Hillary may be a top-of-the-line VCR, but Obama is a DVD player

A letter to a Hillary Clinton supporter

by lestro

Recently I discovered that a friend of mine is a supporter of Hillary Clinton and what follows is my response, with links added for reference purposes:

Well, thankfully your reasons for Hillary are actual reasons and not just ‘it’s a woman’s time.’ I hate that shit. It’s so anti-feminist. I am all for a woman President. But not Hillary Clinton. and I voted for her for Senator.

Which is where she belongs, working on the legislation, fighting over the details, making the sausage.

Presidents, however, are about vision, leadership and direction. The policy will follow.

Presidents do not write laws, Congress does. The President sets the vision. Think of your city councils. The mayor doesn’t have a vote. The federal government is supposed to function in the same way on a larger scale.

Presidents provide vision and direction by rallying the country around a set of ideas and a series of goals. Congress then responds to that by writing those laws.

And Hillary has no vision. Obama has vision. He’s the first candidate since Reagan to have vision. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a fan of Reagan’s but he definitely changed the entire political culture of the country. We are still living in Reagan’s America. And I, for one, am done with it.

It is time for something different.

Hillary Clinton will lose to John McCain (you asked who needs Reagan? really? He’s the second most popular president ever. Clinton is fourth. Kennedy is third) because the change she offers is essentially the same he offers. There would be changes in policy, sure, but the time of the baby boomers is over. They are all VCRs and Hillary may be a top-of-the-line VCR, but Obama is a DVD player.

McCain, for the record, is filmstrip. Electing him would be putting like rabbit ears on a high-def plasma because the antenna makes you nostalgic.

I have ostensibly been an Obama supporter for damn near a year now. I think he is amazing. It is time for a generational change. All the best ideas for everything are coming from young people. All the new shit and the best companies and innovation comes from younger people.

And the simple fact is that every generation becomes the old guard. To paraphrase Kennedy, the old kind of experience no longer applies. The world today is a vastly different place from the one our parents, the baby boomers, knew about. The world is much more interconnected than they imagine and their experiences, though we thank them for the work they did, no longer apply.

I may not be an overt supporter of Obama, but I am a supporter of the movement he now represents. It’s the movement I have been waiting for most of my life.

I can honestly say that Barack Obama is the first candidate that when I look at I think ‘he looks like me.’ Which is remarkable considering he’s a black dude from Chicago and I am a white kid from upstate New York. But I think it speaks to our generation, the Red Dawn Generation, and the realities in which we grew up.

Besides, look around; the Boomers broke fucking everything. They were very very good at pointing out the problems, but they haven’t fixed shit. Seriously, read Bubba’s 1992 convention speech. It’s the same issues. Except Bubba was doing a soft shoe version of Obama’s act.

Obama represents the very change that the Clintons are trying to affect. And god bless them for it. It was their work that allowed our generation to grow up KNOWING all of the basic things they had to figure out and force into the open.

The boomers won. Their revolution is over and we thank them for it.

But we’ll take it from here.

And the idea of Hillary having ’street cred’ is hysterical. She has served less elected time than Obama. She was married to the President and has one term in the Senate. That’s it. Honestly, these two candidates are about on equal footing in the experience department. But again, the old experience no longer applies.

But enough of that. I respect your reasons for supporting Hillary, but I respectfully disagree. and I will put money on her losing to McCain. Because even I will not vote for Hillary Clinton for President. That’s not to disparage her as a Senator. I would vote for her again. But for President? I would rather vote a party-building Green.

Or Bloomberg. Because a McCain-Clinton contest would be ripe for the picking for a politician like Mike Bloomberg.