A Couple of Old Democrats Sitting Around Talking
May 4th, 2008 at 5:33 am by Susie
Lance Mannion with another good one:
As much as they like and care about their candidates, to Uncle Bill and Pop Mannion Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are tools. I don’t mean that in a snide or dismissive or insulting way. Because of the way the country is set up, we need a certain type of people to go to work every day on our behalf and get things done. Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill want certain things to get done. Their argument is over which one has the better chance of getting into the position of getting those things done and which one seems more likely to be able to get those things done. But it’s the things that need to be done that are what’s important. Not the person doing them. To them it’s an argument over process not over personality and since they are in fundamental agreement about principles, they don’t worry about the personal and they can take a kind of mechanic’s delight in the process. Half the fun of any repair job is arguing over the best way to go about it before you settle down to work.
Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill went around and around, but neither one lost his temper. Neither gave an inch and the conversation only ended because at one point they turned to me and asked for my opinion and when I said I didn’t think it mattered which one got the nomination because the Republicans are broke, demoralized, and disgruntled with their candidates up and down the ticket. The Right doesn’t come out just to vote against things. They vote for things too. They won’t come out to vote for John McCain. The only people who are going to vote for him are the Republican equivalents of Uncle Bill and Pop Mannion, practical-minded party loyalists, and there just aren’t enough of those left in the Republican party. This is why the polls that are supposedly showing McCain “doing well” against either Obama or Hillary (although lately he’s not doing as “well” against her) are really all showing the same thing—he can’t get above 45 per cent of the vote. This is at a time when the Democrats are supposedly tearing themselves apart while he’s getting a free ride from the National Press Corps.
I said this and Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill exchanged sidelong looks as if to say, What are you going to do with somebody this naive?
Then the subject changed to baseball.
There are loyalists among the Republicans. It is just that they party has shipped all the jobs to China and then laughed.
I clicked through to the Vanity Fair article, which opened like this;
“After two terms of George W. Bush, which only seemed like a scarred eternity, American voters (so the scenario went) would be pining for Democratic recapture of the White House and a return to competency as a novel change of pace. Let the reclamation begin.”
So I’m thinking another lens to look through would be which of the candidates started their run thinking that a Democratic president would be a shoo-in. Just sayin’. Or would it be “shoe-on?”
I’ve been watching all day long, I guess no one remembers that thirty-eight years ago today four students on the campus of Kent State University in Kent Ohio were killed and nine others wounded, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. Some of the students shot were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, the other students were merely walking nearby or observing the protest at a distance.
Gunned down by the National Guard.
What if you knew here and, found her dead on the ground?
How could you run when you know?
Guess it isn’t all that important to you “anti-war” dems.
What’s that old saw about those ignoring the lessons of the past?