Dear Lefties,
I am not quite one of you. I am,
rather, a creature of the political center, and sometimes you drive me nuts.
However, for the last twelve years or so we have been fellow travelers, as the
Democratic Party has been the only safe place for people like me—centrists who
view with trepidation the increasing radicalization of the Republican
party. So, I speak to you as an ally if not as a soul mate.
That said:
it’s time to stop all of the “I’m-not-ever-voting-for-Obama-again” stuff. It’s
just getting silly. Yes, I suppose he has done some things to disappoint you.
He has done some things to disappoint me as well. One of the big downsides of a
two-party system in a functioning Republic is that nobody ever quite represents
anybody’s ideology. This is just how the system works. Get over it.
Politics is
a pragmatic business, and the situation is like this: one of three people is
going to be elected president next year. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, or Newt
Gingrich will be sworn in at the beginning of 2013, and, for the next four
years, will control the reins of government. This person will appoint thousands of like-minded people to executive and judicial offices, including,
perhaps, one or more Supreme Court justice. If you are absolutely neutral in
this, then go off and support the Peace and Love Party or whatever. But if you
even suspect that there might be a difference between a Gingrich government and
an Obama government, then, really, it’s time to get behind the one who probably
won’t drive the country off a cliff.
Some time
soon, the three candidates will become two candidates, Obama and “the other guy.”
At that point, anything that you do to hurt Obama will automatically benefit
the other guy. Please don’t equivocate on this. Remember that, had Ralph Nader not
been in the 2000 race, Al Gore would have won a few hundred more votes in Florida and become president. Spend a few minutes thinking about how
different the world would have been then.
And then
admit to yourselves that you are going to vote for Obama in the end because,
whatever you dislike about him, he will be better than the other guy. The sooner you admit this to yourselves, the better chance Obama will have to be
re-elected. If you haven’t noticed, his poll numbers are pretty bad. The
economy still pretty much sucks, and people are unhappy. The only things that
Obama has going for him are 1) the weakness of the Republican field; 2) the fact
that he does not have a significant primary challenger; and 3) the absence of any Naderesque third-party general election candidate. If you keep whining, #2 and #3 could disappear.
So please, I
am begging you, let’s end this now. I get that you would like a more
ideologically pure liberal, but it isn’t going to happen. And such a candidate
would virtually guarantee that the other guy would be President anyway. And if your
grousing about a few concessions to conservatives helps that happen, I will
probably never forgive you.
