My husband and I attended the Minnesota Green Party state convention. That was an absolute disaster. As much as I rail about the Democratic Party being fractured and unorganized, the Greens are much, much worse. While I don't wish to dismiss the hard work and dedication of the convention organizers, the event itself was a sad joke. Random, unrelated groups of people ran about, handing out fliers and shouting for freeing various prisoners, legalizing marijuana, banning plastics, etc. No one was running for Attorney General, so the organizers got on stage and begged for any random person to offer to run. Instead of voting to back Paul Wellstone, the Green Party voted to endorse a guy who's only coherent campaign promise was to "make half the Senate woman [sic]." I'm not sure how he intended to do that....and not sure if forced sex-change surgery or a Constitutional amendment would be the scarier prospect. My husband and I left the convention at that point.
Point being....I was disillusioned with the Green Party. I had started looking at the Greens because I was also unimpressed by the Democratic Party. Al Gore was about as exciting to me as Wonder Bread. Smushy, white, nothing surprising. While he wasn't particularly offensive to me, he didn't give me a whole lot to vote for.
I watched the Republican primary contest with interest. Now, I was pretty certain that I would be unlikely to vote Republican in the general contest. Most of the candidates stood for the standard Republican platform of:
- socializing business costs,
- privatizing business profits,
- inciting class warfare between the middle class and the poor in order to distract them while the rich take and eat the whole pie,
- promoting irresponsible military aggression, and
- prying into the private religious, sexual, and familial lives of the public.
But one of them....well, he seemed different. No, he wasn't a progressive. But he seemed to have some principled stands of his own. I didn't necessarily agree with all of his stands, but he seemed so firm in his convictions that he was attractive. He was McCain.
Back in 2000, McCain focused on:
- campaign finance reform,
- getting the Religious Right and their narrow litmus tests out of politics,
- refusing to attempt an overturn of Roe v. Wade,
- allocating the budget surplus to shore up Medicare and Medicaid, and
- moderate tax cuts that were not skewed almost entirely to the wealthy.
Of course, in typical Republican fashion, McCain was skewered for these stands. His war record, which is now unquestionable, was smeared. The drug addiction of his wife, which is now off-limits, was fair game. Questions of his temper and mental health, again, now off-limits for some reason, were raised. And even though there supposedly is no such thing as racism (or so the Republicans would have us believe), push polling was done, implying that McCain had a mixed race child out of wedlock.
If McCain had won the Republican primary, I would have had a tough decision to make in the general election. I didn't agree with McCain on everything, but I also didn't agree with Gore on everything. Nader was interesting but my experience with the Minnesota Green Party left me leery.
Alas, the McCain of 2000 wouldn't vote for the McCain of 2008. After all, he's your typical Republican. Tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for multi-national corporations, war without end, fear without end, you name it, McCain is for it now. I guess all fairy tales must eventually end.
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