Thursday, February 7, 2008

In a desperate political mood, Barak cuts the mustard

Who isn't caugh up in the primary fever? It is very much in the air and like all things that grip a country, we can bet that we will embarrased about this moment later. Nonetheless, in this particular minute, I can't worry about political embarrasment. We are caught up in the winds of electorial political passion that only someone like George Bush & Co. could have created. Lets just look back painfully at the electoral set backs. Gore vs Bush vs Nader (round 1) in 2000. We all went green back then didn't we? Well good for us. Gore actually wins, but then Bush wins. Kerry vs Bush in 2004 (round 2). No one likes Kerry. Nobody. Bush wins. This time around the country really really hates Bush and the democrats are running a white woman and a black man in the lead up to the primaries. The nail biting is over. We have our chance. All aboard the big democrat capitalist ship! Fuck it. We concede. We can't handle Republicans anymore. We can't ignore electoral politics anymore. How did on the ground activism fair in the last eight years (?) Not so well. Electoral politics has coerced us into becoming enthusiastic about the elections! CHANGE! Please! Anything!

I am for Obama under the same trope as everyone else. I must say, I just lack nuance this time around. Hilary voted for the war (so did Edwards). I just can't support that. I can't even go into how pissed I was when the Democrats caved to the idiocy that was the Iraq War. Everyone knew Bush was using the trauma of 911 to shift bellicose energy toward his long-time desire to get a foothold in the middle east. No one was under any illusions. It couldn't have been more transparent. It was one of those political moments that you thought the country had gone crazy and well, lets face it, Edwards and Hillary both went along with the insanity. Barak didn't. Not giving into the mad, fascist disaster that was the last eight years, was simply not a bold thing to do, it was an obvious thing to do. I can't begin to say how caving into that type of pressure can only be the best rorschach test of their politics.

Now Barak is using this annoying language of bringing the country together. The rallying cry of bi-partisanship. What exactly does that mean? Lets hope he means that we need to get the working classes back to a more reasonable political platform and ostracize the hateful and capitalists. He also didn't mention anything in New Orleans about housing. Stregthen the levees, the schools. These are good things to do. But New Orleans suffers from racism and capitalism and levees and schools aren't going to solve that. (but right, it is better than HIlary and any republican). I feel that Barak might have a lot of Clinton-esque capitalism up his sleeve. Fortunately, he doesn't have a ton of Bush global aggression. We will have to see. Like most political activist types, we refrain from elections because, we also know, they make us look soft. I am almost positive that if Barak is elected there will be many policies that I find to be in line with the powers that be (I do hold out a shred of hope that he will really be bold and do something more radical on the economic front, but I doubt it). But now I am desperate. We all are. Eight years ago, he wouldn't have had my vote. But we now have eight years of Bush totalitarianism between and that folks, makes all a tad more gun shy in the face of electoral politics.

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