Credit where credit is due, the title of this diary is lifted from the famous Bob Johnson diary where he excoriated this site for some of its nastier posts. There's no need to follow that theme: Something has happened since that diary, maybe because of it.
Certainly some of the more virulent contributors (who I'm pretty sure were just sowing discord for discord's sake) have been booted. And then something even more amazing has happened, a rapprochement: I'm particularly thinking of Sricki's diary yesterday and the comments that followed it.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/4/9/22273 7/8142
But more of that in a moment.
Full disclosure first: I'm a keen Obama supporter - have been since his speech to the convention in 2004, and since then a close friend became quite high up in his campaign. Before 2003, I would have been completely for Hillary, having followed and supported the Clintons (with some reservations) through the 90s. Given my bias, what the hell am I doing here?
Over the last few months MYDD has topped my 'most visited sites' in Firefox, and for a while I've been wondering if these is not some perverse kind of rubbernecking from me. I'm a Brit whose lived and worked and married in America, but I can't vote in these primaries - even though I often wish I could. I know it will influence my world just as much as yours. But why did I keep on coming to this hot pit of hate? Did I just like seeing democrats tear each other apart? Was I just coming up with great diss lines and insults to use in my writing (I'm a dramatist). Or was something else going on?
Well, fortunately I'm not alone in my addiction. I know now many others around the world, equally hooked on this democratic primary. And for good reason. The passion of the debate, the argument, the out and out yelling match with slamming doors and threatened fisticuffs that has been going on here reflects the importance of the issues at stake. Not just policy issues. Not just the destiny of the world's one remaining superpower - but some of the most intractable problems that face many societies today - especially those twin evils of racism and sexism.
I've been fighting both since I was first politically active in the 1970s. Racism figured slightly higher because of the situation in the UK at that time, and my mixed race family and it's complex heritage. But sexual equality was also a large part of the battle, and though there have been big strides in that direction in the professional orbits of the US and the UK, we know that this is only a tiny fragment of the worlds population.
Though we lost sight of it, this was always potentially tragic and catastrophic that having two huge CHANGE candidates, Hillary and Obama, would be pitted against each other in the same primaries would cause huge frictions. With, emblematically, these two demons of racism and sexism on trial, the potential for catastrophe, for matching one oppression against another, was massive. I've been guilty of it myself. Because both issues speak to identity, the debate easily becomes viciously ad hominem or ad feminem, and so we're cornered, trading personality traits and insults.
But some people been big enough to get beyond this. It helps to have someone as blunt speaking (and frankly dead funny) as Bob Johnson. But it also took a huge step from Hillary supporters like Sricki to begin to get over the need to be right, to attack your opponent. Huge kudos to her for owning up to some of her extremes. Kudos to every Obama supporter who does the same. It's not about joining hands in some happy clappy Kumbaya - but realising that the other people feel different pains, want to tackle different oppressions.
So now I know the reason I needed to keep coming to the cesspool of hate (as Bob Johnson did too). The anger was out there. The boil needed to be lanced. This festering bottled up issues needed to be aired, fought over. Somehow we've gone beyond triangulation in the process. The DNC freeper lookalikes have been outed and ousted. People no longer link to the worst republican smears about Hillary or Obama. Yes, triangulation doesn't work. Sometimes you're enemy's enemy is, actually, your enemy too
So perhaps after all, as some people have maintained, the last few weeks have shown how this hydra headed nightmare can have had beneficial effects for democrats.
And one thing I now understand, having read diaries by people like Sricki, no democrat can win the GE without finding a unified theme again. If is Obama who wins the nomination, he would have not only been tried and tested by two of the smartest politicians of his generation: Bill and Hillary. If he beats them fair and square, he will DESPERATELY NEED former Hillary supporters.
Given the passion and commitment and honesty some real Hillary supporters like Sricki have shown, their support is vital, persistent and ground changing.
If Obama gets their support, McCain will be blown away.
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