Growing Pains

[This was originally posted at 11:12pm, but after having added a couple of additional posts, I want this one at the top of the page, so I'm changing the post time.]

As a parent, one of our more painful experiences is watching our children outgrow the wonder of youth and begin to see the world in all of its sometimes less than savory aspects. The first time your child looks at you and you see in her eyes that she’s finally grasped that you are not some mystical demigod walking the Earth, that "Dad" is not a title bestowed upon the perfect, the eternal, the all powerful, but that in fact her parent is just another human being with warts and failings.

As we get older these moments become fewer and further between as with each disappointment, each minor pin of reality bursting another fragile soap bubble of hope and fantasy we become a little bit more jaded, a little bit more cynical, a little bit less likely to believe the hype.

It is just such a painful realization that I have gone through in the last five months watching Bill and Hillary Clinton run her campaign for the White House.

I am not a staunch Democrat, I have intentionally remained independent in order that I might continue to hold my fiscally conservative values along with my progressive social concern for my fellow human beings, without being sucked into the sports team mentality which has become so pervasive in our national political discourse. Still, I have generally considered Bill Clinton to be one of the better Presidents of my lifetime. I have been willing to forgive him his personal failings, because who among us is truly free from sin, and I'd much prefer a man with personal failings but a professional aptitude for the job than a man of supposedly good moral character dragging the nation down by his lack of foreign policy and diplomatic skills.

Six months ago, Bill Clinton was here in New Hampshire campaigning for his wife, and I was extremely excited to meet the man and hear him speak, one of the better political orators of our time (made to seem all the more so by the miscues and malapropisms of his successor). What a difference that half of a year makes.

I don't suppose I need to go through the entire litany of things both members of this couple have done in service of her campaign as she's slid from inevitable nominee to pathetic hanger on, I shall simply give a few examples, but suffice it to say that the political expedience of her ever changing narrative have left me believing there’s little "there" there.

We've seen an endless litany of which aspects of the primary contest should really count and which should be discounted, always miraculously trending towards counting that which favors her and discounting that which does not.

We've watched as she's gone from agreeing with her Democratic rivals that she would remove her name from the MI ballot (and not from FL only because FL law did not provide a method for candidates to do so) to deciding to leave her name on the ballot "because we all know this isn't going to count, so what does it matter?" to the moralistic preaching about how we aren't the party that ignores votes after she wins a nearly uncontested primary in that state. And she won 55% of the vote. Against Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd, Mike Gravel and "uncommitted" she could only manage to pull in 55% of the vote and she now believes this is representative of the will of the people of MI and should be counted as is (55% of the delegates for her, none for her opponent). This in a primary in which had she kept her word, her votes would also have been split between that "uncommitted" category and the bump in the Kucinich, Dodd and Gravel numbers that would have come from our collective tendency to believe that a vote for anyone other than one of the pre-printed names is essentially a wasted vote.

We've watched as she and her surrogates have repeatedly (and sometimes not so subtly) inserted race into the campaign while trying to paint anyone not in her camp as misogynistic, as though entirely unable to grasp that some people might vote for Obama for his message, rather than against her for her gender.

We've seen her repeatedly praise Republican John McCain over her opponent Barack Obama, sending the clear message "If I'm not the Democrat on the ballot in November, you really should vote for the Republican." I may not value brand loyalty in the voters, but I do value it in the candidates. There are very real, substantive philosophical differences between the parties, and to throw her party and her principles under the bus in service of her own campaign shows that she puts her own good ahead of that of the party or the principles, leading to the inescapable question “What makes us think she’d put the good of the country ahead of her own?”

On a more personal level, I believe the most damaging thing about the Bush Presidency has been the severe shift towards an Imperial (Unitary) Executive branch and away from the checks and balances of co-equal branches of government, and in the rhetoric of the Clinton campaign I hear ominous echoes of the same attitudes towards Presidential power which I think are so dangerous. Whether used in service of goals I approve of or those I abhor, the means are not justified by any ends.

And just this morning, in the midst of yet another half-truth about the campaign and her remaining in it, she raised the specter of political assassination when one undercurrent of the whole race has been the question of whether Barack Obama could make it all the way to the White House without some racist nut case taking a shot at him. The political half-truth was in raising the idea that "lots of previous contests have gone into June" while ignoring that those were in years when our primary seasons began in the middle of March, not the very beginning of January.

I don't know what I was expecting. They are all politicians and as such marketing, particularly of themselves, is a natural skill that our political system breeds for. Still, I had allowed myself to believe that they were good people largely tarnished by some right wing conspiracy (the existence of which is all too obvious), instead of simply the left hand side of a political tug-of-war.

In these last few months, I've had to grown up again. I've seen behind the curtain and realized that the Wizard isn't who I thought he was. I've learned once again that Dad can't fix any problem and doesn't know everything. I've walked behind the façade of the Hollywood set and seen it for the shallow falsehood that it is, all glitz and glitter and no actual substance.

Growth is never easy. But it is a part of life.

Liam.