Thursday, June 5th - Preseumptive Nominee Obama...but still

Since my dear blog friend [Cherry] asked in a comment yesterday, I will go ahead and talk about my feelings on Hillary and the end of her campaign. While I have honestly been thrilled about her performance in the month of May and June (South Dakota, who woulda thunk?), I have known it was over since she eeked out a victory in Indiana on May 6th. I do believe that if Indiana had been a blow out, we may be singing a different tune right now, but it was not to be. I am extremely happy that Indiana was a win for her, but I am pretty bummed that we couldn't make it more decisive.

I still have problems with Obama as a candidate (and even more so some of his supporters). My support for Hillary came from my brain, and what I felt this country needed after 8 years of amoral, dictatorial assbagary. We needed a candidate who's platform was based on level headed reality, not on amorphous feelings of empowerment and betterment. There is a place for those lofty notions, but in these troubled times, we needed someone who was going to stand up and fight for America in a way that will restore not only our country but our place in this word.

I still do not think Obama is ready for the job, and there is no amount of "HOPE" that can somehow make him a great president. Will he have my vote, yes, but you can bet I am not going to bend over backwards to support him. You will see no Obama icons on my blog, bumper stickers on my car, or signs affixed to my balcony (in fact, I am contemplating keeping all of my Hillary stuff around until the convention, in tribute). Maybe that makes me a sore loser, but I've had to hold my nose and vote for the Democrat in the past two elections, why not make it a third.

And to all you Obama folks, I hope your faith is justified. I hope that he is able to deliver on everything he has touched within you, and most of all, I hope you do not abandon him when the first hint of reality sets in. Most of all, you better hope he doesn't lose in November. You will never hear the end of it from me...

In closing, I would like to steal a couple of paragraphs from another blog friend and Hillary supporter who is much more eloquent than I am, NYCweboy:

...I'll be clear right now: I'm comfortable with Barack Obama being the nominee. He'll do. He's not my first choice, never was, and even now, still kind of isn't. But he's it, and that's that. What I object to is this notion that millions of voters, and what (and who) they've chosen to support, will be treated as an irrelevancy, an afterthought. As if it didn't happen. As if she didn't win Texas. And Pennsylvania. And Ohio. And New York. And California. And Florida.

When the post mortems (ah, another death metaphor) are written...it's going to be easy, too easy, to rewrite this story as more than what it was, and less than the sum of its parts. At best, I think Barack Obama became the rallying point for people who could not, and would not, ever bring themselves to allow Hillary Clinton to be the nominee; what they did not anticipate was that the Clinton they started with is not the Clinton they would end up with... and the Obama they have is not the dream they had in mind when they started out.