okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:
hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!
what are you going to do if he loses?
because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:
- bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
- the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
- while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
- the republican party wins the presidential election.
(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)
so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?
i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.
you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game?
they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.
i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.
because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.
VERY IMPORTANT.
Whatever happens with Bernie, do not let this country suffer a Republican administration. Do not.
OKAY LISTEN UP KIDDIES
I campaigned for Hillary in 2008. In fact, if she wins the primaries I literally have a political button from that campaign that I kept for history’s sake (it was the first time in history that a woman ran for president and was considered a serious candidate), and if she wins the primary I will damn well break it out again because I would rather have my mentally-deficient dog in the Oval Office than another Republican.
So in 2008, as we all know, Obama took the primary. And I spent about two days being disappointed, and then I called his local office and said “I worked for Hillary and if Obama is good enough for her, he’s good enough for me. I want to volunteer.” I actually showed up on my first day with that Hillary pin still on my backpack.
My primary job with Obama’s campaign was voter outreach. Going into low-registration neighborhoods and asking folks if they were registered and if not, if they’d like to. Telling folks with felonies that in the state of Pennsylvania they were no longer barred from voting and could re-register to vote. Signing people up for rides to the polls if they didn’t have transportation.
In the course of one of those voter outreach trips, I met an old black woman, somewhere in her 70s. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her story. And when I asked her if she was registered to vote, she said no. I asked if she wanted to register and there was this pause, and when she spoke again there was so much shame in her voice I wanted to light the world on fire.
“I can’t read to vote.”
I told her that someone at the polls could help her read the touchscreen so she’d know which buttons to push, and that I could fill out her form if she could make a mark for her signature–and she said yes. So I filled it out as carefully as I could, showed her my voter registration card so she’d know what to look for in the mail, and handed her the clipboard to make her X. Ready for the story part? Are you sure? Because it took everything in me not to cry when she told me, and seven years later I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes.
“I left school in the third grade because they didn’t want to let no black people go,” is what she told me. “I had to work. I ain’t voted in my entire life and I want my grandbabies to know they ain’t got to be like me. You tell that Obama he got my vote. Nobody ever asked me before if I wanted to.”
I dutifully wrote out her story and hung it on our Story Wall in campaign headquarters. It stayed there until the day we closed shop. And the night of the election I was on campus, waiting outside the library for final results to come in because I didn’t have a TV; I was one of only a handful of white students in a sea of varying shades of brown. And then someone came running out the library doors: McCain conceded. Obama wins. Fucking chaos erupted. People were screaming, crying, dancing. Some girl I’d never seen before in my life and never saw again saw the Obama volunteer pin on my jacket and hugged me so hard she lifted me off my feet. It was about 35 degrees outside and we were too excited to care.
And what’s the point of this story? The point is that hope didn’t end with Hillary. In 2008, the fact that Obama beat her was fucking stunning–she was considered the clear front-runner almost all the way up to the primaries.
The point is that if Hillary wins out, you carefully tuck away your Bernie button for 2020 and you call Hillary’s office and say “I voted for Bernie but I would rather have a diseased goldfish in office than another Republican, I want to volunteer.” You make her know she was not first choice, but for the country’s sake we must push the party forward. And we back the shit out of Hillary. Because you may well find yourself standing in line in the polls with a woman who never got to vote before. Because hope has a lot of faces, and some are nicer than others, but above all we must hope. And we must work to achieve what we hope for.
There was a poll recently that asked Americans whether they would vote for a candidate who was _______ and they had “black”, “Muslim”, “atheist”, etc. in the blank. The lowest number of votes went to “socialist”. Shocking, I know. I am prepared to vote for whoever is going to defeat the GOP, even though Bernie is about the closest thing to an ideal candidate I have ever seen.
Jackass Penguins 