Oh, I'll vote for him. Because let's face it: the alternatives, along with the world they would create, are just too awful to consider.
The candidates jockeying (jacking?) to become the Republican presidential nominee are on a par with a haphazard cluster of low-level villains that The Justice League of America could dispatch within a few kinetically rendered panels (although, the Tea Party has all the tenacity, simplicity and personality of the household cockroach, a most formidable foe, indeed).
And because maybe my president knows something that we don't, that the highest level of the poker tourney that has become presidential politics has rules and moves and twists and spins that we here in the lobby can't even fathom, and that this latest seeming capitulation will lead to a harmonious, strategical, progressive, patriotic triumph.
But while this proceeds, at least have a pep rally.
It's so disheartening to suffer the psychological crush of living in a country where bullies, ninnies and feebs are calling the shots, their chests puffed out as they strut and bloviate and just plain hate, to open the media tap and see a nation reveling in lowbrow pursuits, vilifying intellectualism and otherwise fetishizing mediocrity (and I don't just mean network television).
At least the game is not over yet, despite the pundits and putzes dry heaving their assertions about Obama being done-for, a one-termer, heir to Jimmy Carter, etc. (heck -- in a late night Twitter-jag, I was saying as much myself).
But sleep and ponderation (two things that the corporate-stoked 24 hour news cycle has sought to eliminate with as much zeal as the Right's drive to eliminate granny's safety net) has tempered my frustration. A bit.
A lot of this is about team spirit. After all, every coach motivates his or her team before a game, every general exhorts his or her troops before the big battle. The Right, of course, gets their troops' juices going by watching clips from "The Town" (sometimes followed by selected scenes in a Mummenschanz version of Wall Street).
The Left needs to be psyched up, too, instead of continually being psyched out. It can get rather disheartening for the constituents to have their enthusiasm squelched for lack of a chirpy squad of scantily-clad cheerleaders to counter the rakishly cocked tricorn hats, bandoliers and bold "Don't Tread On Me!"-mullets. I mean, at this point even a human pyramid wouldn't be so bad. It's basic Trickle Down Psychology.
So while the upper level machinations are being machinated, and assuming that Obama is indeed the shrewdest gambler since Kenny Rogers, then why not in the meantime give the majority of Americans who voted Obama into office on a swell of hope a show they can actually get behind? Catchy, upbeat ditties about the greedy cretins and xenophobic phooeys who got us into this mess? A true telling of the motivations of the neo-cons and the radical religious Right, with their fealty to ideological myths of capitalist übermen and implausibly generous plutocrats? A big, clear, colorful demonstration of the steep slant of corporate-backed media and the maddening treason of a Frankenstein's monster of a Supreme Court? I feel my toes a-tappin' already!
And when, many years from now the history of this time is writ, clearer heads will look back and ponder the shame of a president -- and a country -- under siege from the moment he stepped into the Oval Office and was prevented, therefore, to do what the country needed him to do; that the machine of government had been so corrupted from decades of corporate incest and the resultant growing sociopathy. And they will see that the destruction was so calculated and so complete that not even the hope and change that blew the ember into a fire in the hearts of so many Americans in those first days of Obama lasted for sheer lack of a St. Crispin's Day speech or a Knute Rockne incitement of victory over a formidable opponent.
Gimme a U! Gimme an S! Gimme an A!