it happened one day in February…

Posted on Wednesday 7 May 2008

[returning on line after our site was ‘hacked’ yesterday]

I enjoyed staying up for the returns from Gary Indiana. It felt like old times. I’m not going to join the chorus about Hillary Clinton staying too long. I’ve liked her except for some of her votes, and I understand that she is struggling and doesn’t exactly know what hit her. Whatever it was, it’s pretty clear when it happened – February 12th, 2008 [VA, DC, MD]:


from CNN

I live in the reddest of counties in a red state – a county in Georgia that sent some soldiers to fight for the North in the Civil War and has only gone for two Democratic Presidential contenders in its history – FDR during the War and native son Jimmy Carter. Today, I was with my wife at a Physical Therapy appointment [two new knees] and all the people there, including the young therapists, could talk of little else but the election returns. All white people, Fox News droning on the television, and they were talking in an interested way about it being time for the Clintons to throw in the towel so the Democratic Party could focus on November. I haven’t heard such talk in this place ever. I liked the energy being expended thinking about politics in a serious way. Who knows where all of this will lead? But for today, I’m hopeful for America. And I just loved this.

I don’t know if the Democratic Party will pull together after all of this. If it was some Republican’s plan to pit Obama’s Supporters against Clinton’s supporters so as to disenfranchise the Democrats in November, it was a brilliant scheme. It’s given McCain, a weak candidate a bye. It’s potentially chased off Democratic Voters. And it has focused us away from the Bush Administration big time. While I prefer [and actually increasingly prefer] Obama, I’m going tp vote for the Democratic Nominee if I have to be wheeled to the polls after the car wreck I haven’t even had. There has never been a more important time to vote against something in our history.

Unfortunately, the issues that are important in the primary are different from the ones in the general election. The Democratic Convention is the last week in August. That leaves only September and October for the campaign. We’re all worried that that will be a bad thing. Maybe not. The issues of the Republican government we’ve endured for the last eight years are clear. Obama and Clinton are both competent, both Democrats, neither is particularly Liberal or Libertine. Both are Minority Candidates in the way we now use that word. Maybe all this campaigning business is being overhyped. It’s not a particularly popular thing to say, but any fool knows we don’t need one day more of the lunacy we’ve had to live with these last two terms…

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