The End of the Campaign

(Note: Hillary Clinton announced her withdrawal from the Presidential race shortly after this essay was posted, which instantly made it obsolete).

After six sometimes acrimonious months of primaries and caucuses, it would appear that Barack Obama has finally reached the threshold of victory in the Democratic Presidential nomination process. With a margin of victory as razor-thin as the general elections of 2000 and 2004, we offer our hope that Democrats of all stripes come together and bind up their wounds, both for the good of the party and for the good of America.

We think that a first step in that process would be for the Clinton campaign to acknowledge the fact that Obama has the delegates he needs, and bring an end to Hillary’s increasingly quixotic quest for the nomination. The only thing to be accomplished at this late date would be to prolong the pointless animosity between the two campaigns, at a time when the Democrats need to be coming together to oppose the common foe. A foe who, unlike Obama and Clinton, hasn’t been throwing brickbats at his fellow travelers. The Republicans decided their contest months ago, and have been using this precious time to prepare for the full frontal attack they will be waging in the general election.

And whether or not Obama decides to choose Clinton as his running mate (a prospect which OMT isn’t entirely convinced is a good idea), supporters on both sides need to stop for a minute and consider what’s at stake here.

Let’s not forget what the Republicans are capable of; they managed to convince a frightening number of voters in the last two Presidential elections that a worthless little piss-pot like George W. Bush was fit to run this country. John McCain represents nothing more than a third Bush term, and the Republican machine is gearing up to give the country just that. The long, ugly Democratic selection process has given the Republicans plenty of ammunition to use to prove that if the Democrats are elected, there’ll be people having sex in the streets with animals, you’ll be able to buy heroin at the Seven-Eleven, we’ll be overrun with Mexicans rushing across the border, there’ll be condom machines in elementary school restrooms, and God’s American citizenship will be revoked.

And there are legions of dolts and morons in this country who are all too willing to buy in to that line of bullshit and trade away their lives and their children’s futures for a symbol-rich, substance-poor Republican America in which our power and influence in the world is further eroded, our economy lurches further toward collapse, our national security is further weakened, our infrastructure continues to crumble, our cities descend into chaos, our educational system falls further behind the rest of the developed world, and we continue to sow the seeds of Armageddon with continued military adventurism in the Middle East.

These are the stakes.

The Republicans will bombard the voters with piles and piles of meaningless bullshit in order to convince voters that the Democrats are in league with the devil. If the Democrats show even a thread of internal divisiveness, the Republicans will be sure to pounce on it, and the next thing you know, we have that third Bush term that John McCain promises to give to us.

It’s not entirely clear that anyone can undo in four, or even eight, years the unmitigated disaster that frat-boy Bush and his minions have perpetrated on our once-great nation, but it’s certain that John McCain will only continue down the same vile path; thereby ensuring that America will never again be the truly great country it once was, and that the balance of economic and military power will shift away from America with that same “sucking sound” that Ross Perot used to like to talk about when he was predicting how quality manufacturing jobs would leave America if we were to sign onto NAFTA.

The Republicans will give us a weaker, more authoritarian America, where flag lapel pins become the new swastika, where Homeland Security becomes the new SS, where Fox (ahem) News becomes the new Pravda (officially, that is … they already are unofficially), where skyrocketing oil prices will be the excuse needed for the declaration of a national emergency in which the Constitution will be put into suspended animation. An America in which one or two more Republican Presidents down the line, we will find a chief executive declaring himself to be “President-for-life”, and declare the Congress to be invalid.

Sound far-fetched ? Think OMT has morphed into just another whack-job blogger ?

Well then, think about this: In 2000, as you were making up your minds between George Bush and Al Gore, did you think that just two elections down the road America would be torturing prisoners that were being held without the benefits of habeas corpus and due process ?

If we give the Republicans a third term, just what sorts of things do you think they’ll have given us by 2012 ? Would OMT even be able to freely express itself in this manner by then ?

This is why it’s so important for the Democrats to set aside the squabbles of the primary process and pull together for victory in November. Even though Democrats have been registering and turning out for primaries in record numbers, even though every poll suggests that the Republicans are in for a rout this fall, even though people from all walks of life have finally begun to make the connection between the people that they vote for and the quality of their lives, a Democratic victory this fall is by no means assured. The Republicans are beginning to realize that they have nothing to lose this fall. They are as a cornered animal, willing to do anything to win. A Democratic party weakened by this ongoing divisiveness will be steam-rollered by these fascist bastards into yet another loss at the polls.

