In my fog about my own election (now Hillary can be my best girlfriend: "we lost elections together!"), I failed to properly acknowledge how incredible it is that Obama clinched the nomination. It matters.
One way it matters is that it has thrilled the Black and international communities, and already begun the process of racial healing that Obama talked about in his speech. These are, respectively, cultural and foreign policy shifts.
Today, Obama has caused a huge procedural shift as well. The New York Times has reported that, "the D.N.C. will no longer accept contributions from federal lobbyists or political action committees, which follows the rules he established for his own campaign last year." This is a dramatic change, and hopefully will spur other candidates to make the same rule change. Then the strings attached to political money will be voters' strings. I know that corporations and wealthy donors will still have the thicker strings, so to speak, but this is a good first step, and shows the ways that Obama understands how this tangled web works.
1 comment:
Wow! That news about the DNC is fuckin exciting. I'm stoked to have Dean and Obama running the party now.
I wasn't born in time for Bobby Kennedy, but listening to yesterday's Fresh Air in honor of him made me wish I was. One of his aides said that his nomination, election, and end to the Vietnam war would have been the logical culmination of the 1960s (and would have happened had he not been killed). Instead we got Richard Nixon. Someone said that when Kennedy was assassinated, he could feel history slipping through his fingers.
Well, I think the Obama candidacy and presidency is the logical end to the Bush era. Remember back in 2000 when we said, "well, the silver lining on Bush's election is that it will make the progressive movement stronger." At least that's what I was saying. It sure as hell did.
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