On Nov 4, 2008, at 4:14 PM, Dennis Perrin wrote:
> Not that it matters in the larger scheme, since Obama will win NY
> and later the election, but I am curious -- why did you, Doug, vote
> for Obama, after all the accurate criticisms of him beforehand?
My critique of O was that he was basically just another mainstream Dem about whom people had a lot of illusions. As I've said before, there are ways in which a mainstream Dem is better than a Rep, and as long as those are our only choices, D is better than R. Not much, but still better. And as I've also said many times before, pres politics is not the place to build a movement. Voting for Nader or McKinney or any of those other wankers is just a waste of time. As Adolph said it's pretty much the same as not voting, only it takes more time.
And as I've also said many times before:
<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html>
> Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to
> induce some forward motion. There’s no doubt that Obamalust does
> embody some phantasmic longing for a better world—more peaceful,
> egalitarian, and humane. He’ll deliver little of that—but there’s
> evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And
> they will inevitably be disappointed.
>
>
> As this newsletter has argued for years, there’s great political
> potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon
> was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills
> explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals
> thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a
> Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still
> pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the
> 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of).
> You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated
> inSeattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and
> alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and
> includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg’s
> focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living
> and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us.
>
>
>
> Never did the possibility of disappointment offer so much hope.
> That’s not what the candidate means by that word, but history can be
> a great ironist.