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Maybe it's because my least-favorite candidate (Hillary Clinton) ultimately lost, in spite of all her early advantages--but I don't think it's just that. I was saying, circa February, that, even if Obama lost the nomination, the fact that there WAS a meaningful contest, involving real issues (war, NAFTA, who runs the party, etc.), and the fact of the upsurge in citizen activism that Obama inspired, were great benefits to our democracy, which seemed to be drawing its last breath, before Obama came along. And it was the CAUCUSES that did it--breathed new life into our democracy! People hungry to participate. People CARING. Thousands of them, flooding the caucuses in order to be heard--so that there were not enough chairs, and lines out of the door, and a bit of confusion as ordinary people took up the nominating process, and had to quickly learn how to speak up for their candidate and hold fair votes. I had been part of the election reform movement, and hadn't paid much attention to the design of the primaries. Little did I know how important it would be to have nomination MEETINGS that people could attend--the caucuses--where people could express their discontent with the frontrunner (mostly on the war, I think), and rally behind an insurgent campaign, and have this occur in a venue in which the votes were NOT COUNTED BY DIEBOLD AND BRETHREN.
The caucuses were a failsafe against the Diebold & co.'s non-transparent vote counting, and against big money picking the nominee for us. They made an insurgent campaign possible.
All of this would have been true and positive even if Obama had lost. And now that he's won it, I think kudos are also due to Clinton, who provided us the great service of knockdown dragout political brawl, which has produced a fully tested, fully vetted candidate, Obama, who now has the national political experience that he lacked in the beginning, and who is clearly the Peoples' choice because he was against the Iraq war, and also due to personal qualities--steady on his feet, unflappable, great speaker--and organizational genius (as someone pointed out, he must have read "The Art of War"--he exploited every oversight of his opponents, the "unimportant" states, the million small donors, the caucuses, the aroused citizenry, the massive discontent in the country).
It was a REAL contest. None of this airbrushed shit we're been getting from corporate TV since Reagan. A REAL squabble between the grass roots and the party establishment, over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and the country.
And now, as Clinton still tries to maneuver these lawless state party establishments in FLA and MI to her advantage, we see it all on TV! No more backroom deals! It's all out there! Well, there's probably quite a lot of backroom stuff going on, but still--how often do we get to see anything REAL on TV in the political life of this country?
I don't want Clinton to "take it to the convention." I hope she loses this fight as well. But mainly because there are only eight weeks between the convention and the General Election. If that were not the case, I would LOVE to see a REAL convention, where the matter of who is going to control this party, and Democratic Party leaders' complicity in the war (and their complicity on corporate-run "trade secret" vote counting, and everything else) was fought out in public, for all to see. But Obama needs more than eight weeks to create the landslide that he deserves--and that all us--the SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people who oppose this war--deserve. Once again he has big handicaps--among them, the war profiteering corporate 'news' monopolies, and Diebold & brethren still 'counting' all the votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code. He needs a landslide just to win.
So it needs to be over, for that reason. But, wow, it has been great! All of it--the good and the bad! It will go down in the history books as the re-birth of American democracy. It will be up there with the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an ikon of American political life. The first major woman candidate for president and the first major black candidate for president, in a neck and neck battle for the nomination, all across America, with impassioned constituencies on both sides, and one of the biggest increases in voter registrations in history, and one of the most dramatic increases in citizen participation that we have seen in our lifetimes!
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