giornale Archive for November 2004

Dear John Kerry

posted by snarko on Thursday, November 4 2004

The Day After the Morning After

Yeah, I know I'm sitting in Texas—a state the DNC has totally given up on to the point they send us no money for our candidates—but I'm also sitting in the county that voted over 60% in your favor. The progressive star in the center of the state. It ain't "Bush country".

All of us were greatly depressed by NPR yesterday, but cracking half-jokes to the affect of, "Oh! So THAT'S our problem? We don't understand MORALS?!" when we're the kind of people who gladly pay $1 more for our coffee to make sure it's not harvested by slaves or contains GMOs or poured by a corporation that doesn't pay their fair share in taxes and doesn't reward their employees with any of their billions in profits.

You know, the kind of people the Democrats used to be.

All of us walking around still in shock. And all of us more bitter than coffee that you conceded without a fight.

Why? Well, here's my story, and though each bitter person's is different, the effort we put in was the same.

And you didn't return it.

It is no secret that I supported Kucinich throughout the Democratic primary process. A staunch Green, I came to ride the Donkey only because of this man. Dean intrigued me a tad, but did not impress, mostly due to lack of track record that would back anything he said.

Then I heard "Kucinich" and the E word (environment) in the same sentence. Laughing at what I thought more politician blah-blah-blah, I checked his voting record. And attendence record. And background.

My jaw hit the floor.

Anyway, early on I was watching the debates—there were nine of you then—and frankly, Kerry, I didn't even notice you. Couldn't tell you apart from Gephardt or the other dude (who's name I forget) because the three of you said nothing but, frankly, politician blah-blah-blah.

And I thought Edwards talked like a complete idiot and had such a distrustful smirk I wanted to jump through the monitor (I watched these online—I don't have a TV) and wipe it off his face.

So when a little state called Iowa pulled you out of their hat, I was like, "Kerry?! Which one is he? Oh! The tall one."

When I became e delegate to state, the Kucinich camp was having a planning meeting and we all discussed the sign-in process for "Presidential Preference". Each person in the room had to do quite a bit of soul-searching to decide whether to go with their heart and scroll the name Dennis (knowing full well this killed our chances of going to National) or fighting for a more progressive, decisive, old-school Democrat platform—a platform the real JFK would have run on—by lying to our hearts and writing your name instead.

Only two of us did, to my knowledge, and neither were me.

We all knew at that point you were getting the Democratic nomination, and we were beside ourselves. The issues that mattered most to us—healthcare, outsourcing, the never-ending wrong-to-begin-with war, privacy, education, ect.—were not being addressed by you. You voted for the war. You voted for the Patriot Act. You voted for No Corporation Left Behind. You voted for NAFTA and the WTO.

Being a delegate I learned that my disgust in your nomination wasn't all about you; it is a symptom of the how-right-can-we-lean-and-still-be-called-left sickness the Democratic Party caught years ago. That won't happen next time. We elected legitimate liberals and progressives to nearly 50% of those committees and chairs that determine the direction of the party, and if that happened in Texas, I'm certain it happened lots of other places. But that's next time.

So thus began a new process of soul searching. And you are lucky you got so many months for us to think about it, cuz if the elections were sooner, most of us would have voted third party or written someone else in.

I decided to vote for you only because of a line I read in the book "How To Get Stupid White Men Out of Office," which was something to the affect of: "It's a lot harder to be a third party when there's only one party."

Ouch.

But oh, the logic, especially for those of us that have read "The Plan for a New America". I convinced several other Green converts to vote for you with this line.

So by the time elections came around, each of us (save one—who wrote in Cobb) had swallowed our pride and voted for you. Then waited for the returns.

My husband and I watched part of them online. I was throwing hyper-hisses for you when over 15% of Pennsylvania's and Ohio's numbers were in and it was resoundingly in your favor and they didn't light the states for you, but with just 2% of the returns from my state and a lousy 5-point lead they lit it for Bush.

But then we got sick of hitting shift-reload and headed down to Jovitas where the Uranium Savages would be playing music and making fun of the whole thing whilst we watched the returns on a big screen TV. Best line of the night: the Bush impersonator throwing up Nixon victory fingers and shouting, "Four more hours!"

Sometime in the next two, Edwards promised us you weren't giving up on the now ever-so-important Ohio, not without a fight, even if it took days.

Knowing we'd have to get up for work the next morning, we went to bed without knowing the outcome. First thing the next morning, I hit that shift-return and saw Ohio was still being debated, a state we all know was on the list of threatened dubvious election procedings, in the only "democratic" country the world elections monitor won't assist, because we cling to the undemocratic processes of unequal access to media and unequal access to ballots for our candidates [see side column for example].

But an email came in stating you'd conceded. Finding no evidence of this to back that claim, I considered it rumor. A word I define as possible, but not definite.

I went to work to find out this was true, and had to be greeted with a picture of that stupid, smug, "I got away with it again!" look on Bush's face.

Now, even if you did it because it was hopeless, Kerry, you showed flagrant disregard for the emotional depression those of us voting anti-Bush were obviously about to be in. The exact thing NPR kept hounding for the next several hours the Democratic Party "didn't get": no appeal to the spiritual, emotional, or ethical side of any of the voters.

Even if you knew it was hopeless, you owed us the hope. You owed us the reassurance that our votes—nay, our extended blood, sweat and tears in trying to stop America from its current downward spiral—weren't wasted. That if we were going down, we weren't doing it without a fight.

You have no honor.

Your speech? Politician blah-blah-blah. No closure. And you could have spared me the cheering from the fourth reich a few more days. At least the baby knew to cry. The rest of us can't yet.

My also-delegate husband (who became a Deputy Registrar and called around town the last three days to find out who needed the most help and ran out the door on crusade —I am SO proud) would like me to add that he feels you sold us out; that we who put aside our more progressive political leanings this year to work within the Democratic Party towards real change couldn't be more disappointed with the way our hard work has not been respected by your tidy little concession.

A party that needs to STAND for change, if there's ever going to be one.

I, for one, will continue fighting. Wish you and I made two.