So, I know what you Obama folks are thinking. We’ve all seen that Hillary’s name will be up for the nomination in Denver, we know her supporters are planning a “big” protest, and yeah I bet you even saw that post on Digg about Hillary registering a site for a 2012 campaign. Now, us Obama people, the primary battle was very emotional for us, so I know our first instinct is to tear into the Hillary supporters. And why not, Hillary herself.

But we can’t. Unless we want to spend the next few months bickering amongst ourselves and all but hand the election to John “Bush” McCain, Obama supporters and Hillary supporters need to come together in unity behind our party’s nominee. Of course, in order to do this, we’re going to have to swallow some our differences. Let’s see what we can do about just a few issues dividing us…

The FISA Vote

This might seem like a point of contention between the camps, Obama voting for broader executive power over intelligence, Hillary voting against it, this is actually best interpreted as the first real act of unity between the two camps. Both of them used their greatest strengths to help the Democratic party. First, Obama’s “flip-flip.” Most people on the left, including my fellow Obama supporters, completely interpreted this vote the wrong way, assuming Obama was afraid of being painted as “soft on terror.”

Here’s the thing: the vote itself passed 78 to 22. If Obama had voted against it, the vote would have passed 77 to 23, and Obama would still have to worry about being painted as “soft on terror” simply because he’s the Democratic nominee. The difference is within that 77 are several very weak freshman Democrats who are in very real danger of being voted out of office exactly because they would appear weak on terror. Obama, most beloved Democratic nominee, “flip-flopped” on FISA simply to deflect any “soft on terror” criticism to himself. By eating that criticism, Obama helped buoy a lot of down ticket candidates in November.

Hillary, on the other hand, by voting against it, also carried the democratic flag by voting the party’s actual position. Both of them used their strengths to help to the Democratic Party. Obama used his popularity to quash any criticism against downticket candidates and Hillary used her invulnerability to conservative attacks by voting the Party Line. When Obama saves us from another “Democrats bend over big time” story and Hillary saves us from another “radical left wing blogosphere” story, that’s not division, that’s teamwork.

The John Edwards Affair

Now, I know with this one I could link you to a hundred million places that will break down the polling math for you. Kos can break down the exit polling, the Edwards campaign has shown its own inside data shows it, and even the big media networks are showing it in their horrible polls: It is simply not true that if John Edwards had not entered the race, Hillary would have won. In fact, the data shows Obama would have won bigger, sooner. But let’s chunk all this math garbage and get down to something we can really unify on: Mark Penn.

We absolutely cannot ignore the context and timeline of this whole story. The whole idea of Edwards causing Hillary to lose came from Mark Penn at the exact same time that the Clinton campaign was releasing memos revealing a very unflattering picture of the campaign, and of Mark Penn. He said his bullshit about Edwards to distract us from what we should really be doing, and that’s hating Mark Penn. If we’re to pinpoint one thing, out of all the post-campaign “what happened” Hillary Clinton obituaries out there, the one thing that cost Hillary the most in this election, it would be Mark Penn. His shameless pollmongering and divisive negative attack strategy did more to damage Senator Clinton’s reputation than 8 years of Bill Clinton’s dithering and constant Republican attacks.

So yes, the answer to party division over the John Edwards affair is, indeed, “Man, fuck Mark Penn!”

Hillary for President 2012

For us Obama supporters, the prospect of Hillary coming after Obama again in 2012 is very frightening. We know from history that these divided conventions, where a fellow party member tries to steal the nomination from the sitting President, always end in failure. And rest assured, the Clintons are nothing if not students of political history. They understand this kind of division would be fatal to any party. More likely, this is Hillary cutting off any future media hype about party division. If Hillary didn’t buy up all the 2012 stuff, be sure the PUMA radical Hillary supporter surely would. And the media would love nothing better than to interject that little storyline into any campaign.

Look at it from Hillary’s point of view. If she enters the 2012 race, not only would she derail any chance for a Democratic victory, but the entire Clinton legacy, including any possible careers for Chelsea, would be completely destroyed. The story of the Clintons would begin with Bill’s affairs and end with Hillary’s string of defeats and dismemberment of the entire Democratic Party. It’s not likely this is their goal in life. On the other hand, if she keeps her feet firmly on the ground in the Senate, a few years into a roaring Obama administration, the entire primary battle will be forgotten and the Clinton legacy will be that of transformation and power, perfect for Chelsea to step right into.

