McSweeney’s has been running a first rate series on reasons to vote for Obama.

I was struck by today’s (number 13), especially this:

After that I learned to appreciate Obama in a different way. I appreciated that he inhabited a world in which idealism-and ideology-could never by sheer force of will overcome objective reality, and the hard compromises, uneasy truces, and constant errors that must be made to live in that world. I especially felt better about this position when I learned that John McCain carried an indian feather around FOR LUCK. This was not how I wanted my country run. By myth and superstition and magic tokens.

And, in that real world, I began to appreciate, winning matters. And not just that election. Those who hate how far the legislative Frankenstein’s monster called the Affordable Care Act lurched away from the promethean ideal of what it could have been are not wrong. Those who, for this reason, cheered for its failure were dumb. Whether the fight should have been joined just then is a discussion that countless armchair quarterbacks and alternate history novelists can debate, sterilely, forever. Once it WAS joined, that win was galvanizing…

What I’m missing, in the Stein/Honkala account, is a recognition that half the country adamantly does not share our views on most anything. Like the author of this piece suggests, that doesn’t make ’em bad people; but it does mean that, willy nilly, their voices, too, count (nor are they simply dumb-asses misled by their corporate whoremasters–they have their own traditions and values, and simply identifying those with whom we disagree as simply brainwashed by FOX agitprop (which isn’t suggest that it’s negligible, either, is the highest form of condescension).

And they have representation, and lots of it. And a Green President, like any other, would be forced to compromise at every turn, from the moment she takes the Oath. After a year in office, a Green President will look remarkably unlike a Green candidate and probaby find herself with a back full of arrows aimed by her disgruntled supporters).

That is, if she wants to get anything whatsoever done. But of Greens really wanted to get something done, they’d actually be running for offices that they might win, thereby giving them that opportunity.