Along with plenty of others, I'm in as much of a personal fix when it comes to embracing any of the current Democratic presidential candidates as the candidates are in a political one. California's party convention last weekend spotlighted the two-way trouble, and it all revolves around this idiotic war.
The convention's faithful were clearly united in wanting to leave Iraq, whereas the speakers -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich -- were all over the road on the hows of it. One who spoke with purist convictions that mirrored the faithful's -- Kucinich -- was also the only one who would be pulverized in a head-to-head contest against any Republican. So, so much for Dennis. Richardson and Dodd? They're not even running, really, except for the veep's slot, and in Richardson's case, perhaps also as Foggy Bottom's top diplomat.
OK, there's Obama. He's for getting out. But he seems unsure, evasive and downright befuddled on the mechanics of it. In California he said Congressional Democrats could somehow scare up the votes "we need to end this war" by overturning the current legislation's upcoming veto. Somehow, he and his fellow antiwar Democrats "will turn up the pressure on all those Republican congressmen and senators who refuse to acknowledge the reality that the American people know so well, and we will get this done. We will bring our troops home."
That position is a perverted twist on his "audacity of hope." It's the hopelessness of audacity. Many of "those Republican congressman and senators" Obama spoke of come from the reddest of constituencies. The idea that those pols are going to go all Tom Hayden on us just before a primary year in which they'd get their refashioned brains kicked in by jingoistic, raw-meat-dispensing opponents is simply nonsense.
Then there's Hillary Clinton, who took much the same tack as Obama, according to the New York Times. "Mrs. Clinton said that if Mr. Bush vetoed the bill, Democrats should try to find enough votes to overturn the veto, a prescription that -- if highly implausible at the moment -- was a clear winner with this crowd."
Again, the use of "highly implausible" here is a euphemistic substitute for "impossible." Give us something plausible and possible, please.
Which brings us to Edwards, who did.
He said "We need the Congress to stand firm and strong. If the president vetoes this bill, they should send him back another bill with a timetable for withdrawal. If he vetoes that bill, they should send him back another bill with a timetable for withdrawal."
That they have the votes to do, and ultimately Bush's back would be so firmly against the ropes he'd be forced to buckle.
But Edwards added something else that bears painfully on my personal quandary, and it relates as well to my Hillary Problem. He said he has "the responsibility to have the backbone to tell you directly what my position is and what my beliefs are."
Well, then I'd like him -- and her -- to also rewind the tape and get real about their 2002 war-authorization votes. I'd like them to have the backbone to tell us directly what their position was and what their beliefs were. In short, I'd like them to fess up and admit what everyone knows -- that they voted "Aye" not because they they were "misled" by the White House, but because they were covering their potentially presidential behinds, trapped as those behinds were in the nation's war hysteria.
That goes for Joe Biden too, whom I could get excited about if he would just confess. But he won't, and for the same reasons Edwards and Clinton won't: they'd be brutalized for opportunism by -- of all people -- those never-opportunistic Republicans.
I understand that. I'm even sympathetic to a degree. But I'm having a bothersome time embracing any candidate who first voted to send 3300 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths for political reasons, and then won't concede those reasons. The dead and their grieving families deserve at least that much.
For me, that leaves only Al Gore. And he ain't runnin' -- not yet, anyway.