Dissertation Year endorses Obama

I think that both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton would make good presidents. But today, this blog makes an historic announcement (rather than an historical one, for once): We here at Dissertation Year officially endorse Barak Obama for president.

Obama seems slightly more left than Hillary. She talks about "strengthening the middle class" on her website; he talks about poverty and affordable housing. For real, people. Let's keep talking about working to end poverty!

Also, the things that people like Geraldine Ferraro have been saying make me really sad and worried for the future of the democratic party. Those kinds of comments about Obama and race are awful. At the same time Ferraro is claiming that he's got it so easy, Hillary is blasting him for things his pastor said (things that actually, I largely agree with.*) Obama was in a tough position, and how he dealt with it--his speech on race in the U.S.--impressed me a lot.

Many people think that Clinton isn't so far behind, and that besides, women are always being asked to step aside so that men can take on the bigger role by virtue of gender norms, and that she shouldn't succumb to that. This is true--she's not so far behind. Women do often get screwed because of gender norms. But in this particular case, I don't think that most people who think she should drop out of the race think that because she's a women. We think that because she's behind in both popular vote and delegate count. And because the longer the primary contest goes on, the uglier it gets, the more polarized Clinton and Obama voters get, and the more likely it becomes that people who back the person who goes on to lose the Democratic nomination for pres. will stay home during the general election. Hence, I call for Clinton to drop out of the race. The point here is to beat the 'publicans. Remember Duck Plus Horse? I would seriously vote for Duck Plus Horse before I voted for another 'publican, because I sincerely believe that working together, a duck and a horse would do a better job than a 'publican.

It's a happy time because we have both a white woman and a black man running for the nomination, and against the most unpopular president in history! Let's not self-implode in a race war, for once, people. No one screws up their chances like the democrats.

*He said, among other things, that violence begets violence. He said that HIV was a government conspiracy to wipe out people of color, and though I don't agree, I do agree that that's not an entirely far-fetched statement, for the reasons he cited: other government medical experiments on black people (the Tuskeegee experiments) and other government lies (bombing of Cambodia, I'd ad the freaking Iraq war). He may have said that about HIV for a strategic reason--to get more people to get tested for HIV; if a conspiracy theory gets more people to get tested, great. (Oh, and by the way, there was a government conspiracy not to do anything about the AIDS epidemic in its first years because it was supposedly "the gay disease.") And if he called the USA the US-KKK or something, so what? There's a lot of racism in the U.S.: see Ferraro's inane comments, the persistent rumor that Obama is a Muslim, etc. With all the racism and violence against people of color, I can see how someone would call the US the KKK. (Here's just one reason among many: the U.S. government did nothing while the KKK set up a terror state in the south that lasted for, what, 60 years?)