Kerry? Who cares?

A friend responded via email to my post admitting that if I lived in a tossup state, I'd vote for Kerry. I'm going to post my side of the exchange in order to make more explicit what was implicit (but I thought, perhaps incorrectly, still clear) in my previous ones on Kerry. Note as you read this that I'm excerpting from and thus not doing justice to my friend's argument since my purpose here is to "revise and expand" my own thoughts rather than to argue for them as a course for others to follow. My friend's remarks are italicized.

You still see Kerry as an option to Bush? Ya gotta love the Gucci and Pucci set. They have the election cornered. I think the ABB crowd has lost its way. The system is broken beyond repair. There's so much hot air from all corners, that it, like more advertising, makes one turn away with contempt and disgust.

Actually, I didn't say that. I said, as near as I can quote from memory, that the only hope I had for a Kerry administration was that things would get worse a little more slowly, giving a little more time to organize opposition. In that sense, yes, I think a centrist corporatist Democrat would be "better than" - read "not as insanely bad as" - a sociopathic wingnut.

Put another way, under Kerry most everything would get worse on any scale we could agree on. Bush would actively press to make those same things worse. Kerry is a product of a corrupt system and demonstrates that corruption well. Bush is a whole new system of corruption.

Put a final way, I see them both as debilitating diseases, neither of which you would choose but one of which, bluntly, will happen to you - but one offers somewhat better chances for long-term survival or at least a course of decline that will take longer, offering some slightly better chances for developing effective treatment.

That's why, if I lived in a tossup state, I'd swallow my pride (and a good deal of antacid to keep from upchucking) and vote for Kerry.

In one sense, however, I don't know if it matters because I'm afraid we're screwed either way. Bush wins, he consciously and deliberately seeks to undermine what remains of our freedoms and turn us into vassals of the corporate state. Kerry wins, he doesn't try as hard and frankly probably not consciously, he just lets it happen because that's where his background, including his political career, points him, it's what seems natural - and it turns out every bit as bad because we stop trying as hard to resist because too many of us think "oh, we've got a Democrat in there now, things will be okay," just like we did with Carter, just like we did with Clinton.

So no, I don't see Kerry as an "option to Bush." I see electing him strictly as a tactical move, nothing more. I also said something like "the work doesn't end in November, it begins."

PS: The ABB crowd hasn't lost it's way. As soon as your stand is "anybody but," you're admitting you have no such way to lose.

As your closing statements alluded to, I do not believe that a Kerry presidency would gain any extra time for anything. The person occupying the White House is a subject of the paymasters.

I don't know that it will, either. I just have more hope that it will than the alternative. And I gotta keep taking my hope where I can find it.