Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp02042008.html
As a progressive myself I am dismayed. But I choose not to whine or whinge. This year, the whining is of the keening, plaintive type, like a puppy locked out of the house. Please love me, the wining seems to say. Please let me love you. We're seeing left-wing articles with headlines like "Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama: Who is Better at "Framing" Progressive Issues?" (Buzzflash) and "The Choice" (The Nation). Both articles can be summarized briefly as follows: neither, and none of the above. There is nothing whatsoever for a real, transformation-seeking liberal to respond to. What do the candidates advocate? "Change" and "Improvement" seem to be their suggestions, although no genuine changes or improvements have been mentioned that even approach the scale of the problems before us as a nation. As always, liberals are doing their level best to put a smiley face on the doings of the Democrats, the closest thing in establishment politics to a left-wing party (just as the right wing is the closest thing to the left wing on a duck). Unfortunately it was Mrs. Clinton's late husband, President Bill Clinton, that permanently locked the Left out of Washington. There's precious little likelihood that she will show the winkiest flash of progressive sentiment during her 18 months in office before she's impeached by her own party. It might possibly be worse with Obama, because even if he's not assassinated in the first six minutes of his presidency, he certainly won't be allowed to govern. In fact they'll be counting the White House spoons every night.
Don't get me wrong. I would be delighted to see a woman or a person of color in the Oval Office. Progressive, remember? But America needs to move well beyond the knee-jerk pocket liberalism that says any young black man is superior to an old white one, and any woman superior to both of them, or we're doomed. England elected Margaret Thatcher to the role of Prime Minister in 1979, and that was a ghastly mistake. Kenya has apparently elected numerous black presidents, and it's not in very good shape at the moment. It turns out, if you really study the matter, that people must be judged upon their merits alone, with no points awarded for gender or race. This is, after all, the leadership of the world's most heavily armed nation we're talking about, not admission to Harvard. I'm all for quotas in higher education. Otherwise we have fewer candidates that aren't old white men. But after that, qualification is everything. I know Hillary isn't qualified, even if she was the first man to scale Everest, and I don't know a goddamn thing about Obama, except he admires Ronald Reagan, a gentleman of the old school that would have called Mr. Obama "boy" and rubbed his head for luck on the golf course.
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