Would you like to know how it feels to vote for a protest candidate in a very close Presidential race? I can tell you.
It doesn’t feel all that good even while you’re doing it. Then, after the Republicans’ idiot child king gets into office, it feels even worse.
I voted Green in the 2000 presidential election, for many of the same reasons that I see a lot of Bernie supporters talking about now. And for my sins, I actually have a record of my thinking at the time, because I have been old on the internet for a long time now. Here is a chunk of something I wrote explaining my decision to vote for Ralph Nader in 2000:
“Especially now that almost nobody is voting these days, the defection of a particular block of voters, even if it’s small, is of serious concern to either party. That’s why you see George jr. out there whoring himself for the Christian right, just like his father before him. But Gore doesn’t whore for the liberal left, because he doesn’t have to. He knows that as long as he doesn’t actually start talking about criminalizing abortion and rounding gay people up in cattle cars, we’ll stick with him just out of fear. Which means we’ve already lost any power we had. We can’t influence the Democratic party’s agenda; we can’t impact Gore’s platform; we can’t put any kind of pressure on him. All we can do is concede, concede, concede. Telling ourselves while we do it that it’s all right, it could be worse.“
Ah, the pugnacious pungency of my younger days, how I miss it. Anyway, rereading that has reminded me of how BAD it feels to be in the position of having to choose between two candidates who don’t seem willing to fight for anything you believe in. And I actually do not disagree, generally speaking, with Young Plaidder’s assessment of the evils of the two-party system. So, you know, it curbs my desire to yell at the Bernie Sanders supporters who are still not willing to vote for Clinton. They’re already in pain, it’s neither helpful nor strategic to make them feel worse.
Here are some things I know now that I was wrong about then:
1) I SEVERELY underestimated the amount of damage that an unqualified and incompetent President of the United States can cause. SEVERELY.
I have seen a number of comments from the Bernie or Bust perspective suggesting that if Trump got elected, he’s so uninterested in the whole business of government that he might not actually bother implementing what passes for his platform. Friends, you may be right or you may be wrong. But I’ll tell you what: the eight disastrous years of George W. Bush’s presidency, during which I am 100% convinced Dick Cheney made most of the major decisions, are all you need to teach you that incompetence at the top can be just as destructive and dangerous as malice. It’s very, very unhealthy for any organization when the person who has all the executive power is someone who either can’t or won’t use it effectively. It leads to factionalism, infighting, and corruption, because his subordinates know they can get up to whatever shit they want and nobody will bother stopping them. If you want to imagine a Trump presidency, try imagining a Trump cabinet. He doesn’t even know enough Republican politicians to fill it with. It’ll either be cronies from his ‘business’ dealings or names that Mike Pence fed to him figuring he won’t know any better. Who wants to see what a gang of evangelicals and profiteers get to do to this country while the boss is out golfing? I don’t need to. I’ve seen it already. It’s hideous. We’re still trying to recover from it. I mean this is the reason that New Orleans was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina…and nothing was done about it. Because Bush put in some chum of his as the head of FEMA who could not have found his ass with both hands and a flashlight if you gave him a week to do it. And that is why there were corpses floating in the streets of New Orleans days after the hurricane was over. Incompetence kills. It doesn’t have to be evil. You’d be amazed how much damage stupid and untrained can do.
2) I didn’t expect that we would experience a massive terrorist attack on US soil during the next 4 years.
That was not an unreasonable assumption to make in 2000. It’s a completely unreasonable assumption to make in 2016. I think it’s also pretty clear which candidate would, given the opportunity to wreak VENGEANCE! that such attacks always provide, do the most damage with it. The entire twenty-first century, nearly, testifies to how catastrophic it is when the person in charge of responding to a terrorist attack on American soil is an idiot who has no understanding of dipolmacy or foreign policy and no way of making decisions apart from listening to his own ID.
3) I didn’t appreciate the importance of the one issue Gore would actually have made some significant movement on: climate change.
I honestly still think Gore only did all the other crap he did–like, say, choosing Lieberman as VP–because he wanted to have a chance to GET to the Oval Office and do something about climate change. He grasped the importance of it long before most other American politicians wanted to talk about it. I really wish he’d been in the Oval Office in 2000 to get the ball rolling. I really, really, really wish that.
Here’s the good news from that paragraph: the Bernie Sanders campaign has already changed some of the things I was complaining about in 2000. The platform has moved left. The agenda has changed. There is pressure on the Clinton campaign, to which they have responded. In other words, just by running the primary campaign, Sanders has already achieved a lot of what I was mistakenly hoping my protest vote in 2000 was going to achieve.
Bernie Sanders’s speech last night was basically a bunch of variations on that theme: that the Sanders campaign itself has already had a greater impact than a protest vote (or protest abstention) would have, because it has changed the party. Has it changed Hillary Clinton? Who knows. But if the past 8 years have taught us much, it’s that in terms of shit you can get done, Congress matters just as much as the presidency if not more. Get enough left-thinking Democrats into Congress, and they can lead even if Hillary Clinton won’t.
So anyway. I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. Because I don’t want to have to say that I did not do everything I could to prevent George W. Bush from becoming the SECOND WORST ever President of the United States.
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