So whether you were a Clinton supporter, or an Obama supporter, or were even for Edwards, Kucinich, Biden, Dodd, or whomever … Obama is going to be the nominee. Like it our not, that’s the way it’s turned out. That’s the system that we have, and that was its result. For those who are not satisfied, there will be plenty of time to change the process after we ensure that Obama is elected President, and that we increase the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. If we don’t do that, then changing the process won’t make a damn bit of difference.

There is simply too much at stake for the country, and for the world, for anyone to stay home on election day simply because someone that they didn’t support ended up with the nomination. And if you’re even thinking about voting for McCain for those same reasons, then let OMT be the first to say, “damn you to hell”.

Do you want to be responsible for the further degradation of America ? Or do you want to be a force for positive change in this country ?

Then rally behind the Democratic nominee, and help get out the vote this November.

If you do anything less, you will get, as Adlai Stevenson once observed, “the government you deserve”.

And don’t think you’ll get another chance to turn it around. Give the Presidency and the Congress to the Republicans this fall, and there may not even be an election in 2012.

It’s time for Hillary Clinton to suspend her campaign and bring her quite considerable forces to bear for the good of the Obama campaign. The Democrats have never been in a better position to win a complete victory this fall. But it can’t be done without Hillary and her supporters, nor should it be. We are a democratic party, after all, and there is far more that unites us than divides us.

If we blow it, history will … well, history is written by the victors, isn’t it ? You want the Republicans to write it ?

———————
Speaking of suspended campaigns, OMT has, after much soul-searching, decided to fold its tent.

It’s not that we’ve lost interest in writing or anything, it’s just that this particular format, blogging, has lost its appeal for us. Maybe if we had made more of an impact, if we had been able to broaden our audience, it might have made a difference. But the fact of the matter is that OMT is just a minor planet in a galaxy of blogs that nobody reads. We sometimes feel like we’re way in the back in the rain and mud at Woodstock, wondering how we’re ever going to get Grace Slick to notice us.

There are tens of millions of blogs out there, and with everybody writing, it’s no wonder that it’s hard to build an audience. We know for instance that we’re reading fewer blogs than we did before we started this thing, and that’s probably true of everyone. Of course, most blogs are unreadable in the first place, and simply having a blog lowers expectations about content, so we were probably already limping right out of the starting gate.

This country could probably get by with about 99.999% fewer political commentators than we currently have, and our stepping into that arena was ill-advised to say the least. But originality has always eluded us, unfortunately. We’ve found that we’re at our best when we’re echoing something else, which, once we got over the initial shock of realization, we got more comfortable with than we probably should have. This was true when we were more actively involved in music, and it’s true of our writing as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that … there are a lot of people making good money parroting other people … Rich Little and Frank Gorshen lived quite comfortably.

Then, of course, there are the complications of our personality, in which we get all caught up in whether or not we made a post every day, our general dissatisfaction with too many pieces about politics, and facing periods when we simply don’t feel like living up to the standards we set for ourselves at the outset. Not to mention those long periods of drought in which ideas are as hard to come by as a telegram (see, even that sucked).

Also, when taken as a whole, nothing that has appeared in OMT has been terribly extraordinary. We’re aping good writing without actually achieving it, and we recognize the difference. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for us to go back and read previous posts without the urge to cringe.

There are other reasons, of course, but the main one is that this format isn’t getting us what we want, not that we have a clear idea what that might be, but we have the instinctive feeling that it’s not this.

We would like to thank everyone in our tiny core audience, who checked in with us every day, and who gave us a lot of positive encouragement and feedback. This little adventure lasted longer than it might have because of your support, and we are grateful to you for your attention and loyalty.

But all campaigns must end, some in victory, some in defeat.

We may decide, as the fall campaign heats up, that we were nuts to pull out, but for the moment, we have some other things in our life that are clamoring for our attention, and it’s high time we got to them.

It’s entirely possible that after a couple of months off we’ll get the bug again, and come back with another blog. We may even revive the OMT brand, or we may be back in another format entirely.

Or maybe this was all there was to be.

We just don’t know.

OMT was certainly an interesting little diversion for us, and as experiments go, it was a pretty valuable one. We learned a few things about ourselves, and about writing every day, that will likely serve us well in the next phase of our development, whatever that turns out to be.

Until then, though, we’re off to return to obscurity.

Not that we ever left in the first place.

(-daj)