With a Bullet
This past Sunday’s NYT contained an editorial that got under my skin. Donald Ray Pollack’s central topic was one of first-time voters, galvanized by two presidential terms’ worth of spectacularly bad government. Pollack presents his tattoo artist, Doodle, as his sole example:
“‘I’ve never voted,’ he says in a soft, almost apologetic voice. He shifts a little on the stool. ‘It never seemed to matter much before which one of them was in there, but lately things have got so bad that I think I should give it a shot.’”
What got to me was not Doodle’s preferred choice (Obama), nor the reasons for his choice, but his main reservation: “The bad thing is, a lot of people figure some nut job will assassinate him if he gets elected.” Pollack writes that one of his students fears the same, and cannot bring herself to vote for Obama out of fear for his life. Pollack’s encounters are not unique; I’ve seen people on three politically-minded online forums that I follow convinced that Obama, if nominated, will be assassinated.
I’ve had it with this “Obama assassination” meme. Sure, it’s conceivable—almost certain, in fact—that someone, probably several someones, will get it in their tiny, little, racist brains to resort to a gun to keep the White House nigger-free. Maybe some of them will work up the nerve to try. It’s possible one will succeed. Conventional wisdom among security agencies is that it isn’t that hard to kill a president, or a presidential candidate, not if the assassin is willing to die in the process. Of the forty men who have held the office, four died from assassins’ bullets, a ten percent rate. Others, including FDR and Reagan, have had narrow escapes. We lost a major presidential candidate, too.
But that hardly means we should go through life expecting our candidates to die, and allowing that expectation to sway our vote. If ten percent of our presidents were killed, that leaves a full ninety percent who were not. Allowing actual, real-live armed nutjobs to dictate our political future is unthinkable; allowing the fear of merely potential, perhaps entirely imaginary, gunmen to do so is flatly ridiculous.
I think that what I’m seeing is less a considered worry over a real danger than a measure of how whipped Democrats have allowed themselves to become. Kennedy was not an especially good president, but he has become mythologized in Democratic eyes, largely because his death began a long period of almost unbroken failures for the Democratic party: a string of lost elections broken only by Clinton, who won by compromising the party’s principles, and Carter, vilified for national problems he neither created nor swept under the carpet, as Ronnie and every Republican since has done. Democrats haven’t had a candidate they felt proud of since Kennedy, and have become so used to seeing their hopes dashed that they’ve started dashing their own hopes before politics and circumstance do it for them. If the Republicans mount a smear campaign, Democrats sigh and presume the public will fall for it. If the political climate looks favorable for the Democrats, they hunt around until they find someone capable of losing: Dukakis, Kerry, and even now they’re still considering Hillary Clinton. If they find a candidate that looks liable to sweep the election, they began imagining scenarios by which we can all still lose. We’ve been down so long that we’ve just stopped trying.
I am tired of this defeatism. How could we have lost so much, so thoroughly, so long? By deciding ahead of time that we’re going to lose. By settling for making a lukewarm statement instead of fighting for the right. By conceding the political dialogue to the hateful and selfish. By being too much in love with being the victims of Kennedy’s death, much in the way the South is too much in love with being victims of the Confederacy’s loss, or minorities are too much in love with the idea of being victims of The Man. Playing the victim is easy, and comforting in its way, but it won’t fix the problems we face, any more than it stopped the sons-of-bitches from creating those problems.
Stop finding excuses. Shut up, just shut up about a bullet with Obama’s name on it. Worry about that bullet if and when it comes. Right now, vote to win, and keep voting to win in the future.