From the mailbag: Voting for Moseley-Braun

I just got this email from a reader:

Re: Moseley-Braun

Amp:

For Christ’s sweet sake, why would you vote for her? Unlike Sharpton, she never led a race riot in which people were killed. However, she is a crook and a fool. I wouldn’t trust her with $10 of real money. What conceivable qualification other than skin color does she have for the Presidency? This isn’t a game, you know. When Presidents make mistakes, actual human beings die.

Honestly, dude, since I’m not a registered Democrat (and thus don’t get to vote in the primary), I don’t feel obliged to take the question of “which Dem candidate to vote for” seriously. (Right now, not having given the matter any serious thought, Moseley-Braun and Dean look the best to me.)

If I do register as a Democrat before the primary election, then I’ll take it more seriously.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not. I live in Oregon; by the time the polls close here, the real race for the Democratic nomination will all-but-certainly be done. In that context, voting for the black woman simply because I’m tired of the Democrats offering all-white, all-male slates seems perfectly legitimate to me. That’s she’s relatively lefty and intending to run on a firm anti-war platform doesn’t hurt, either.

I don’t live in a meaningfully democratic system, when it comes to primary elections; the decision is made long before I cast my vote. Asking me to take that system in dead earnest is, in my opinion, treating politics like a game; as if it were only the play-acting of voting that mattered, rather than whether or not my vote had any consequences.

For what it’s worth, when I do think my vote has consequences, I agonize over the decision. I even sometimes vote for Democrats I hate (I voted for Oregon’s current governor, despite having campaigned against him in the primaries). But until the Democrats see fit to rearrange their primary schedule so that ALL Democrats have a chance to cast a meaningful vote, don’t ask me to take the ridiculous mockery of democracy that they call a “primary” seriously. I take democracy seriously, but judging from how they’ve designed their primary, I don’t think the Democrats do.

(Of course, the same could be said of the Republicans. And maybe even of the Greens. Feh.)

Yours,
Ampersand

Update: The same reader emailed again, arguing that I have influence on primaries that really do matter, insofar as what I write here influences my readers. I don’t think my readers would really vote for CMB based on an offhand comment I make here, but in general it’s a good point. I do think we should act as if our actions mattered, even if it’s likely they don’t matter. But on the other hand, if I started taking myself and what I write here too seriously, I’d freeze up entirely..