Pick Your Poison

Original Link: http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/friday-pick-your-poison/

by riverdaughter

Ahhh, I *knew* there was a catch to potentially seeing the presumtuous nominee give his victory speech at Invesco Field. According to the Caucus at the NYTimes, you have to sign up for the Obama package:

Updated Want to score one of the tickets to Senator Barack Obama’s speech next month accepting the Democratic nomination in Denver? You won’t have to pay, but you may have to work for it, according to the Obama campaign.

In an interview with The Denver Post, the deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand indicated that the price of admission to the speech would be a pledge to volunteer and recruit new voters on behalf of Mr. Obama.

“We’re going to ask those 80,000 people in that stadium to march out of there and go with very specific instructions and goals to register millions of new voters,” Mr. Hildebrand told the newspaper.

It’s like a subscription you just want to try out but you find that you have to fork over your credit card number and sign up for 4 years. You can retract at any time in the next 4 months but I’m guessing they are very persistent in badgering you. What is it they hold over your head? Well, to score the ticket, a “community credential”, you have to ask for one through your local DNC office. Gotcha! Now, not only do they have a promise from you to work for The Precious but they will be badgering you, sending out Jehovah’s Witness types to bang on your door with tracts. “Brother, we are worried about your eternal soul. You PROMISED to be an activist for Obama and you haven’t put in your time. When can get you to fulfill your PROMISE?” This sounds pretty bad to me. You lose your anonymity locally and we’ve already seen that some Obamaphiles are nasty pieces of work, kicking over tripods and generally harrassing women. I don’t like it.

Superdelegates, you are responsible for what happens at this convention. The longer you allow for the DNC-Obama holy marriage to go on, the harder it is going to be for those of us who reject him to vote for him. We are now up to over 40% of Democrats in the latest CNN polls. Rasmussen gives a generic Democrat a double digit lead over McCain but Obama comes in at a statistical dead head while Hillary and Gore trounce McCain. The media is fawning all over Obama, now, but it hardly matters. The public isn’t buying it. And if we are subjected to ads during the Olympics, we’re going to blame Obama for ruining it.

It’s beginning to feel like you can’t get away from the guy. He’s on every channel, every radio station, every web page. It’s like visiting a country run by a dictator and finding the guy’s picture on every street corner. We don’t want that. It doesn’t make us want to vote for him. The aura of inevitability will not work this year because no matter how repugnant Republicans are, John McCain is about the mildest of the bunch. I’m not voting for him but if he ends up being the lesser of two evils…

As I see it, you need to pick your poison. You can let this farce go on and alienate half your base or you can take the Obama campaign aside and tell them to knock it off. If we go into the convention that is bought and paid for by Obama when the delegate count is this close, if is going to make us dig our heels in even more. The numbers are so close, the states he has won so indignificant next to hers and the differences in their qualifications so striking that to completely shut out the half of the Democratic voters from enfranchisement in the nomination process is going to spell electoral disaster for you in November.

I don’t want to buy a product. I want to elect a president. In 2000, we saw that it’s not enough to say there are no differences between the candidates. Who the president is *does* count. Neither one of these men is as fit to lead as the woman who was shut out. But if one of them should reach the White House and leaves her voters behind with nothing, then it will be on YOUR heads for leaving the rest of your party but with no choice but a big fat sack of “NO!”