Go Team! by Raul Groom

[EarlG]

Go, Team!

"We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river."

- Hunter S. Thompson, October 29th, 2004

When I first began writing political commentary last June, I was driven by a desire to create a reality that I did not see anywhere across the media landscape, right or left. It was a time of great exaltation for the forces of evil, and it was a dark time for the rebellion.

George W. Bush had recently appeared on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in an unintentionally ironic attempt to fool all of the people all of the time. He'd even quoted from the Gettysburg Address, though not the parts with big words. In the weeks that followed, the stunt had been universally hailed as a political masterstroke - our humongous-dicked leader parading around on one of his biggest floating hunks of killer steel, laughing at his vanquished enemies and toasting the success of his victorious legions. Even those who weren't fooled by the image itself were meta-fooled by it, believing that it was this version of the president - the Invincible Super-Dubya - that would endure all the way to Election Day 2004.

But it was not to be. Serious boxing enthusiasts were wary even at the time; getting by on an air of macho invulnerability has always been a very hard dollar. Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson were considered in their primes to be so completely unbeatable that their opponents' families often cautioned them to bail on their fights and seek respectable employment, lest they be torn apart at the hands of the superhuman beast holding the heavyweight crown. Yet neither man held the linear title for longer than nineteen months, and they notched only three title defenses between them. Iron Mike, no longer quite important enough to float above his frequent crimes, soon went to prison, and Sonny was rubbed out in his apartment the day before New Year's Eve, 1970. The police called it a suicide, and that was that. So let it be with C-plus Augustus. Not that I want the man dead, mind you, not at all. He is, after all, still the president, and there are laws.

Bush believed he could coast to a second term the way he had acquired the first one - by simply convincing the world that he had already won. But slowly, slowly, as is our president's wont when it comes to learning, George Junior has begun to discover that the ultimate prize in American politics - the two-term presidency - is not awarded to just any idiot in a blue silk tie. Winning reelection is hard work, hard work, hard work (need some wood?) and in the heavyweight division, even nineteen months is a long time to survive as the baddest man on the planet.

Thus, I began my career as an unpaid columnist with a clear mission - to convince the rest of the Democratic Party that Bush could be beaten, and beaten badly. Unfortunately, the person who needed the least convincing was, the current author, and it was only a month or so before I started believing my own press.

When I wrote "The Story" in mid-August, I was sure that the sudden revelation that the Bush administration had used its power in the intelligence community to push discredited and illogical arguments in favor of invading Iraq would result in the rapid downfall of the regime. When no serious momentum began to build toward impeachment, I suffered my first bout of writer's block.

The Block only lasted two weeks, a pittance compared to the sclerosis I would endure as the months wore on and Bush weathered storm after storm of scandal, controversy, and obvious doom. But at the time it seemed like a Big Deal, and I considered it a major coup when I convinced myself to finally get off my ass and submit a piece to DU that began to explore the emerging dynamics that would determine the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.

I then took a slight detour to declare that Arnold Schwarzenegger would definitely NOT be the next governor of California and that the Republicans would soon be shamed into proposing a tax increase in order to address the burgeoning federal budget crisis. Both predictions turned out to be based on wildly inaccurate and juvenile assumptions - the first, that California residents care more about substance than they do about hype, and the second, that Republicans are capable of feeling shame.

When these predictions also showed themselves to be clearly overoptimistic, my commitment to offering my own weekly take on world events began to wane. More crucially, by September I had been plunged into the execution phase of a high upper-middle-class American wedding, and despite my solemn promise to my readers that I would file a story from Costaguana during my honeymoon, I dropped out of sight for an entire month. The only thing that got me back in the game was the news that the Central Intelligence Agency had declared open war on the White House over the outing of a covert operative named Valerie Plame. Even though every single one of my previous predictions of GOP disaster had proven ill-founded, it seemed crystal clear that this obvious breach of national security would be the straw that broke the back of the Bush Bactrian.

Of course, we all know how that turned out. I waited almost two months to bang out another article - my longest hiatus since "What About Joe Lieberman?" was published on July 30th - and all I could manage was an uninspired cheap shot at Rove's desperate episode of Mr. Bush Goes to Baghdad, in which Dubya lamely served a fake turkey to a room full of confused soldiers. Despite the obvious criminality and uselessness of Cap'n Bush, the ship was not sinking.

