Via Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why he voted for Obama in the primary, capturing my critical thought perfectly:
I’m for Obama knowing perfectly well that, as Bill Clinton suggested, it’s a “roll of the dice”. A roll of the dice for Democrats, for progressives, for those of us who’ve fought so hard against the right-wing frames that Obama sometimes (sometimes craftily, sometimes naively) deploys. Because I think a Hillary Clinton candidacy will be another game of inches, yielding—at best—another four or eight years of knifework in the dark. Because I think an Obama candidacy might actually shake up the whole gameboard, energize good people, create room and space for real change.
Because he seems to know something extraordinarily important, something so frequently missing from progressive politics in this country, in this time: how to hearten people. Because when I watch him speak, I see fearful people becoming brave.
Read the whole thing; he goes into a lot of other things as well, like what he might do in red states, and why he’s far from perfect but worth voting for anyway. Also a good, substantive piece by James Fallows. Not a single mention of hope anywhere in there. ;)
[And yes, after a successful and very productive month of not reading blogs after 9am, I’ve totally broken down today. Ah well.]