Mistakes of the 2008 Democratic Primary
Joan Walsh has a decent piece in Salon today entitled Mistakes of the 2008 Democratic Primary. I agree with a lot of what she says. I don’t think you can know whether Clinton would have been more progressive than Obama. I don’t think she would have. On policy, they were damned near identical. Neither one was a progressive. The progressives in the race were Kucinich and Edwards. One thing you can’t do, though, is look back in hindsight and say that we should have chosen Edwards. Obviously, that would have been a total disaster. No one takes Kucinich seriously as potential president outside of his own fans. That leaves you Obama or Clinton. I think a lot of progressives were willing to sort of graft a projection of progressivism on to Clinton or Obama that never existed because of the tendency to accept identity politics in the Democratic Party. In fact, I think a lot of Obama supporters did just that. If you were going to graft progressivism onto a candidate, he was the easier choice even without the identity politics. He quite intentionally used soaring, hopeful, progressive rhetoric. That was the real genius of his campaign and of his public persona as a national figure before he got in the campaign. Clinton chose to center her campaign image around being the solid, reliable establishment candidate, the steady hand, etc. She left the aspirations of people to see a woman president as a background theme, one that was only emphasized for specific audiences.
In point of fact, there really wasn’t a viable progressive choice in the 2008 primary in hindsight because of what a total piece of shit John Edwards turned out to be. So even though I currently have no intention of supporting Barack Obama’s re-election efforts and I may even vote for a 3rd party candidate, I think the idea of setting up a primary challenger for him is folly. If you’re a democrat, a well funded challenge just guarantees that he loses if the GOP manages to nominate anyone but the worst of the slavering mouth breathers. I’ll close with the final paragraph of Walsh’s piece. I think it is pretty much politics 101 for anyone who cares about the electoral world, but it’s something that damn few people in the mainstream media are willing to engage with. Only some progressive activists and bloggers had taken this on as gospel until pretty recently:
I think many on the left anointed Obama the only progressive in the race out of a rescue fantasy. But it’s possible people who want to see Obama face a primary — and I do not, as I’ve said too many times to count — have the same fantasy with a different, as yet unnamed savior. It gives progressives a sense of control: It’s not that Republicans are better organized than we are, or that they’ll fight Democrats by any means necessary; it’s our fault that we somehow chose the wrong candidate. At least we might have it in our power to make better choices. But I think it’s time to reckon with the fact that no matter whom we choose, Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Party will do whatever it takes to see them fail.
