I was rambling on about twitter earlier, developed my thoughts, and thought I would share. I think the major part of why this election is so frustrating for me is that neither of the candidates excite me the way Barack Obama did in 2008. Everything about that election was just magical to me- I still remember sitting in the hotel room at the conference I was attending on election night with my boss, and we were drinking and hooting and hollering every time another state went for him.
There was just something there in the man that just seemed larger than the times, and that exists to this day. I hope I am wrong, but deep down i don’t think I am ever going to feel that way about a candidate again. He was, in full dork speak, my Neo. I would crawl over broken glass for the man, and still would. Mind you, his record is not perfect. From my perspective he’s been pretty bad on a few issues, but when I balance that with how far we have come, and the grace and dignity with which it has been accomplished in the face of a worthless cowed media, backstabbing blue dogs, and a sociopathic opposition party, and I still marvel at what has happened these past eight years.
I love documentaries, and I often sit and play them like one would a podcast or the radio while I am working, and one that I play quite frequently is Ken Burns on the Roosevelts. I was a newly minted Democrat when Obama took the stage, and he made me a Democrat for life. The same can be said of Obama about me as can be said about the people, now dying off, who still have pictures of FDR in their living rooms.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Bernie, and I think I like the Hillary that isn’t media managed and shielded from me with a screen of bullshit from her sycophants, and I love listening to Al Franken and Sherrod Brown and Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren up there busting the balls of big banks, but they aren’t Obama to me and never will be.
Having said that, I also get that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton that I felt and feel about President Obama, so I try not to be too much of a dick about the nonsense that gets spewed. You can decide whether or not I have succeeded, but if you decide I haven’t, just think about this- I am actively holding back most of the time when I talk about these campaigns. The Bernie Sanders supporters can be some of the most irritating human beings on the planet, as if they took every annoying fucking trait of the Paulites and said to themselves- “Let’s take this to eleven.” Likewise, the thick slime of the permanent Clinton advisors, who will literally say anything, even if it defies all logic and reason, makes me want to gag at times. I think the utter gibberish her supporters spew is also one of her best attributes- she can command such a loyal following that they will willingly debase themselves publicly in support of her. That’s loyalty. And in politics, that is useful and EXTREMELY valuable.
I think the thing that makes me jaded, though, and again, this is just me blabbing, is that I don’t feel like I had to make things up to be outraged about when defending Obama. People were really doing the things that pissed me off. People who should know better were saying outrageous things. I didn’t need to make things up to appear offended about- there was so much offensive shit being launched at Obama that you couldn’t keep up with it.