There are two choices available. That's it. If you didn't like Obama, the time to work against him was in the primaries. I did. The 'heightening the contradictions' strategy is both morally questionable and very unlikely to work. For one thing, it's more likely to push the Dems to the right rather than the left. Nader ain't leadership, he's a Repub funded concern troll working on their behalf, just like the PUMA's. Take a good look at how Dem legislators from swing areas voted after 2000 - did they move left? Eight years after 2000, with all that happened, you'd have to be a fool to think that electing Republicans will make things better.
If you've got the energy for it, organize where you are on a local level to try to move the Democrats leftwards. City council, education boards, county dem committees, etc.
Marek, how many people do you know who've been told that the reason that their job was sent overseas was for the better good?
How many people do you personally know who have worked in a factory that has been offshored?
In you own community, what percent of the population knows someone who's suffering hardship because we've been told that there is no alternative (TINA) to voting for the lesser of two evils for the past 20 years?
How many empty lots are there where you live that were once factories that supported thousands of jobs that allowed your friends and family to enter the middle class?
I will not be told to how to vote out of some vague sense that there is no alternative, because when we are held to that standard, there is in fact no alternative. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
As far as poverty and lost industrial jobs go - guess what, in my area they're long, long gone - they were exported in the fifties to all those places which have been losing factories for the past thirty years.
In any case, traditional industrial labour is not the solution. Productivity keeps going up. Even if we cut our manufactured products imports by half, that would be what - a couple percentage points of GDP, a couple million jobs, at ever decreasing real wages? What we need to do is transform the service sector the way the industrial sector was transformed from the New Deal through the fifties, from poorly paid, crappy jobs, to well paid ones that provided a decent life. We can't go back to the sixties economy.
But not in a million years would I have considered abstention, even though the result was clear. I was not going to have been among those who let Sarkozy happen. Not if you had paid me for it.
With McCain, it's far worse. You may hate Obama (I sure wanted Edwards), but he won't take you to Iran, nor appoint another lunatic fringe extreme right of a Supreme Court judge, who will then deliver the election to the Rightist candidate everytime forever. Please, don't let him happen. Then I will join you in your vocal complaints that Democrats are way too far to the right. Democrats are not even centrist, and Obama is campaigning as in between the parties, yes, that is awful. But McCain-Palin??? Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
