Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, July 22, 2016

Let Hufflepuff Be Hufflepuff

Clinton/Kaine 2016

5 comments:

jimf said...

"That's ok after Sanders betrayal I have decided to
take a chance and vote for Trump instead."

sez a commenter on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsSvpYGt2BI
Tim Kaine is Hillary's VP! Is it the right pick?
The Young Turks

Lorraine said...

I assume you're not at all surprised with this development. No reason to campaign against them, of course. But are there no limits to the amount of enthusiasm you'll bring to promotion of what at the end of the day is the party of Jefferson and Jackson?

Dale Carrico said...

If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, as god is my witness, I will shill for the party defined by the slave-owning Jefferson and genocidal racist Jackson without limit! (I hope I have correctly interpreted your comment as satirical in spirit, soliciting a reply in kind.)

Lorraine said...

"defined" is probably an overstatement, but yeah, so will I. Perhaps hoping not so much for satire as a BRIEF (we've got a campaign to support, after all) moment of commiseration.

Dale Carrico said...

If you read my twitter feed and check in here periodically you will know that Kaine was far from my own preference. As I have said repeatedly, I would have preferred a ticket that looked like America's future (the diversifying, secularizing, planetizing Obama coalition, a coalition grandmothers in charge should be a part of) rather than its dreary past (the old straight white penis parade), also Kaine is to HRC's right in a party and a nation going left and there is a practical case to be made that the generationally sound tack left for the general common wisdom is giving way -- I dunno, I for one am spoiling for a fight with the GOP (I am that paradoxical socialist who considered HRC a better tool among two imperfect available choices for such a fight), and I think the Kaine choice was not about the election fight but governing after the election for HRC and signals that she would rather turn down the heat than play Trump's game in Thunderdome. It's a sound choice, in some ways a rather encouraging one, even if it isn't based on quite my own read of the terrain. I think the thing that reconciled me to Kaine more quickly than I otherwise would have done was the rather explosive and histrionic repudiation he received among so many of my usually congenial lefty allies (I don't mean you, I just happen to be confiding this to you because you asked the question), filled with silly immoderate misrepresentations and ungenerous omissions but also revealing, yet again -- as happened over and over again throughout what I had originally expected to be an uplifting primary for the organized left -- an embarrassing incapacity among too many who share my righteous indignation and ideal aspirations to understand the necessity of mobilizing a nationally viable partisan vehicle that is a coalition engaging in brutally frustrating social struggle in the service of progressive reforms and real-time problem solving among diverse stakeholders involving many losses and compromises. Kaine makes perfect sense as a VP choice, which is why I have been seriously steeling myself for HRC to pick him for well over a month, he has his strong points, he looks to be rather like Biden as a governing partner to HRC, and she means to govern. There is plenty to like in all this, and of course the know-nothing greedhead bigot anti-fact death-cult GOP has picked an explicit authoritarian strongman to represent them so I can't say I have much in the way of sympathy for anybody pretending to the least sense or decency who wants to devote so much as a second to anything but defeating them utterly and decisively at a time like this.