The Scumbag Line

I don't know how many readers of this blog check out the comment section. But I think it's interesting. One of our longest-time contributors goes by the name of "Petey" and has traditionally had a lot of interesting things to say about both politics and basketball. Lately, though, all of his posts consist more or less of calling me a "trust-fund scumbag" and accusing me of being opposed to universal health care.

It makes for an odd argument. Basically, before Iowa Petey strongly supported John Edwards. My feelings were more mixed, but I came down softly on Edwards' side. Now Edwards is out of the race. Petey thinks Hillary Clinton's health care plan is better than Barack Obama's. As it happens, I agree. Petey also thinks there are other problems with Hillary Clinton. As it happens, I agree with that, too. To me, the problems with Clinton outweigh the fact that I think she has a better health care plan -- among other things, I think the outcome of 2008 Senate elections will have a larger influence on the ultimate shape of health care policy than will the outcome of the Clinton_obama primary -- but Petey disagrees. From this rather narrow disagreement, a huge amount of bile has spewed, including repeated insistence that I oppose the idea of universal health care when I clearly don't.

There are no perfect presidential candidates any more than there are perfect presidents. But by the end of January we had two options, and I think Obama's the better one. As of today, it's even more constrained than that -- if Clinton does poorly tonight, she'll be forced out of the race and progressives will be in good shape to acquire a level of political power we haven't had in decades. If she does well, she'll stay in the race and an incredibly destructive Democratic primary will continue for a while longer and the odds still make it overwhelmingly likely that Obama will emerge as the winner. That would be bad. I like her health care proposal more than I like Obama's (and I like Obama more on foreign policy, climate change, and several other issues) but I hope she does as poorly as possible tonight and gets out of the race. Either way, though, it's deeply irrational for people with similar political views to get so mad at each other just because we may disagree about which politicians do the best job of imperfectly embodying those ideals.