The Academy’s Bench Warmer

Next week, I’ll be having dinner with dear friends of mine, one of whom is a rabid active Clinton supporter.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain why I’m rooting for Obama.  This post by Ari Kelman over at The Edge of the American West is a pretty damn good start, especially this bit:

And make no mistake, as we choose a Democratic nominee for the presidential election, we also very likely are choosing a leader of the party. We have to ask ourselves, will we allow the Clintons to continue to dominate the Democratic Party? They have, for years, steered it to the center. Recently, they seem to be veering further to the right. And if that’s the direction they’ve chosen in the primary, what can we expect during what promises to be a difficult general election campaign?

There it is.  That’s maybe the biggest reason I want Obama to win: because I want to be able to support the Democratic Party in the future.  I’m a lefty, and I voted for Nader in 2000–yeah, that’s right; fuck you, too–because I couldn’t hold my nose and vote for a party that had chosen a middle course between wimpy-centrism and the Evil Right.  With Obama, we get a shot at a Democratic Party in which there’s room for the Left; with Clinton and all the machinery and baggage that she has chosen to bring with her, it’ll be more of the same fence-fucking centrism.  And I just can’t take it anymore.

I probably won’t say all of that over dinner, of course.  Might cause indigestion.