Liberals, Grab Your Narrative

I wanted to make this one of my expletive-ridden rants, but in the interest of getting through to the mainstream, I’m going to watch my language.

Here we go.

I am--kind of stupefied at how willing liberals are to participate in narratives given to them by Conservatives.

By the time Senator Sanders entered the Presidential race, the Republicans were already geared up to mock Democrats for having so many people running for President.

This is based entirely on them assuming that we have no memory of 2015/2016 when they ran an entire clown car of candidates and then elected the Head Clown.

In comparison, our list isn’t even all that big yet.  It looks like by the time we get to the primaries and a few people drop out, we’ll be able to have one halfway crowded debate as opposed to two overstuffed debates where a bunch of white men scream at each other over who hates immigrants the most.

There is nothing wrong with having a lot of people in the primaries.  That is LITERALLY what primaries are for, everybody. Lots of people are supposed to run.  It creates conversation and helps streamline messaging. Can it be divisive? Sure. But the point is that when all is said and done, everybody lines up behind the candidate who best represents them.

Read that again.

I didn’t say--”...the candidate who lines up perfectly with all your beliefs and philosophies.”

That’s where liberals get our butts handed to us.  But the GOP gets in line, and we get to the nearest dive bar, order a craft beer, and talk about how all politicians are the same.

(They’re not.)

The current roster of Democratic nominees is not perfect, but it is WORLDS better than the group of people the GOP ran eight hundred years ago back in 2016.  (It also feels like yesterday, doesn’t it? Man, time is a horrific force.)

We have a diverse, smart, eloquent, passionate group of people--and the GOP wants us to talk about how there are too many of them and none of them can beat the President in the next election.

And--to my surprise--liberals and progressives are repeating the Republican talking points on this.

To be clear, the only reason people think the President can’t be beat by someone like Senator Warren or Senator Harris is because when you spend a year and a half believing somebody can’t win and then they do, you immediately start to believe they can’t be beat.

If any of these candidates can’t beat the President, that doesn’t say anything about them, it says something about America, and we should be having THAT conversation, not a conversation about how flawed the highly-educated and experienced Democratic line-up is right now.

By all means, discuss them.  Look at their policies. Converse.  That’s healthy democracy. But to cynically wave them away with a “They can’t beat the President” is infuriating.

You gonna HELP any of them beat him, Facebook Fred, or are you just going to sit in your living room and continue being too cool for democracy because it worked so well the last time?

Look, if you want to be negative, that’s fine, but the world-at-large does not need your negativity on this particular issue.  We don’t need unconditional positivity either, but we don’t need dismissals. We don’t need a hot take that we’re all just screwed and by the way, did you hear Senator Klobuchar once yelled at an intern because her coffee had too much sugar in it?

Give me a break.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but if nothing else, do not spread the bull being handed to you by the other side.

This is a great list of candidates.

There is, in many ways, a great thing for the Democratic party and/or progressives and liberals at large, because if this is our best, then our best is miles ahead of the other side’s best which includes Ted Cruz, Kid Rock, and some guy in Baton Rouge who thinks gays shouldn’t be allowed to use the post office.

Any one of these people should be able to beat the President, but the only one we need to worry about beating him is the one who wins the primaries.  And whoever that person is, so help me, I will come after every single one of you who insinuates that they’re going to stay home because they didn’t get their pick.

I will vote for Harris.

I will vote for Booker.

I will vote for Klobuchar.

I will vote for Warren.

I will vote for Sanders.

I will vote for Oprah.

In fact, I still want to vote for Oprah.  I’m still fairly certain that Oprah is the only person who would handily give the President the whooping he deserves and then hand him a paperback copy of an Eckhart Tolle novel so he start to become an actual human.

This should be the deal we make--

Argue as hard as you want about the candidate you want on the condition that if your candidate doesn’t win, you get behind who does.

The Clinton supporters on my Newsfeed still want the Sanders supporters to apologize for being manipulated by Russian bots and the Sanders supporters want the Clinton supporters to apologize for running a candidate they believe was some sort of secret Republican who would have been just as bad as the President we have now because...Well, I honestly don’t know, they can’t seem to explain why that would have been the case, but I’m sure they will in my comments section so I’m just turning it off now.

The point is--that’s over.  We’re done with that. The future is now, and 2016 is the haircut we had in high school that we DO NOT TALK ABOUT UNLESS IT’S TO SAY WOW, WE’LL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

Let’s fight and then get in line.

It might sound sort eerie and conformist, and that’s because it is, but the winners make the rules, and the last winner won by getting everybody in line, so those are the rules we’re playing by now.

Get.

In.

Line.

And in the meantime, let’s have a robust debate about a group of interesting people who, if nothing else, all have good jobs that they could sit in for awhile and instead are looking at what is sure to be a giant mess and thinking--

I want to help clean that up.

That’s something worth talking about.