Today my husband Jake, a longtime Obama supporter (you should hear some of the trash talk in our house this campaign season), came home from work and said to me, "Honey, listen up, because it pains me to say it, and I'm only saying it once. I have to vote for Hillary."
Holy cow! I think that's fantastic news for me and for Clinton and her supporters! His reasoning is that Obama has stumbled enough since his stunning February to demonstrate that he is the political amateur I've been telling Jake he is, and that this election is too important to take chances with. He's knows Hillary can win against McCain. He feels he'd be taking a bet with Obama. He's a gambling man, but he likes to win, so he chooses his wagers very carefully. More on his reasoning (and a look inside a candidate-split marriage) below the fold.
When this whole thing started out, Jake leaned Obama and I liked them both, but supported Clinton ultimately on the basis of identity. I was all about the glass ceiling, and I wasn't bothered by whose ceiling it was, AAs or women. Jake was a Nader voter in 2000 and (I'm ashamed to say it) 2004. I have voted Democrat in every election since I was able to vote, beginning in 1990. I cast my first presidential vote for a winner--Bill Clinton--in 1992 and never looked back.
Now Jake and I have had political disagreements in the past. He claims his vote for Nader was in response to feeling as if there was little difference between Dems and Reps. After 8 years of Bush, he now understands what I've understood all along, which is that the problem with this country is not about two out-of-touch parties, it's about one underhanded, untrustworthy party--the Republican Party--taking unfair advantage and playing some very underhanded, sometimes illegal games. He is also aware, as so many liberal-leaners aren't, that Democrats are infinitely better with the economy that Republicans. Before Jake met me, he didn't know that Bill Clinton was the only president in fifty years to actually balance the budget and give us numbers in the black. In a sea of red going back as far as FDR, there are only six black years--all of them under Clinton.
Our early conversations revolved around him asking me how I could support that dishonest woman, and me asking him how he could not respect the work she had done, and was he not aware that, modernity be damned, this was how women broke ceilings in American politics--by following their husbands. Every first for women in national elected office in America has been the wife of a male politician. It may offend your modern sensibilities, but I call it tradition, and I don't have a problem with it at all, especially when the spouses are two such intelligent, thoughtful people as Bill and Hillary Clinton. By mid-February, Jake was deep into the Obamaverse. I never attacked Obama in those days because I still liked him. I offered up vague feelings of insecurity about him being too marketed and inexperienced.
But I was put off by Obama's constant chastising of the ranks of the left for our lack of public expressions of faith, or opposition to Republicans, Supreme Court nominees, etc. I'd seen him do this for a couple of years and resented some newcomer coming in, making false arguments about how Dems and Reps were equally to blame. I knew this argument would resonate with low-info voters like my mother, and I knew it was a lie. But I kept my mouth shut, because the people in my life are diverse, and I want everyone to feel like they're making progress and casting a blow against the white male power structure. You have no idea how many people I "talked up" Obama too in those days--one of my best friends and my sister, for the sake of their bi-racial children, my black friends, most of whom seem politically uninterested still, my daughter (still an Obama supporter) and more.
Right before SC, things changed for me. Once the Jackson Memo was captured in the news, I knew what I was suspecting was right on--the Obama campaign was race-baiting, and denigrating the Clintons in the process. Jake didn't see it at first, but after all of this Wright nonsense, he sees it now. He sees that Obama isn't post-racial, or post-political. He thinks Obama should have known about Wright and done something about all of this earlier, before Philly, even. The "bitter" controversy didn't help. Jake knows these things are deal-beakers come November. Looking back, he sees how a lot of things about Obama are indeed "fairytale." Jake says Obama didn't have enough experience, so he got caught in a web of his own making.
Jake still believes that the basis for Obama's campaign and rhetoric--the idea that we need to make some progress in the political realm--was authentic, but he doesn't think Obama is the one to deliver it anymore. At least not right now. He hopes (and I do too) that Obama runs again, but he can't support him right now. He saw what Republicans did to Gore, who, he now agrees, was the greatest missed opportunity of a president since RFK, and what they did to Kerry, and he sees how easily they could do it to Obama now. He thinks Hillary can win that fight, and he's seen her take on some tough opponents lately. I know it's only one vote, but it's a victory for me personally, and another drop in the Hoosier bucket for the next POTUS, Madame President Hillary Clinton.
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