An Open Letter

[gfish]

Dear Senators Clinton and Obama,

Please end this now. It's been fun, but it's only going to get more ugly, dumb and embarrassing from here on out. The last week has been bad enough, but Pennsylvania is seven weeks away. You can both do immeasurable damage to the party in that time. Time and money spent fighting each other is fundamentally wasted. It doesn't make us stronger, it just makes the divides between us all that much deeper.

It is now obvious that even Pennsylvania probably won't decide the issue if neither of you is willing to back down. We can't afford to wait until August to name the nominee. That simply doesn't work in 2008, not in a campaign that started two years ago. Anyone telling you this would make the Democratic party looking anything other than weak, divided and ridiculous is either incompetent or a dangerous flatterer. The historical precedent is completely irrelevant to perception.

No matter which of you finally carves out an unsatisfactory victory, backed by superdelegates and obscures procedural votes at the convention, half the party is left feeling disenfranchised. No matter who wins, it wastes the enthusiasm we've seen so far. It turns an entire generation of Democratic voters bitter and cynical. This is not just a single election on the line, but potentially the next three or four.

We need a joint ticket. One of you needs to suck it up and be VP. I really don't care which.

Make a hard decision and impress us all. Be leaders.

Cordially,
Fish

Comments

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Months of news coverage focussed on the messages of the two Democratic candidates just doesn't seem that bad to me.

[corivax.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I think that 1) media is going to report preferentially on candidates attacking eachother because it's more exciting than policy, and 2) candidates attack eachother on an awful lot of things that aren't policy, like experience and whether one teared up along the campaign trail once upon a time, and 3) people are going to remember those random juicy sorts of things, and the fact that there was acrimony, better than they'll remember abstract policy.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Sure, but there's a saying that any press is good press, which I think is somewhat true.