Barack Obama is such a fine orator I usually prefer to read his speeches so I can analyze them without being swayed by his delivery, here’s the text if you’re so inclined but tonight I watched it live. I thought it wasn’t his best speech ever, but far from his worst too. The last five minutes especially I found myself nodding and smiling – an almost MLK cadence and a “ask what you can do for your country” message made the man sound like the democratic socialist firebrand I wish he was.
Still, my red lines are my red lines and I cannot in all conscience support him. That’s not to say I don’t understand why others would wish to and it’s not to say that I’m coming over all Nader and telling others they shouldn’t vote for Obama. My red lines are my own – your mileage may vary.
I watched Biden too and, too bad for them, no Dem Eastwood for Republicans to gloat over, just another good workmanlike speech containing some good soundbites. Romney and Ryan must be worried – they’re going to get destroyed in the debates.
to vote for a challenger based on what he says, on how he presents his message.
To vote for an incumbent based on anything other than what he has actually done is pure folly. By his record (the part that he hasn’t kept secret from us, anyway), Obama is in the same league as GWB, maybe worse. There is no reasonable way to vote for that.
The correct answer when offered a contrived and loathsome Morton’s Fork like this is, of course, “no”. (Alternately, “go fuck yourselves”.)
…when comparing the two conventions is a masterful slight of words.
All my friends back in the states have bought it; lock, stock, and barrel.
And they are solidly middle class; probably scared shit-less and unable to muster a cogent thought. I can’t even discuss this with them anymore; I’m too far out there, a bloody radical.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows,or with both~FDouglas
It has always been easy for me to not vote for the lesser evil at the presidential level. I live in Illinois. I have voted for Nader and Perot and even Commoner because my vote effectively doesn’t count. But if I lived in a swing state then the story becomes different.
So as much as I agree with Ian Welsh I still feel I have to cut some slack for our swing state brethren (and sisteren). In any case it is not so much exactly who you are voting for and why you choose to vote for them, but that you are aware of the why’s and why not’s of voting the way you do. Ian is likely not talking about the run of the mill Agonist reader when he lambasts so-called progressives. We here are quite capable of holding nuanced positions regarding the likes of Obama. We here very much do understand the concepts and practices of strategic voting. So that when we live in Ohio and vote for Obama rather than some Green or Libertarian we do so all the while we curse our bad fortune to live in a place where we must explain away the scorn heaped on us by the Ian Welshes.
But the scorn we are not able to escape from Ian is the scorn of having done such a piss-poor job of organizing a principled oppositional presence to combat the forces of authoritarianism. Perhaps Ian shares our feelings of guilt over that one as my impression of his Harper (garnered significantly from Ian himself) is that Harper is right there with the Reagan/Thatcher/Bush/Blair crowd and the prettier faced Clinton/Obama duo.
is Stephen Harper.
I’m just sayin’.
“The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
for someone outside of the US to say go f*** yourself… Bottom line there is no alternative that is better than voting dem. There is no realistic third party vote here and we once again are stuck with the lesser of two evils…because we are the ones who will be living under the results.
to expand on that as I don’t get it. Are you saying that Ian has less responsibility for Harper being his nation’s leader than I do for Obama being my nation’s leader?
with a slightly different project timeline at best.
I’d rather the people stayed away from a rigged game in protest than give these bastards an excuse to claim a “mandate”, as they always seem to do. Winning a general election with 20% of the eligible vote is not a mandate; make it 3% and the illusion of legitimacy will be fully unraveled.
The only vote we have left that means anything is “go fuck yourselves”. Opt into their meaningless multiple choice, and you’re just consenting to more of the same thing.
it will be Obama or Romney. If you don’t live in a swing state…, by all means cast a protest vote. But if you live in a swing state and feel that you must stand on principle or ideology when you know that the country will go down in flames instead of living to fight another day…, well you can call yourself a martyr…., because I believe there is a real choice here that will have real consequences. As Tina says, “…, there is no alternative that is better than voting dem.”
If folks can’t in good conscience vote for candidates from either of the mainline parties, then they should vote for another candidate. But they should damned sure vote. The really destructive corrosive thing is when folks say that others shouldn’t vote and that there’s no point in participating in civil society. That just makes everyone easier meat for the organized and privileged who can work the levers of power to their advantage.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
If voting for a third party candidate merely ensures that the worst possible outcome of the election (for example a Romney administration) happens, then folks cannot in good conscience do that, unless their conscience is misguided.
That is, assuming that they agree a Romney administration would be significantly more destructive.
In that case, their voting is every bit as destructive as not voting, and they are not contributing to civil society, merely helping destroy it.
(The above argument is partly rhetorical (in that it goes to one extreme) but I present it to show that the one you have made, JPD, is equally extreme and irrational.
