), he was a divider, a man who left the White House so befouled that Gore couldn’t shake the stench during his run (a man who, by all accounts, is a better person than either Bush or Clinton). We cannot lie to ourselves and claim that his legacy did not, on some level, offer up a precedent that W. Bush and Co. have been tweaking and developing for eight years--our cynicism. Any other president in history would have already impeached (or investigated) by now, yet because of Clinton’s arrogance and privilege (he could have simply fucking admitted it—as if we didn’t know already, which speaks to the galling aspect of it all), Americans view the process as completely partisan (which it became—thank you Republicans, you must have had a crystal ball). If we try to tell ourselves that Clinton was not a divisive personality that pushed many independents towards Bush in 00, then we simply waiting for those dark suited politicos to step in with their Bush Version 3.0 in 2012. I can’t think of a more catastrophic.

Which is why Barack Obama, and not Hillary Clinton, should be the democratic candidate for president. As a teacher, I see the unexplainable disgust on many of my students face when you mention Hillary Clinton. That this reaction is misguided and ill-informed is obvious—they were children during the first Clinton-era and could hardly have any real, well reasoned, feelings about Bill. Yet, those poisoned waters (their parents) remain and are palpable. To think that Hillary can reach across the aisle and help us get past the partisan blockades that have taken over this government (blockades she did her fair share of building in dismissing real American concerns as “a vast right-wing conspiracy"—not exactly the words of a uniter), is the height of delusion.

Rather than take my word for it, I will allow The Dropcloth and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon to make a case for Obama...

…Did you check them out? Good. Allow me to close on this point. If you can find no reason in the above links to vote for Obama, then let me ask you a simple question: What major sport/endeavor/field has not experienced its own renaissance upon the inclusion of African Americans? Baseball, basketball, football, music, literature, art, and business—has a one suffered as a result of the inclusion of African Americans? While investigating the appeal of Pan-Africanism, it was James Baldwin who argued that African Americans could never be African, because they were inherently American, probably more American than many of the Whites who sought to keep them segregated and marginalized. In fact, if one traced back the lineage of many African Americans and compared it to the standard Cracker, we might find that, for the most part, they have been here longer (I have no basis in science for this statement, it just seems right since slavery was here at the beginning). That finally, after four hundred years, we finally have a candidate who has the potential to bring a diverse experience to the White House, should be a cause for celebration. Still, you shouldn’t vote for Obama because he is a black man. You should vote for him because his is an intelligent, articulate, charismatic, impressive, black man. You know all the things we used to think a president had to be.