I gotta admit, when kos announced the "let's get as involved as the law allows in repuke primaries and keep the frothy one, um, dripping along" campaign, aka "Operation Frothi-, er Hilarity," well, maybe it was the obviously condescending name, but it all led to a sort of queasiness inside. It smelled cheesy to me, almost amateurish or even preening, like skinny, naive college sophomores who really aren't as smart as they think they are cleverly discovering some loophole they thought the rest of the world too f'ing stupid to find. Why, it seemed as cheesy as something some desperate Republicans might try.
More down there below the Mason-Squiggle Line...
Now, let's get this straight: my objections weren't of the vapors variety. I worked in the trenches of electoral politics for eleven short years, and while I pretty much loved every f'ing minute of it, and Lord o'mighty, when you work progressive politics, there are an awful lot of minutes in a lot of those days, you are expected to work hours that leave your regular-job-holding friends gasping in horror, or, to put it another way, I often received vague hints from various superiors and co-workers that my fifty or sixty or, during busy seasons, seventy hour work weeks just weren't enough and betrayed a lack of dedication to the cause, but fuck 'em, I had a wife and kids and the wife wound up dying pretty young so I'm pretty glad I fought for my right to party, as they say.
Um, where was I?
Oh yes. The vapors.
After eleven years immersed in the cesspool that is electoral politics in this country I know the score, and make no mistake, my friends, at anything beyond the level of maybe village mayor or county coroner, electoral politics is an utter cesspool of duplicity, corruption, dishonesty, and phoniness that would put a tear of joy in the eye of ol' Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. And even if I know that, having smelled it at the levels I did, I can't even begin to imagine the stench that wafts through the putrescent airs where Presidential campaigns are bet on and lost, I'm pretty sure you can't give me the vapors. I know it's a dirty, win-at-all-costs proposition, no matter how pure the intentions of the participants; they might wanna save the world or something, but three days before the votes get counted they'd sell their first-born into eternal damnation to come out on top. There's something about winning an election that reduces people to instincts so base it's an embarrassment to the better instincts of the human race, and after awhile you come to accept that fact, so, really, as I said, I thing I'm pretty vapor-proof.
No, my objection to Operation Hilarity sprung from purely tactical grounds.
I saw it like this: it played right into the Repuke eternal-victimization theme. And the victimization theme is pretty much the last working play they got left in their playbook at this point. Demographics and reality are firmly against them, yet they keep parlaying the victimization card, along with generic Democratic stupidity and weakness, into too many winning hands.
Oddly, I respect them for this. Or maybe, fear and loathe them for it. Conservative power-brokers consistently use victimization to whip enough voters into enough of a, oh, hell, I can't help it, enough of a froth to vote against their own interests, and any
power bloc that can, say, totally convince a man without health insurance that another man trying to help him obtain potentially life-saving health insurance is the Devil incarnate, and that he is actually better off with no health insurance, is not a power bloc to be fucking trifled with. That is one seriously deep magic trick to pull off.
I saw Operation Hilarity as a gift to those bastards. As in, it gave them an easy way to say, ooh, look at those meany, lefty, assholes trying to subvert our freedom'n'mockracy'n'free elections. We're just good honest folk tryin' to have our elections and here come these meddlin' libruls with their welfare and food stamps and kill-gramma-socialized-medicine plots and well look at how relentless they are, they never sleep people, they're comin' for it all, your guns and your "freedom" (to be piss-poor and free of health care), they never sleep, they're always attacking, even in our primaries, they won't let us be, see, we told you they're plotting to destroy you.
Or something along those lines.
I felt like, well, I enjoyed watching Mitt and the Not-Mitts duke it out, and I figured, let sleeping dog shit lie. Let them tear each other's eyeballs out like rabid forest animals while we sat off in the distance and quietly watched, waiting to pounce mercilessly on whatever wounded, limping bastard emerged from the woods for the November tilt.
