Now that the primaries are over, remember what is truly at stake!!!
Subject: Now that the primaries are over, remember what is truly at stake!!!
Hi to all! This is kind of long, but I felt like I just had to write it.
I was agonized today to see a column in “The Tennesseean” in which the writer pitched the case for many Hillary Clinton supporters to wind up voting for John McCain, and claimed that this is what is happening across our country. According to this columnist, women who supported Clinton are saying they will now vote for McCain, and the writer brandished a supposed national poll showing McCain currently with an 8-point lead among white women.
Admittedly, the columnist was from the right, which throws her perspective off right away. After all, she has an agenda to help urge that switch along. But I was agonized, quite literally, to think that any woman who has called herself a Democrat or even an independent could for one second even contemplate voting for John McCain in the fall, simply because her candidate did not win the Denocrtic nomination. (That goes for men, too!)
Now that the bruising divisiveness of our primary process is behind us, it is time for all of us to remember what is truly at stake here. This is no peacetime, everything’s going great election cycle. Our country is in serious trouble, and perhaps standing at the precipous from which one more false step will lead to its permanent decline.
The matter at stake that has lasting ramifications for many decades to come is that of the Supreme Court. Seven of nine justices currently serving were appointed by Republican presidents. As many as four seats on the Court may come up in the next four years, and almost certainly two at minimum will open up for appointments.
John McCain is now firmly on record as saying he will nominate for those appointments the exact same kind of justices and federal judges we have seen from George W. Bush, and that means only one thing for those women who vote for him — fewer rights. Fewer rights in employment and equal pay. Fewer in terms of sexual harassment. Fewer reproductive rights. The list is lengthy.
As is the list of issues on which McCain’s so-called “straight talk express” has been very clear in putting him on the record in the past three months: continued war in Iraq; no diplomacy when it comes to our enemies (so we make decisons in a vacuum); continued “tax cut” deficit spending that hurts our economy while benefiting the rich. It goes on and on from the man whose Senate record shows he voted the Bush line 95% of the time! It’s Bush Lite — sound centrist, but less substance!
And read what the “Guardian” newspaper of London wrote today about how Republicans want to try to exploit any rifts in our party:
“With the Democratic nomination settled, the Republican party are seeking to exploit divisions within the Democratic party and peel away Democrats and independents uneasy with Barack Obama.
As soon as it became clear Obama had clinched the nomination on Tuesday night, the Republican national committee’s research arm began releasing memos highlighting criticism of the Illinois senator from fellow Democrats.
The Republicans memos featured primary-campaign comments that are critical of Obama from Democrats, including former president Jimmy Carter, senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, and of course Hillary Clinton. “Democrats vs Obama,” the rubric is named.
The Republican party hopes to capitalise on the lingering dissension among Clinton supporters, and to split them off from the party while they are still angry. The quarry: 17.5m Americans who voted for Clinton in the primaries. The party also hopes to show independent voters that not even the Democrats are united behind Obama.
“The longer the Democrats have [to take] to heal these divisions, the longer it gives McCain to organise in the key states and raise money,” said David Johnson, an Atlanta-based Republican strategist. “It keeps them from attacking him and trying to tie McCain to Bush. If his own party has so many questions about him, how can the American people support him?”
Republicans say that using Democrats’ own words against Obama effectively augments attacks from McCain surrogates like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who this morning said, “for all of Barack Obama’s charm, that he doesn’t have the experience to lead our economy at a time like this.”
It’s time for us all to take a giant deep breath and begin to heal from the primaries — and then to consider the benefits our party has derived from those primaries and the risks of not following through with that process all the way to the White House.
We have benefited from the 56-primary Obama-Clinton struggle because the nominee of our party will now stand as a much stronger candidate as a result of that process. The fact that the primary process actually did what it was constructed to do this time, and was not short-circuited, means that presumptive nominee Barack Obama emerges better tested and better ready for the fall. There was no free pass this time for either Obama or Clinton, and whoever emerged was sure to be strenghtened by the process and far less likely to get KO’ed by a surprise attack later. There is a far lesser chance of a John Kerry “Swift-Boat” type attack being sprung on candidates so well vetted by the primary process. Both Clinton and Obama became tougher fighters during the primaries, and that will serve both well in their political futures.
We are stronger as a party now, having drawn in millions of young and new voters, as well as attracting some Republicans and independents who for the first time have declared themselves Democrats in the primaries. We are poised by any reasonable measure for victory on a national scale that may be of historic proportions — not only in the presidential race, but in the House and Senate as well — IF we can heal and join together to do this. It quite literally is ours to lose, and the decisions each one of us makes between now and November will decide our own fate as a party and as a nation.
Do we want to help our nation emerge from this cave we are living in? Or do we want to yet again fall back into the darkness? It’s up to each of us. I hope you’ll reflect on this, and pray about it, and then join me in reaching toward the future!
Thanks for all you do!
Jim Steele
Vice Chair
Lincoln County Democratic Party (Tennessee)
June 6th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Excellent commentary from one of my Democratic friends in Tennessee.