Andrew Sullivan reprints the following from a 20-something reader:
I’ll just put that out there. If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can’t invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again. If the Democratic party decides that it can not risk nominating a great and decent African American man because his pastor is a scary African American man, it does not deserve power because it will have caved to what is worst about America. Racists on both sides of the divide will rejoice at having taking down the biggest threat to their belief system since Martin Luther King….and young people like myself will burrow deeper into to the holes we were in before Barack Obama dug us out.
As Stephen Bainbridge notes, attitudes like this are just plain silly for so many reasons.
First, at this point Barack Obama has nobody to blame for his Rev. Wright problems but himself. If he had given the speech he gave earlier this week back in March, rather than the “I can no more disavow him” speech he gave in Philadelphia, it’s entirely possible that this issue would have been over and done with. Instead, he tried to have it both ways — repudiating the comments that Wright made while saying at the same time, rather implausibly I might add, that he never heard comments like that himself despite the fact that he’s belonged to Wright’s Church for 20 years, was married there, and had his children baptized there. By not making a clean break with Wright at the earliest opportunity, Obama guaranteed that the issue would come back at some point.
Second, the idea of withdrawing completely from politics just because your favorite candidate loses is just, well, juvenile. It’s similar to the attitude that many Ron Paul supporters had back at the end of 2007, before reality hit and people actually started voting when they said that they would never vote for anyone other than the Texas Congressman. Politics sometimes means that the guy who you like loses, if you can’t handle that then you don’t belong in the game to begin with.
Or, as Bainbridge notes:
I thought about sitting out the 2008 election if McCain or Romney got the GOP nomination. Even when I was most disgusted with the GOP during the primaries, however, I never thought about dropping out permanently. Shit happens. Grown ups get over it. They move on.
And they also realize that politics isn’t the most important thing in the world and one election usually doesn’t decide the fate of the Republic.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am
It’s a bigger issue than whether Obama wins or not. It’s an issue of whether the reduction of our election process to the influence of numbingly repetitive sound bites makes an individual’s attempt to effect the process pointless. Does anyone really think that Reverend Wright is more important than the recent escalation of violence in Iraq, or the utterly ignored Pentagon-placed “independent” military analysts on our “news” shows, or any number of important/frightening issues that actually ought to influence our votes more than the rants of an angry black preacher?(who by the way, said nothing different than Ron Paul in terms of “chickens coming home to roost”–look it up, all you deeply offended patriots). To proclaim that it’s juvenile not to feel fairly desperate about the stupidity of what constitutes our political “dialogue” is juvenile in itself. This is not about entertainment. This is not an episode of “Survivor America” where the candidate with the cleverest maneuvers deserves to win. Our country, and the world, is in trouble on so many levels, and here we sit in America worried about which acquaintance of which candidate said what, which candidate does the best job of pretending to be Joe Working Class, and which candidate is the most patriotic. If we really are that stupid, then I say that bowing out of the political process is the only sanity-saving thing to do. Why continue to beat one’s head against the wall…or the better, although overused, analogy would be, why keep rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? May as well just pour a stiff drink, find a comfy chair, and watch the ship go down.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Lord. Carol, Excitable Andy, and the Gen Y twit need to get a clue. Barry has yet to show that he has a grasp of anything, other than his own self-importance. Would any of you care to post a copy of his “record of achievement?” Thought not. That leaves us with judging his character by examining his comments and associates. His comments indicate that he is woefully unfamiliar with cold realities of the outside world, and his associates, thus far, appear to be corrupt, radical nutjobs. Barry is a classic empty-suit liberal, spouting various crypto-socialist schemes that will “save America.” But feel free to crawl back into you hole after the election. I prefer voters with a modicum of sense and intelligence.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
You watch Clinton if elected President do any of the things she has promised. She is a proven lier, and will pander to the republican party. She is telling big whopper lies just to get elected and counting on simple minds, such as possibly yours, to do so. She is right now pandering with the enemy, and you think she cares about you!!?? Ignorance, is what she is counting on the most, to win the election. It worked for, G.W.Bush, and it will work for her too, no doubt.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:29 pm
And what makes you think Obama will be any different ?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:57 pm
One part of Obama’s record of achievement: http://www.democraticcentral.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1565. Also, I think that the reason why many Obama supporters ARE Obama supporters is because he speaks out about the distractions and divisiveness of our current political dialogue and to see him possibly derailed by such a divise distraction is just a slap in the face of what they hoped would change in this election cycle.