Of course, there’s always the chance that Obama could lose the election, but let’s be clear. It will be written in blood in the history books that Obama’s loss will absolutely without a doubt be Hillary Clinton’s fault. She will have torn him up and politically bloodied him so much in the primaries, to the point of injecting race, that there will be no choice but for the entire Democratic party to shun and discard her. There could be no forgiveness for such a blatant disruption of the party. After all, look what happened to Joe Lieberman!

Uh oh.

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Under the Bush Administration, this country has pissed away all of its moral integrity and respect around the world. Thus any calls by Bush for restraint from Russia as it pummels the former Soviet province of Georgia ring rightfully hollow. As likely heirs to this smoldering empire, we in Obama’s new liberal base have an opportunity to show that we are not pragmatic usurpers capitalizing on the failure of George W Bush, but rather a base of clear moral leaders on the full spectrum of American policy. So far, this opportunity has been mostly squandered.

Iraq and a Hard Place

A lot of the conversation on the left regarding Georgia centers on the US invasion of Iraq. When Bush and McCain take the press conference stage and bitterly scold Russia for invading a sovereign country, the left sneers and, quite correctly, lambastes them for hypocrisy. What they fail to do is then pivot. First, go to one of the original and core messages of the new liberal base, that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake and should never have been attempted. Second, explain Iraq’s precise relevance to Georgia in that when we blow our military wad on ideological pipe dreams like Iraq, the US ties down one of its main tools of leverage against real threats to democracy, namely Putin’s Russia, among others. Along with the numbing loss of over 4,000 American lives and the catastrophic damage to our economy, the savage mishandling of our great military force should stand as the foundation of our opposition to the Bush and McCain policy of Middle East war mongering. Georgia is the perfect illustration of what happens when the most powerful democracy in the world misuses its military: Other democracies die. As liberals, we would never allow the US to become so distracted and negligent. This is how we must connect Georgia to Iraq.

Know Your Enemy

We all know the pitfalls of traditional media: bloviating opinionators, bite-sized information, the pervasiveness of corporate infotainment. Sometimes however, during extreme situations, such as the Burmese cyclone, election crises in Zimbabwe, we on the left forget our normal media inhibitions and go off furiously googling for any tiny source of information. The conflict in Georgia is no different. As soon as Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia, CNN instantly becomes again a credible source of news. The on-air employees with their laser-precise hair-dos and augmented breasts heaving stutter out breathless headlines about Russian aggression and almost seem to sexualize horrifying and disturbing images of burning and bloodied Georgian corpses. We liberals seem to forget that this is the same CNN that refused to show images of our soldiers in Iraq because they were “tasteless.” Next in our frantic googling we come across things like Russia Today. We echo endlessly their gracious YouTube contributions across our blogosphere, not understanding that this is the same Russian media that can be brutally gunned down in the street for daring to criticize the state. They report whatever Moscow tells them like a Russian FOX News and some on the left are completely oblivious, refusing to connect the dots. And this isn’t to say that even the media themselves are oblivious to misinformation. I saw ABC employees openly asking on the internet for any articles “around 1000 words” so they could quickly catch up on the Russia-Georgia conflict they were about to cover. This is a war between a nuclear superpower and a tiny western democracy and the good folks at ABC didn’t even know where to begin. Also you had infotainment demigod Larry King interviewing former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. As Larry flung softballs like “are you optimistic,” Gorbachev went down the line one by one listing the exact same talking points as Putin’s foreign minister. The soldiers are Russian Peacekeepers (wtf?), Georgia attacked Russia first, Georgia was involved in ethnic cleansing, and CNN ate it all up and shat it back out as “Breaking News.” This is unacceptable. Quality information and a clear understanding of the facts on the ground are absolutely crucial to making our arguments against conservatives regarding Georgia.

It’s Not All Groovy, Baby

Before President Clinton demolished the liberal base in the 1990’s, liberals were often smeared as new age hippy leftovers from the 60’s love generation. They’d say liberals have no limits, they’re for whatever feels good, man. Worse than that, they’d be painted as “Anti-War,” weaklings, afraid to use violence for fear of upsetting someone. Given that one of our core issues is opposition to the war in Iraq, and that we generally refer to any Iraq war opposition activities as “Anti-War,” we in the new liberal base are in very clear danger of falling prey to the very same political smears. The conflict in Georgia is the perfect opportunity for us to make crystal clear exactly what are limits are. We stand in opposition to distractions like Iraq, but we draw the line in the sand at dictatorships invading democracies, especially European ones. Even dense and backward newcomer democracies in the backwaters of the EU deserve the full and complete protection of the US military. While we liberals can indeed be quite open minded about things, Russians invading Europe is absolutely out of the question. This is our opportunity to make that explicitly clear.

So, what do you think? How can liberals best make their case vis a vis Russia and Georgia?

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