(photo from obamawill.com)

Most of you that know me well will know that I am a fairly left-leaning Democratic Party voting guy. I like the notion of a safety net for society. I like smart thoughtful decision making and inclusion of all sorts of different people. However, people who lean my way politically have a sometimes fatal flaw — they are far, far too idealistic in what they require from a candidate.

One example is the angry people who are still angry that the primary was “stolen” from Hillary Clinton (and who vow to vote for John McCain as a result*). Obama has made some moves that haven’t sat well with me since he all but clinched his party’s nomination, that’s for certain. But the way I see it, for liberals, the Democratic Party is a workaround.

They are one of the big parties that can actually win and they also happen to share a lot of your beliefs and values! Well, they may not be as good on some things you care about as Ralph Nader, or one of the other minor liberal parties. Sure you’d be sending a small message by voting for one of these small party candidates. And yes, you do have some sway. You do have the ability to take away maybe 1 or 2% of the vote and sway the results of an election. But for who’s benefit? What good does it do to cause the guy who’s even less like you and shares less of your beliefs and values to win?

In an ideal world, all those parties would have a larger voice and we’d be more like Canada or European countries… But I suppose this is the way politics is done in America, and we have to go with the workaround. We can’t even completely control our computers, which are (normally) governed by the laws of physics and logic. We use workarounds in code all the time. If we can’t wrangle predictable 1s and 0s with 100% confidence, what chance is there of wrangling millions of intelligent independent humans? None.

Go with the workaround. Put a comment in that says
// ss 8/26/08: this is not ideal, but it works pretty well. think about ways to fix in future.
and move on. Incremental change, with progress made at each step, is what we need. It’s what I’ve come to know from coding, from songwriting and from thinking about politics.

Incidentally, I’m leaving for Washington, D.C. fairly soon, mainly to visit my sister, but also to take in some sights and sounds and smells. See you later.

* There is so much that is wrong with doing that that it’d be too hard to get into, but some major ones would be he’s pro-life and she’s pro-choice, he wants to perhaps stay in Iraq for a 100 years, she wants to get out of Iraq, whereas Obama and Clinton share a good majority of their platforms.