And let me wander - what's that you say? This whole diary has wandered aimlessly? Fair enough. I never said I could write. Hear me out, though. Yes, let me wander off course to say that as an inveterate, hard-core left winger, raised by parents whose hatred of the rat-bastard popularly known as Richard M. Nixon provided some of the earliest and most formative memories of my earliest years, please don't count me as some sort of Obama-bot; quite the opposite, in fact.
Let me wander even farther afield to offer a preemptive defense of my lack of enthusiasm for the re-election campaign by saying my main beef with Obama is that he's a status-quo defender in a time when, in the face of looming resource shortages, climate chaos, and the chickens hatched in the midst of banking illegalities coming home to roost, the status-quo can no longer be defended, and I think he's smart enough and well-informed enough to know better. I think he blew a chance to make some inroads on those issues in the early days of his Presidency, but I'm not going to sit here and psychoanalyze the man or ascribe some evil intentions to his actions. I think he thinks he's doing the best he can under the current political reality.
And anyway, speaking of reality, the reality is, the choices at this point appear to be Obama, who defends the status-quo; Romney, who seems to favor the Robber Baron era; and Santorum, who seems intent on bring us back to the thirteenth-century. Given this reality, re-electing Obama is an absolute essential, and if re-electing him is a rear-guard action, well, so be it: a Romney or Santorum presidency, with one or more houses of Congress on top of that, would be an unmitigated disaster for the future of this country.
An Obama re-election will do little to take us toward mitigating problems like banking corruption and peak oil and climate change: I mean, let's face it, Hope and Change are gonna look really, really enticing in their pasties in the over the next few months, but no matter how much they flirt with us, when the bell for last call rings and the liquor gets locked up and the taxis get called, they're goin' home with the boys with deep-pocketed suits, with the boys who work for the McBanks. And it's not all his fault either, far from it; as a society, we're pretty much convinced we have a God-given right to cheap gasoline and lives as small-scale Pharaohs powered by obscene amounts of carbon-based fuels that we believe will last forever. He could stand up on a podium and tell truths he surely knows about oil reserves and what they mean for our future, but doing so would doom him to an electoral defeat that would make Carter's drubbing at the hands of Reagan in 1980 look good - it's essential to keeping us in the game as it were.
That's a defeat we can't afford right now. Obama winning, and the Dems keeping at least one house of Congress, keeps us in the game. Yes, keeping ourselves in the game is the best we got right now. Yes, it sucks, but that's the reality. There are other things going on in other spheres, outside the electoral, that I think are important and necessary in helping to deal with what's coming, and I intend to support those things when appropriate, but that's what not we're talking about here. We're talking about winning the Presidential election this year.
And the more I look at it, the more it seems obvious to me that the best way to win this election is to make Romney, Santorum, and maybe even Gingrich slug it out to the end. Romney's probably going to win the nomination; I don't see a brokered convention happening, but who knows. But think of how damaging a Romney loss in Michigan would be to his general election prospects. More money spent trying to put out that frothy fire. More chances to utter gaffes that'll burn him come general time, as he tries, fruitlessly, to outflank Santorum from the right. More time spent painting himself as a desperate flip-flopper.
I honestly can't see how dragging the Republican primary out as long as possible doesn't help Obama's chances; Operation Hilarity . And with gas slated to hit five bucks a gallon this summer, he's gonna need all the help he can get; even without that, I figured this election as a nail-biter, no matter what piece of retrograde patheticness the R's puked up. Too many people don't understand the massive forces working against them at this point in history, leaving them apt to buy into the sort of easy explanations the Repukes are masterful at providing; easy explanations and a vague awareness that things are getting worse for 99% of us generally disincline people to vote for incumbents.
So, in an election of great importance, and one that figures to go down to the wire, we should do everything we can to get any advantage we can. In other words, my initial resistance has melted: despite the cringing, I'm behind Operation Hilarity.