Like many people, I have gotten pretty caught up in the Democratic nomination fight over the last couple of months. After initially leaning towards Edwards, I shifted to Obama for a variety of reasons. As I became increasingly invested in (and excited by) the prospects of his winning the nomination, I found myself getting irritated by the tactics of the Clinton campaign, sometimes voicing my frustrations on this site in a fairly full-throated fashion.
It occurred to me that this was not producing the most edifying or rational state of mind for me and many others. This should have been self-evident when I was muttering about sitting out the general election if Hillary won the nomination -- okay, a pretty guilt free indulgence in its way when you live in DC, which has never been characterized as a swing state -- here we like to see if we can keep the Republican from getting into two digit percentages, something we have achieved in the last two presidential elections. The madness of this perspective was really driven home to me on the night of the Pennsylvania primary when perusing other sites where Clinton or Obama supporters were vowing to vote for third party candidates or sit out the general election as though none of us had absorbed the lessons of the 2000 election.
And then I awoke the next day to two stories on NPR concerning rising food commodity prices and the enormous impact that this is having domestically and internationally. I felt a bit ashamed that I was obsessing over the Democrats' internecine battle and issues of tactics and the like at a time when the ability of large numbers of people to feed themselves and their families seems to be growing ever more tenuous as a result of poorly crafted public policies.
Of course, this is just the latest in a series of calamitous events that have occurred on the present Administration's watch -- a disastrous war, the gutting of the Constitution, the embrace of torture, the Katrina debacle, two recessions, a plunging currency and rising deficit -- well you get the idea.
The take away lesson to me seemed obvious -- we cannot afford to allow the Republicans to continue to run this country. It will be a disaster not only for ourselves, but for the world writ large. So I've vowed to lock away my inner fascist* and keep my eye on the prize, regardless of how irritated I may get during the day to day struggle of the campaign. I am going to try to avoid writing about the Obama-Clinton battle and to reaffirm that I will support whoever emerges as the nominee. As the old cliche goes, I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good -- or even the palatable.
*This would be the "emotional fascism" that obsesses Elvis Costello -- our need to be right and to dominate people on a small scale, not the Jonah "I put the fat in fatuous" Goldberg notion that we liberals all goose step to the recycling bin.
