I’ve been lurking at Kos for the last year or so and finally started posting a few weeks ago; in the time I’ve been reading here I’ve learned quite a bit and I’ve had to think and research some ideas. Initially, I had three candidates to choose from - even though Dennis Kucinich has a lot of positions on paper that I really like, his woo-woo new ageiness gets to me and his abortion inconsistency bothers me. I also don’t believe he has any sort of chance of winning in a primary at all, although I do believe you should vote your heart rather than your cynicism; still, he just doesn’t do it for me. There are other candidates, I know, but I really feel I am left with Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.
Let me take an apparent detour, which I promise will return to the main road very quickly.
If you pull on a puppy’s leash to get her to follow you she will pull in the opposite direction; this phenomenon is widely known to physiologists (and behaviorist-oriented dog trainers), who call it negative thigmotaxis.
From the beginning I have felt that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was producing negative thigmotaxis in me, whether it was intentional or not. There is some argument that it’s intentional in that the "inevitability" trope does get pushed at us, but in fairness it seemed to come just as much from the media as from the Clinton camp - perhaps even more from the media. At first, when I came to Kos, it seemed to me that the Clinton followers were getting picked on here. Rightly or wrongly, most of us are sympathetic to the underdog, and I tended to root for them just on principle, and I started trying to educate myself about her positions a bit more. As her followers never tire of telling you, her voting record taken across the board isn’t that bad and in some ways is better than the others. She has a lot of great attributes! But she has negatives too, and her negatives are stong ones. In the end, it is these negatives that push me away, and I know when camel’s back broke. For me, the defining moment in my own attitude was the YearlyKos event, with her "lobbyist" statement, which just insulted me tremendously. Without my wife’s job I would have no health insurance, but I’m sure somewhere someone would be lobbying for me, maybe even giving money to Hillary Clinton, but she tells me that it wouldn’t have any effect on her position. Someone, and I don’t know who it was, posted this, which I felt so strongly about that I copied it down:
The most shocking thing Clinton said was not that she would take money from lobbyists, but that she would take their money and they should expect nothing from her in return! She says lobbyists represent real people, but then says none of these real people will make a difference in her thinking.
Yet right now one of the really big holes in Clinton’s campaign is her lack of anything substantive on health care. Dennis Kucinich has a plan which is more radical than anyone else’s, but the other main candidates at least have something out there although they is much too insurance-based for me to really like them. Clinton has very little but she assured us that by her second term she would have a plan; well, that remark didn’t go over too well so I understand she is "now working" on a plan. I hope that is true; I think that Ms. Clinton is smart, feisty, and she has a lot of connections - she would make a great president compared to George Bush but I’d still like to hear what her plan is.
Her stance on the war just isn’t very good in comparison with Obama’s or Edwards. The problem I’m having here in this diary is keeping it from becoming a Hit Hillary piece, but the fact is, her negatives are what are knocking her out of the race for me, so I’ll stop with them.
In the meantime, conservatives such as Karl Rove are announcing that she will be the (flawed - his word) Democratic candidate, while more moderate conservatives are saying that given the poor crop of Republican entries, she is the best choice choice for them: http://www.latimes.com/...
The pressure is building.
Getting back to my own personal negative thigmotaxis, I feel that some of Clinton’s supporters on Kos have become much more strident, posting on seemingly every thread in which anybody is mentioned, often making as many as nine or ten comments in the course of the thread. These people (there are four who tag team), I now feel, are starting to act like the dog owner pulling on the leash and I have become the dog; instinctively, I pull back. It’s a bit like what happens when you first see a billboard BRAWNDO - THE THIRST MUTILATOR and ignore it, but later, as you continue to BRAWNDO - THE THIRST MUTILATOR drive home you realize that there are an awful lot BRAWNDO - THE THIRST MUTILATOR of these things beside the road, and pretty soon you’ll do anything but buy BRAWNDO - THE THIRST MUTILATOR whatever it is. Especially when it is working so hard to position itself as "inevitable".
I’d rather not have it become BRAWNDO - THE THIRST MUTILATOR - IT’S YOUR GIRL. They’ve become totally counterproductive from my point of view and I know that’s not their intention.
Thigmotaxically speaking, Barack Obama has a couple of followers that try to interrupt all the time too, but I find them less annoying; I’m not making up my mind based on what DailyKos members think anyway. I like Obama. But my feeling is that he’s young and if he had a term or two as VP under his belt he would be fantastic and I don’t think he is there yet. I don’t mean to dismiss him with one short paragraph, but in the end -
I like Edwards better. But he’s a human being too - I don’t like everything about him. But of the three, his rhetoric comes closest to what I want to hear a presidential candidate say even if I’m realistic enough to know that should he be elected he would never be able to push through everything he talks about. I actually appreciate his trial lawyer background and the fact that he chose to make a lot of money at it while suing corporations on a contingency basis since the plaintiffs often had little money. He could have worked for them rather than against them and I salute that. The whole "traitor to his class" issue is something weird dreamed up by the media as far as I can tell and it certainly doesn’t work on me. If he is a traitor to his class I’d sure as hell rather he be like he is than another Clarence Thomas, who went the other way.
I would like more of a universal coverage single-payer system proposal from him. However, just as my objection to Clinton’s refusal to even consider her vote on the war was wrong isn’t the deal breaker for me, Edwards’ health care package isn’t one either. Hey, at least he has one.
I did not like his vote for the war in Iraq but I either have to accept his admission that it was wrong or simply decide he is a liar. When I have made mistakes I’ve tried to apologize for them; it’s what I think you’re supposed to do. For me to blow his apology off would require a degree of cynicism I don’t have if I were going to vote for him.
John Edwards strikes me as being pretty much what I think of when I think "Democrat" and not all of the other nominees do that. At heart, I guess I’m a populist and he’s playing that card; it’s such a refreshing change from what we’ve had in living memory that I’d like to see him pull it off. I also think Elizabeth Edwards is a hell of an asset, and in saying that I don’t want to take anything away from Michelle Obama.
His biggest weakness is that the media has decided they hate him and this worries me. Given what they did to Dean, I think the worry is realistic but just as Dean used new technology to raise money and get his message out I believe that Edwards has used the internet better than the other Democrats. The internet alone will not get him elected, though; he needs a breakout and that’s simply the kind of event I can’t predict.
On the other side of the fence, if Mitt Romney becomes the Republican nominee, as I’m betting he will, I think Edwards is the best counterfoil to put up against him. I have some close degrees of separation with Giuliani and he really is King Midas in reverse - all his relationships turn to shit. I have trouble taking Giuliani’s chances seriously, certainly as seriously as Giuliani himself does. But the contrast between Romney and Edwards plays to Edwards’ strengths and Romney’s weaknesses in my mind. I’ve diaried about Romney and contrast before because it can be used so effectively against him - here, in a comparison between his five sons and the Sullivan brothers in WWII.
I know, I know, every one of you can post a million reasons why I’m wrong, some of them so devastating they’ve become your sig lines. I can only say what I think, and unless something happens to change my mind (this is politics, after all), I’ll be supporting John Edwards.
Finally, because of my own reactions to some of the candidates’ attempts to boost their own favorites by taking the others down gratuitously, a message to the Edwards supporters on the site: please don’t pull on the other puppies’ leashes either.
I don’t really care to post a tip jar. As I understand it the purpose is to get more points toward Trusted User status, something I will never have because I simply don’t post enough. I’d rather not get on the treadmill.