The fact of the matter is definitely that conscience about the actual outcome of an electon (read what really happens because of it) is every bit as valid as conscience based on an abstract principle that has no application in reality.
…particularly extreme. My view, the notion that single individual’s vote actually determines the election is very small compared to the greater principle that everyone participates. If the result of people not being able to live with their vote is that they don’t vote, that’s a much, much higher cost than the cost of them voting for a third party. Given the specific political dynamics at work in the United States around non-participation, the plausible negative result of widespread non-participation due to lack of belief that there is sufficient difference between the candidates is that Romney wins – the plausible negative result of widespread participation by casting votes for a third party is also that Romney wins. If the choices are that the voter stays home, or that they vote for a third party, I’d rather they vote for a third party – the collateral over the long term is lower.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
The choices are not that the voter stays home or votes for a third party. Those choices are based on extreme, and false, idealism completely unrelated to reality or actual consequences of outcome (collateral).
If we agree that the collateral from a Romney administration victory is significantly greater than the collateral from an Obama administration victory, in terms of actual damage done to the country, then your pie in the sky fantasy of what large percentage participation voting (where that voting is ineffective) is just that…. pie in the sky, and extremely so.
I understand your argument and that you view it as rational. I just fail to understand how it works. The collateral, and the damage, is done by not voting for the best outcome, when the other outcome has real, tangible, damage, not just imaginary damage.
“when you know that the country will go down in flames instead of living to fight another day”
Wha??? You have a crystal ball and have seen that Romney’s the last ever US president if elected?
You don’t know anything of the sort. It is at very best, in the very strictest and most obvious of senses, a hypothetical – so at best you can only believe it – and an unlikely one too, imho. At worst, it’s unconvincing rhetoric.
…that the choice is very, very much between voters staying home or voting for a third party if they were to vote. The numbers in key demographics that previously came out for Obama should be cause for concern.
The rest of our disagreement flows, I think, from a mismatch around what I mean by collateral. What I mean is everything else other than the direct consequences of the election (i.e., participation in civil society institutions, etc.). In my view, I specifically set aside the direct consequences of electing a Romney administration because I think the two choices (not voting or voting for a third party) risk getting to exactly the same place. To be clear it’s not a good place – it’s just that the non-participation option risks getting to the same bad place (President Mittens) with even less societal resiliency.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
the collateral would include a pre-revolutionary current in US politics if Romney is elected?
…of it, but my instinct would be no, at least in any sense positive to us. A Romney administration would sap the real strength of the Tea Party aligned movement as they devoted increased energy to seeking to manipulate that asset; it could increase the raw revolutionary potential of the Occupy aligned movement through heavy-handedness in suppression, but I don’t see that as particularly increasing their receptivity to traditional politics (either towards forming a third party or joining a mainline party).
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
I “believe” that. And have been consistent in saying that the Republican Party got on the wrong course with the election of Reagan. He did about everything he could to provoke a real war with his rhetoric and invasions of Grenada and Panama. GHWB tried to take the party back…, but failed. He realized that supply side (voodoo) economics, tax cuts for the rich, deficit spending, and war were not the answers to our economic problems. I “believe” that we would be in much better shape if he had been re-elected and got the Republicans back on course. Clinton benefited from GHWB’s tax increases and (justified) war stimulus of Desert Storm…, and rode the dot com bubble to undeserved (near) hero worship. None the less…, the Wee Bush took over a stable economy and country and began parroting Reagan. Cut taxes on the rich (and marginally on the middle class) and doubled the national debt. The Afghanistan war was justified…, and should have ended at Tora Bora…, but he let Bin Laden escape. Irag was just a war stimulus. It was an illegal war of aggression that cost thousands of American lives and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many of those were innocent lives. I “believe” that the Wee Bush was evil in the worst sense of the word. The Republicans don’t even want anything to do with him…, but they want to continue the same policies that he employed. And yes…, I “believe” that Romney would inflict a far worse legacy than Reagan and Wee Bush combined. As I said in “Old Hippies”, “But I believe that a Romney win would assure the final collapse of not just the financial system…, but the empire as well. He will follow the path of Rummy Ronnie and the Wee Bush. He will plunge the country even deeper into debt, enriching the already rich fat cat elite, while demanding that the poor suffer even more, and exhorting the middle class that if it wasn’t for the poor holding them back, that they too would be filthy rich. And we will be at war…, not just the everlasting wars on terror, and drugs, and women, and the poor, and the old, Social Security and Medicare…, but a real shoot ‘em up military industrial complex compounding, gas rationing, martial law declaring, terrorist detention rendition torture debacle.”
I hope my crystal ball is wrong.
The Quillayute Cowboy
about sums it up for me:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-september-6-2012/hope-and-change-2—barack-obama–it-could-have-been-worse
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory