I was talking to a friend of mine who reads my stuff online and he told me this:
"Listen, when you advocate for a candidate in an extended primary season, you run the risk of everything you do coming off as spin. That's not good writing. That's not good blogging. And, at a certain point, that's not good advocacy."
I agree.
And something from the last few weeks has taught me a lesson. I don't know where this primary season is going to go, but I do know that we are moving towards a way of talking about and engaging in politics that won't look like how we did things ten years ago.
None of us are going anywhere. (Or, if we are, I hope we all return.) But most of us aspire to a more authentic and honest way of talking and doing politics, and that is a very good thing, that's part of what it means to blog at dailykos.
Spin is powerful. No doubt.
But honesty, reason and authenticity are not bad antidotes to spin.
I didn't know about the controversial statements by Reverend Wright till I saw them on YouTube. When I saw them, I slept on it, and then I posted a diary the next day on the website MyDD disagreeing with those comments but also lamenting the utter lack of context the media was providing about Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Do I think that these comments will derail the campaign of Barack Obama? I hope not. I don't know.
There's six long weeks till the Pennsylvania primary and in that time I am sure they will poll and focus group those sliced and diced clips of Reverend Wright till the cows come home.
However, I am pretty sure that the conclusion folks will come to is the same one common sense would have told us from the git go: the best way to judge a candidate is by what they say and what they do and how that coincides with one's own self interest and one's political views.
Personally, and I'm speaking frankly here, I don't know what the outcome of this primary contest will be. There are tests that the long campaign for the presidency impose upon a candidate that are, whether they are fair or not, simply the rules of the game.
FOX News will attack you. Your primary opponents will attack you. People will post YouTube clips and try to smear you with them. Your patriotism and family will be questioned. Kitchen Sinks will be thrown.
All that being said, I still respect and admire and support Senator Barack Obama and believe that his campaign for the presidency represents what is best about the United States of America.
I am impressed with his forthrightness and his tone, even when the chips are down.
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But let me be clear. If anybody thought that the Democratic primary in 2008 was going to be a cake walk in which the supporters of one candidate or another were going to be handed victory on a platter, they were wrong.
Nobody has a cake walk this time around, and nobody is going to get one going forward.
I respect Senator Clinton and her supporters, and I've tried to convey that. I post on blogs where people who disagree with me run the show, and I will continue to do so. That's part of blogging, too. I would hope we could emerge from this primary season, even if it goes to the convention, with a stronger netroots and a stronger culture of respect for differing opinions. I would also hope we get around to talking about local races and local blogs again, because that is so important, too.
I know that Barack Obama has no shot at the nomination, much less a victory in the general election without, at the very least, the respect and vote of all of us who make up the Democratic Party. But I'm also not going to BS here. This is a knock-down, drag-out, dust-up battle royale for delegates within the Democratic party and it gives every indication of being so for the duration of the contest. If you want patty-cake...come back in January.
That being said, and I'll say this just to be clear and not beat around the bush, I hope everybody who is on strike comes back to dailykos if they so choose, and when they do, I hope, whether this thing is resolved or not, that they be treated with respect and not have mocking or insulting comments posted in response to their opinions.
I don't like it when this website gets reported in the national press in a way that mischaracterizes the dailykos that all of us know. I'm sure you don't either.
And in this situation, we're not alone.
I'm sure that the congregants of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago who have been maligned, misrepresented and slandered unlike any religious congregation that I've ever seen...feel something similar tonight. All they did was go to Church, worship Jesus, and work for social justice in the best way they knew how and they have been utterly poorly served by our nation's media.
That's not right.
I think that everyone in the Democratic Party knows exactly what I'm talking about. Attacking people where they find community and fellowship, where they choose to get married and baptize their babies and worship their Lord is out of bounds.
But that is what's happened.
And that's something that needs to be put right for us to move forward. It's actually, on some levels bigger than this election campaign. If FOX News and Good Morning America are allowed to trash a candidate's house of worship in the process of choosing our president then I don't know what we stand for as a nation anymore.
There was something wrong about that, and we all know it.
It's fine and right to hold a candidate for the presidency to the highest standard. But it is wrong and sad to involve footage of everyday Americans that smears their church and house of worship in doing so.
Those questions could have been raised in a way that didn't divide us and distract us and involve the faith life of average Americans. But they were. I think that's wrong. That's not spin, that's my heart and my gut instinct about how Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago has been treated by our media.
The media agenda was very clear from the beginning:
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Now, let's get down to brass tacks.
This is a contest for delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I have no idea what the results of that contest will be.
I don't pretend to know if there will be further controversies or scandals on either side. What I do know is that I've been burned making predictions or getting overly invested in one outcome or another in the past and I'm not going to do that going forward.
I've written time and again that we are locked in battle for governance of the United State of America. We need every last 'fighting democrat' in America to rise to that call.
We all know that the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party is a contest for control of the Democratic Party as well.
Should the reigns of our party belong in the hands of Barack Obama and David Axelrod and Steve Hildebrand...and their allies Claire McCaskill, Ted Kennedy and Janet Napolitano...or should they go to the stewardship of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Terry McAuliffe and Mark Penn?
That's for the Democratic Party to decide.
I hope we can do so in a fair contest from both sides. And I certainly hope that in the process that the fans and supporters of Senator Clinton choose to end their boycott and rejoin us here at DailyKos where we have a long tradition of informed and respectful debate about politics and the state of the nation going back over five years.