I had a strange dream on Saturday night. It was Election Day and Obama was losing because of an unexpected "hate" vote turnout in Virginia, Ohio, and other places. Rather than gloating against the DNC a la, "well that's what they get for being so stupid," I felt very sad. When I woke up, I was asked if I had been crying. It was a very vivid dream and I remember feeling this awful pit in my heart and wishing something could be done to make us win the election. I think subliminally it was also a throwback to Election 2004 when I felt so devastated by these unequivocal rejections from states and counties I thought we would have won.
As diehard Hillary supporter, even long after I accepted her defeat, my distrust of Obama and fierce dislike of the way the party leaders handled the primary stayed with me. I felt I could not bring myself to endorse such a slight and I'm still not happy I was seemingly taken for granted and told to "get over it" etc.
Still, there's nothing I can do to rectify what was done except to not watch MSNBC again. People in positions of power make callous and narcissistic decisions every day, and "punishing" Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, and Nancy Pelosi is going to be a completely trivial/irrelevant concern as life moves onto bigger things. In fact, it's rather pointless even now.
A few weeks ago I decided I would probably vote for Obama, but I kept it private. It was purely cerebral. A balanced (or even more left leaning) judiciary and more Democratic idealism in the Oval Office benefits the world, regardless of whether or not I have a personal affinity for the person implementing it.
I had no emotional connection to the presidency until this dream I had though. I really don't want a 2004 repeat. Back then, I was living in one of the biggest cities and sort of condescended towards rural people as "stupid" and "prejudiced" etc. So I hated seeing county returns from outside of the cities. Now I live in a mid-sized city and after supporting Hillary it was like being "against" the urban "elite" and academic leftist know-it-alls... a group to which I always belonged (and still do technically). I was politically against urban voters, young voters, AA voters, educated suburbanites... talk about a world turned upside down. My whole life I was instead politically against Evangelicals, haters, NASCAR voters (ugh Bush), and so forth. What an inversion of reality.
But now that's all over.
I told my sister, also an ardent Hillary supporter, in a whisper that I was going to vote for Obama. She said she is too. I think my mother is also, even though we all ragged on him constantly during the primary.
Forgive the casual tone in the writing here if it's a bother.
I really hope we win now and look forward to an administration stacked with partisans of the RIGHT kind (Dem, of course) and am glad for the barriers we've broken (much sooner than I would expect) and will continue to break.
The only caveat is that if John McCain wins, I will be very sad again and may take my anger out on the DNC. rawr
-Brian
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