I have a group text with my mom, my dad, and my sister. It’s mostly pictures of brisket, stories about how Liz’s dog has met a goat or a child. There’s a long stretch where I try to help them figure out how they can watch Lemonade. My mom often uses this forum to talk about what she’d do if she won the lottery, or as she calls it, “the big one.” On the night last month when Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination, a text came in from my sister who had caucused for Bernie Sanders. It said:
When Hillary Clinton is president she, like Obama, will do things that inspire and disgust me. She will make compromises that I hate. She will solve some seemingly insurmountable problems and ignore others. Ones I probably care about.
- She’s a woman. We not only get to but need to acknowledge that. We’ve long raked her over the coals a little extra. It’s why we’re a more eager to call out her lies and misrepresentations even though fact-checkers confirm that she doesn’t do it that much. It’s why we salivated over her deeply stupid, offensive comment about Nancy Reagan. It’s why we punish her for doing the thing that is politics. It’s why we attack her for being ambitious and entitled to the presidency and celebrated Bernie for refusing to drop out of a race he’d lost.
But she didn’t fail. She won the votes. So we say that the rules which Bernie and Hillary both understood, agreed to, and followed—however outdated or overcomplicated or unfair they may be—were not rules at all, but were the machine actively inventing ways to keep Bernie down. Bernie chose to use this system because he knows you can’t legitimately run as an independent. He used the system. He made that choice. He knew what it was. It was a sly, savvy political move, and he did well. But as Hillary won more and more, the rules they both signed on for were called voter suppression, rigging, more classic Clinton cheating. Hillary, who has a record of opposing real voter suppression like redistricting and ID requirements, was accused of it simply for, ya know, winning votes.
“I’m done with the lesser of two evils,” you say. But I vote with a brain that knows taking your toys and going home to pout is one thing, but burning down the whole damn sandbox because you lost the game is a dangerous overreaction.
This essay was first performed in The Paper Machete, the live magazine hosted by Reader contributor Christopher Piatt at the Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway) on Saturdays at 3 PM. For more info, go to thepapermacheteshow.com.
