Sanity on the internet!

or another Clinton supporter on the internet besides Taylor Marsh and friends. You may recall Pizza Diavola as the only other person in the universe interested so far in intersectionality in communities of color the week I was at Feministe. Or not. Anyway, I remember she said she’s a second generation Korean American and here she says she’s a recent college grad. She likes Clinton the same reasons I do in her excerpt below. I don’t want another President I can have a beer with. I want the designated driver, the uncool mom, the total bitch (not that she’s one) who will take care of business and clean up this mess and no more nice guys like Gore, Kerry now Obama who capitulate to Republicans. We need a total bitch who will take care of business. R U kidding me? I wonder if her electability is more sexist wishful thinking than reality because we create our own Baudrillesque hyperreality these days. We became the media in 2008.

I’ll be voting for Clinton, because I think she’s smarter, more competent, more experienced, more liberal, and tougher than Obama. I think she knows her policies better, I think she’d be better at the actual work of governing, that she’d be better at managing the various factions vying for attention and power, and I think she’s run a very good campaign in the face of undisguised, unbelievable misogyny. I think she’s better prepared to deal with a general election than Obama is–she’s a better debater and the Republicans have nothing new to throw at her. I am also a fan of the fact that she had the most diverse campaign staff of all the Democratic candidates and that she doesn’t hang out with ex-gay bigots.

On a side note, I am so sick of this generational shit and this unity/end of partisanship shit. As for the former, I’m a recent college grad and I’m not enamored of Obama and his vague promises of change and unity, whatever the hell they mean, and I’m not charmed by his poor oratorical skills (full disclosure: I haven’t been impressed by an orator since Cicero died). I do, in fact, pore over the details between the Clinton and Obama health care proposals; “the bitterness, divisiveness and ineffectiveness” do not make politics “seem so unsavory,” it’s the Democrats’ repeated and cowardly capitulation to the Republicans that make politics unsavory to me; and although I am ” just fed up with the status quo,” I want something more than vague, unspecific promises of “change” and I’m skeptical of a “rockstar who embodies [that] desire [for change].” Would you all please stop with the “college students love Obama” crap? Not all college students do, and we’re not all idiots who want nothing more than “change” and don’t care about policy differences and platforms, whether we support Obama, Clinton, Edwards, or none of the above.

As for Obama’s unity/end of partisanship shtick, I have a real problem with that, which Melissa McEwan articulates at Shakesville: “I Have Questions For Barack Obama.” In November 2006, the Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress. It was going to be a period of change, it was going to be the beginning of the end of the social conservatism, fiscal irresponsibility, mindless militarism, corporate pandering, and everything else that Bush & Co. have been doing to destroy the country.

Instead, the Democratic Congress has repeatedly failed to get its act together and advance a liberal agenda (pro-choice, pro-environmental, anti-Bush tax cuts, pro-civil rights, pro-social welfare programs, anti-war) and instead it’s consistently capitulated to the Republicans. And yet, that is unity. That is bipartisanship. To me, in today’s world, bipartisanship and unity don’t mean working together, they mean the Democrats capitulating and giving the Republicans whatever they want. I want partisanship: I want the Democrats to stand up for liberal causes, challenge the Bush administration and the Republicans, and do the job I elected them to do, which is to represent my pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-civil rights, anti-war, anti-lobbyist, liberal self. I am perfectly happy with the twain never meeting, if that means that the Democrats do their damned jobs. Standing up for your ideals means you have to be partisan on some issues and I see nothing wrong with that. They’re called “ideals” for a reason.