And so, in a fit of garrulous optimism, I endorsed Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination. It seemed self-evident that the man who had first staked his credibility on the now-manifest wrongness of the Iraq invasion was the one to overwhelm and dismantle the Bush machine. I had believed all my life that it was important to choose the candidate with whom one's own political philosophy best meshed, but for some reason I was unwilling to go all the way and endorse the lovable but unrealistic Dennis Kucinich. I chose Dean because he had opposed the war, and because he seemed as good a bet as anyone.

I was then treated to an object lesson in why the primary season is all about picking a winner. John Kerry and his team, whom I had praised in several 2003 articles, dismantled Dean with a February primary strategy that was at once unbelievably topical and classically timeless, playing up Kerry's service in Vietnam (contra the emerging story of Dubya's cowardly shirking of his Champagne Unit Guard duties) while brokering a deal with second-tier candidate and Midwest specialist Dick Gephardt to make sure that Howard Dean couldn't win the Iowa caucus no matter how much money he'd transferred over from the Bank of New England.

The strategy Kerry used to overtake Dean and seize the nomination was so brilliant and subtle that I wasted no time mourning the death of the Dean Nation, but simply transferred all of the hopes and dreams that I had tacked onto the Vermont governor over to the Senator from Massaschusetts. I rode high on the promise of John F. Kerry, the Perfect Candidate, for about a week before events in the Western Hemisphere brought me up close and personal with everything I had disliked about Kerry from the very beginning.

Haiti's government, which had been reinstalled by American Special Forces under the Clinton Administration, reversing a Bush-backed coup, was overthrown once again by allies of the younger Bush. I was devastated; my conversion to the far-left bank of American politics had been facilitated largely by my exposure to Stan Goff's excellent account of the Clinton-era invasion of Haiti, Hideous Dream. I thought of Haiti's flawed democratic government as one of the great justifications for my allegiance to a flawed Democratic Party, and its collapse sent me into an emotional tailspin.

Kerry failed to go on record condemning the coup, a ruthless tactical decision (and, it turns out, a correct one) that shook my support of Kerry's candidacy to its very core. With Sophia just recently revealed to be in the family way, I obsessed about how I would explain to my child why I had wholeheartedly supported - not just with my vote but with my voice, my most prized possession - a man who could not summon the political courage to decry the violent overthrow of a democratically elected leader in a country just a few hundred miles off the Florida coast.

A few positive events would bring me back to DU in the coming months: Ahmed Chalabi's fall from favor amidst allegations of spying for the Iranians, George Tenet's disgraced resignation, and others... But for the most part, my interest and commitment to the cause of electing a Democratic president was not enough to keep me consistently in the game.

It is only now, at the end, that I understand. The Emperor was right - I am a young fool after all. My feeble skills are no match for the power of the dark side. But there is something that the forces of evil did not count on, the one thing they always forget. There are those among us puerile slackers who know what they are doing. There are those who, despite the failure of every institution we once believed might save us from the maniacs, toil on, diligently, to make sure that nonetheless, the American Dream shall live to fight another day.

It is these people - those who have not faltered as I have, who have remained strong not only during times when victory seemed inevitable, but when it seemed impossible - that I salute with this article, my last before the 2004 election. To those superstars who carried this team: John Kerry, James Carville, Bill Clinton, Skinner and Earl G of Democratic Underground, Naomi Klein, Molly Ivins, Eric Alterman, Josh Micah Marshall, and every other wonderful and tireless warrior who has fought on the side of sanity in these last few crazy years, let me extend my pure and heartfelt thanks, before we all get caught up in the admittedly all-important results of the election we are about to participate in on Tuesday. I hope you can forgive me my trespasses, and accept me into the fold of the team that, win or lose, has in a certain fundamental sense given its all.

If we win, as I am young enough to believe we will, I hope to be remembered as the 53rd man on the roster, who hung around just long enough to get a ring, even though he owes credit for the title to everyone but himself. And if we lose, as I am old enough to know is still very, very possible, I hope that those other 52 women and men on this valiant team absolve themselves of wrongdoing, and point to me, the guy who didn't quite pull his weight. I admit now, before the results are in; I could have done more, and I didn't, for no better reason than because that is the state of my character, the stage of my development here in this crucial year, my twenty-ninth.

But as an old Browns fan knows, win or lose, for us and for our opponents, there's always next year. See you there, beloved teammates. See you there.

Raul Groom