pocketjournal

Time to come out – I’m for Obama. I think Barack Obama is the best thing to happen to American politics in many many years. He makes me believe that it could really be different. I am also NOT for Hillary. I’m not going to lie to you – one of the biggest reasons I like him is that I don’t want her. I’ll vote for her because I’m a Democrat and she’ll probably do a decent job if elected. 

The Iraq War is the single most important issue to me. I will not vote for a pro-war candidate. Period. Hillary Clinton’s war vote is really a big deal for me. It showed extremely poor judgment and it showed selfish calculation. She can tell me that she didn’t know, but I knew. And if I knew then there’s no reason she shouldn’t have known. I knew that Iraq didn’t have WMD and wasn’t involved in 9/11. Go back and check WC if you don’t believe me – I was saying it then. So while I understand how she came to that decision, it is, IMO unforgivable. So I am not going to vote for any candidate who supported the war. On top of that she just showed me quite recently that she still has very poor judgment when she voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to declare the Iranian Guard a terrorist organization. This was clearly intended to create a pretext for war with Iran. She did that because she has cut a lot of deals since she got to Washington. She owes all over town. She didn't show political courage, and she has never positioned herself as an anti-war leader. She even sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has never led an effort to investigate war profiteering and corruption. Because that is the kind of don't-rock-the-boat President she would be.

Presidents are not legislators. They need to lead and that means clear vision, good judgment and the ability to pull people to their cause. If we want to end this war, it has to be someone who doesn’t have a lot of their political power invested in the institutions that support the war and that made it possible. It has to be someone for whom being anti-war is an asset. Obama can talk about the war because he has been opposed to it since 2002. 150,000 Iraqis have died violently since we invaded their country. 4000 American troops have died. We invaded a country that wasn’t that great and turned it into a hellhole. We bred a non-governmental militia with Republican ties. We destroyed our economy, our reputation, and our souls. What we are doing in Iraq is wrong and we need to end it. It is very important t me that I cast my vote only for candidates who I think are able to change the conversation about Iraq.

We can’t afford health care if we don’t get out of Iraq. Every single day we spend $200 million in Iraq. Every day. It is a fantasy to think that we can afford any of the health care plans, education fixes, economic fixes, addressing energy and global warming or anything that changes the future of this country unless we can stop spending $200 million every day in Iraq. We are racking up debt and the economy is showing it. The surge that has been so successful has succeeded in pushing the violence down to the level of 2006. That is great but it still is very violent and it still doesn’t create long-term political solutions for Iraq. This isn’t a game. It needs to be taken more seriously.

I am also concerned that Hillary Clinton won’t actually win a national election. It’s like handing the Republican their playbook back. All they really have to do to win is raise her negatives by 2 or 3 points and it’s over for her. It will also raise their turnout dramatically and erase all the negative momentum from Bush. This is the moment when their coalition is finally falling apart. The moment when the divide between evangelicals and republicans is finally cracking away and who do we run? Fucking Hillary. Pita likes to say that the Democrats are the SF Giants of politics – you can count on them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I don’t want to go back to the scandal-plagued Clinton White House. I am so over that and never want to see it again. I don’t want to go back to the 90’s. That was then. And I am sick to death of the fucking Boomers and their Vietnam drama. We desperately need someone who can see the world as it is now.

For a long time now the country has been equally split between the Democrats and the Republicans. This makes any kind of real change extremely difficult because the margins are so thin. The only way to break this is to pick up new voters or to move voters from one side to the other. Obama is picking up support from Western Republicans. My cousin, an ex-marine, a staunch libertarian Republican and a Bush-hater is voting for Obama. And Obama is moving young voters who are turning out to vote in Bill Clinton numbers. And last, but certainly not least – Obama is running the rhetorical debate. He is defining the discourse. Everyone in the race is running on his language of change. And that is because he has his finger on the real pulse of the country.