The Daily Background

Some people, including esteemed commenters on this very site, don’t seem to understand what primaries are all about. If you criticize Hillary Clinton, inevitable nominee that she apparently is, you are not “keeping your eye on the ball” (the ball being Republicans).

Hey, I’ve got a great idea: how about we sink the ship? I mean, gee, wouldn’t it be terrible if Hillary Clinton were president? Wouldn’t that suck even more than President of the United States Rudolph Giuliani? President of the United States Mitt Romney? So let’s keep up these character assassination sentiments that will further fracture the left and have us squabbling like 5 year-olds when the Republican machine gets its crap together, picks someone, lines up behind them, uses our own arguments against our candidates, fixes the voting in Ohio AGAIN and steamrolls us all to death.

Way to keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is obviously that we couldn’t let Hillary Clinton be president. I’m not even a Hillary person, particularly, I don’t really care who the candidate is as long as they win, but the Obama people are even more acidic and vituperative than the Edwards people and I think many of them don’t care if the whole ship sinks.

The comment goes on… and on… and on…. and on…. about how Obama supporters are the most vile and terrible of people, and how I should never criticize Hillary cause she’ll end up the nominee and then my criticism (from her left flank) will somehow convince independent voters that it is better to vote for Mitt Romney or something.

Way to not keep my eye on the ball? Way to not know what a primary is all about.

This does provide me an opportunity to address the end of primary season though. I will vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is come November 2008, and I am pretty well convinced that whichever Democrat gets nominated, they will win the general election. My logic is as follows:

The odds of history are against them. Only once in the past 50 years has a new president been elected after a member of his own party occupies the White House for two full terms. The only exception was when a still-popular Ronald Reagan left the oval office to Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1989.

It will be exactly twenty years later when Bush’s son leaves office to the forty-fourth president of the United States on January 20, 2009. If history (and poll numbers) are any indication, it seems doubtful that the next commander in chief will be another Republican.

To put it plainly: The only Republicans likely to get the Republican nomination are George Bush Republicans. And there is simply no way that another George Bush Republican is going to win an election. Not in 2008, not in this political climate. I refuse to believe that after the last 8 years of Brownie incompetence, Cheney lies, and Rumsfeld wars, that Americans are going to go against the grain of history and precedent to choose another Republican Administration to fix all the problems that this Republican Administration has made. So, simply said, whoever wins the Democratic nomination (at least out of the three candidates with a chance of winning it at this point) is going to become president.

Why should I, as a Democratic primary voter, be focused solely or mostly on criticizing the GOP during a Democratic primary? This is a Democratic primary after all, and if we’re not going to focus on our differences as a party, then when are we going to? When it gets to the general election, parties tend to put these sorts of things behind us, and go forward united (and yes, if that means Hillary is the nominee, I will be proud to cast a vote for her).

The idea that I, or anybody else should hold off on criticizing candidates in this primary, either because it isn’t proper or because it will hurt the Democratic nominee’s chances of getting elected (”sinking the ship”), is absolutely absurd, and frankly a GOP-esque dissent-quashing scare tactic.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog