Oy, it’s starting already, the angry shouting from people outraged by the scandalous fact that some people are not excited about Hillary Clinton as a candidate for president and are talking about not voting for her when and if the time comes. It’s the 2000 campaign all over again.
The shout goes like this: the Democratic Party candidate is all there is. You can’t vote for someone to the left of that candidate, because that is taking your vote from the Democratic Party candidate and giving it to that outsider person. That’s reality. You have to submit to it.
There’s one example at Addicting Info:
Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s announcement on Sunday was met with laments from the left that Hillary is not a “real” progressive and that liberals shouldn’t settle for the “lesser of two evils.” Gee whiz! I wish Warren or Sanders would run!
Yawn. Another round of liberal hand-wringing that will do nothing but leach enthusiasm from a critical race.
Hello? It’s April 2015. The election is more than a year and a half in the future. Clinton has only announced that she’s running; she hasn’t actually sewn up the nomination yet; that won’t happen for more than a year. It’s way too early to start telling us we have to shut up and lump it because she’s all there is.
But anyway that wouldn’t be a good thing to say even if it were the day after the primaries and she the candidate. It’s never a good thing to say. Our votes are our votes, and we are not stealing them from the major party candidate by voting for someone we think better.
Also? We’re not so stupid that we don’t know the obvious facts. We don’t need to be told for the 90 thousandth time that a minority candidate can’t win. We realize that. There’s no need to keep shouting it in our faces.
Is Hillary Clinton the perfect liberal candidate? Of course not. There is no such thing except in the minds of ideologues and children. Every politician ever, including, yes, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have made compromises or have taken stances that some part of the left will find “problematic.” The Green Party will not magically be immune to lobbyists and influence peddlers. “Voting all the bums out” will not miraculously replace them with paragons of unassailable integrity. It won’t happen. Ever.
Letting an imaginary perfect be the enemy of the tangible good is a sure way to place our country under the yoke of another generation of a conservative pro-business, pro-fundamentalist, pro-hate Supreme Court.
Liberals are the reality-based community. Time to start acting like it and vote for change we can actually achieve.
Or, alternatively, we could vote for the candidate we would like to see win.