Tag Archives: obama

How I Managed to Alienate Two Obama Supporters

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A pair of middle-aged women showed up at my door the other night. They had clipboards and they were wearing blue buttons. They didn’t have to say it, but they did anyway: “We’re talking to people about voting for Barack Obama,” she said, in the passive, indirect way that a therapist would tell you to talk to somebody who disagreed with you.

An aside: I live on the outskirts of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest suburbs. Many of my friends grew up here, and they all agree that a democrat in this area is extremely rare.

My first instinct is to try to get rid of them. I don’t want to have a conversation with strangers about something as personal and potentially explosive as politics. Someone I used to know went door-to-door as a child, for religious reasons. She said that the only guaranteed way to get rid of their particular branch of the big X was to say you’re an atheist. Because their church so adamantly rejected independent thought, a person who didn’t believe in God was the biggest threat to an impressionable child’s supple mind.

I admire these two ladies for what they were doing. I sure couldn’t do it, and I’ve tried. My friend Becky ran for Magistrate one year, and all my ex and I had to do, as part of her street team, was go up to peoples’ homes and knock on their doors and ask them to vote for Magistrate, and then ask them to vote for Becky, who happened to be the only girl on the ticket. It was easy. We even had pink pens to give out.

Becky didn’t really have a chance, as we discovered later. The guy who won was a local cop for a long, long time and basically already knew the whole town. She might as well have been running against everybody’s cousin.

So I understood how hard it was for them to come up to the front door of somebody with an undermowed lawn and a talking Darth Vader on his car’s dashboard and ask him to vote for Barack Obama. Maybe they thought it was a slam dunk. The Apple sticker on my car probably got their hopes up.

“Do you know who you’re voting for?”

The first thing I did was apologize.

“I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”

“Oh?” they said, pencils raised.

“Probably Bob Barr?”

Long, pregnant pause.

“Well,” said the leader. “We’ll be sure to write that one down.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. I’m still not sure. She made no move to write anything at all. Did she think I was making a name up?

“Well, I’m a Libertarian,” I said, adding a period to the end of the conversation.

“And you’re voting with your party,” she said, nodding. “Thanks for your time!”

“Thank you, and uh, well, um, good luck,” I said, and closed the door. Carriage return.

I don’t know if I would have gotten an argument if I had said I was a Republican, or if they would have tried to sway an admitted independent. Most folks don’t really know what to do with a Libertarian, because we probably agree with a lot of the things they believe, but with different priorities and different reasons.

It gave me an idea, though. Maybe the quickest way to get rid of door-to-door campaigners is to say you’re a Libertarian?

Democrats – Still Reading From the Script

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Reason Magazine’s greatest asset is its point of view: that any law or policy that directly infringes upon an individual’s right to pursue his own happiness must be very carefully considered, with a bias against such laws. This is why Libertarians scare people – we have some pretty major ideas in common with both parties, and yet fundamentally differ them. You can read their awesome, nonpartisan critiques here.

Who am I going to vote for? I haven’t decided yet. I’m not even sure I’ll be voting at all. I have an argument against VOTE VOTE VOTE AT ALL COSTS!, but I’ll save it for a later time. Not voting is a perfectly acceptable option in an election, and I might just exercise my right to abstain.

When I watch the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, I keep coming back to the same conclusion – these folks, every single one of them, is a what their detractors would call ivy-league elitist intellectuals. On both sides! Barack Obama and John McCain have more in common with each other than they do with us.

It’s all hype. It’s all marketing. Hillary Clinton is saying the same things that Democrats have been saying for decades: Republicans love rich people, hate the poor, want to privatize everything and only care about money and restricting your right to choose.

These candidates are reciting the same script, over and over again. They will continue to do so, the ultra-rich power-wranglers who will never have to worry about a mortgage payment, will play to their bases when they need to, open their arms to the independents when the polls lag, move closer to the center as the election day approaches and sneak through the finish line while their pundits and flacks accuse the other side of playing dirty.

In my own little way, in my own little red, brick bunker here in the rust belt, I voice my frustration and dissatisfaction with the status quo. I defy it in my own way, by writing these blogs, by posting passive-aggressive twitters and maybe even by staying home on election night.

What are you doing? Voting the party line?

The Hypnotized Never Lie

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There are some political shenanigans going on here at my second home. I’m like an old man deprived of his favorite chair – they’ve taken up residence at my favorite spot with their fliers and Macbooks and signs and magnets and things. You can tell who they are because they all wear buttons with one name: OBAMA.

I love the idea of a black President with a Muslim name. I really do. In an age where the common wisdom rejects our current President because the rest of the world hates him, electing a man from a race of former slaves whose father was a practicing member of the religion whose fundamentalist radicals recently murdered a lot of our citizens is a really appealing idea. We can point to our national conscience and say: “Hey, dudes. Check out our guy. That’s how better we are than you. We elected a black muslim. Would you elect a Christian woman or whatever to lead your country?”

But he’s not going to change a goddamn thing.

He’s not going to end the war and bring the troops home any faster than a Republican would. It’s cute that you think he will, but he won’t. There are overriding strategic ramifications at work in Iraq, many of which are invisible to anybody who isn’t the Commander in Chief. When the next guy gets in office, he’s going to meet with the Joint Chiefs, they’re going to show him how a fast exit from the theatre of war will result in one of the biggest clustereffs in the history of the American military, and then let him take credit for smaller-scale troop removals and draw-downs that were in the pipeline already. Obama gets to keep his political promises and the massive industry of war gets to continue.

Bush and his cronies made the decision to go into Iraq, for sure. But the consequences are undeniable and untenable. It’s their bath water, but we have to lie in it. I don’t like it either, but we just have to deal.

A woman’s right to an abortion is in no danger. Gay marriage will probably not happen in our lifetimes. Socialized medicine, one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas, won’t get past committee. A version of it that helps poor families might, but not the sweeping changes that many people are hoping for.

There’s a reason for all of this, and it’s called the wedge.

The Republicans know that they can continue to make money and stuff from people who don’t want two men to be able to get married to each other. If they want to keep making money, then they will make sure not to let the idea get very far.

This is the pivot around which all of politics moves – the acquisition of power, money and influence. People who want to change things don’t get very far, and their changes rarely amount to much. Waging war is the big exception, but even a war doesn’t change the domestic situation much.

Our politicians are figureheads, attractive faces slapped on stumps and soapboxes. They don’t represent constituents anymore, they represent themselves. They don’t fight for what’s right, they fight for more power. They don’t have opinions, they have exit polls.

Any illusion you have that Barack Obama is any different from the many people who followed him is just that, inexorably and inevitably. He is not going to make your life better. He is not going to change things.

How many politicians have run, and have been elected, on the same platform of change and solidarity? Every few decades, we elect an outsider who wants in.

Do you really think Barack Obama wants to be President because he wants to help people? Really?

I look over at the stumpers and I see the main guy adjust his Buddy Holly glasses and dive right into his argument against Hillary – he’s trying to convince somebody not to vote for her. I listen to everything he says, and I see his fervor.

But then I imagine what’s going to happen if Hillary gets the nomination and he’s out campaigning for her – he’ll be saying the same things, or maybe slightly different things, about a completely different person. He’s going to be arguing for the very person he’s arguing against.

Why? He can’t believe in both people, can he?

Can he?