Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Go Home Hillary


Hillary Clinton needs to stop wasting people's money and drop out of the presidential race. She has made an absolute embarrassment of herself. For quite some time now, she's done nothing but distract key parts of the democratic constituency from coalescing behind Barack Obama.

We're at a point in our country's history of great importance. The 2000 and 2004 elections were some of the closest in history. Besides the elections of 1824 and 1800 which ended in draws, the only election decided by a closer margin of victory than 2000 was 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes won the disputed election of 1876.

Like Bush in 2000, Hayes lost the popular vote. He only won the election in a brokered back room deal known to history as the compromise of 1877. In exchange for the Democrats conceding the election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South.

This allowed the Democratic party to reclaim the southern local governments, push African-Americans out of power, and take away their voting rights effectively ending reconstruction. Also like 2000, the election of 1876 was ultimately decided by the Supreme
Court.

After the 2000 election, there have been only two closer than 2004: the election of 1796, the first election in American history not won by George Washington, and the election of 1916, contested during World War One, four years after Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party to form the progressive party. 2000 should have been enough of a wake up call to the country, but instead, we elected the same president by the same questionably close margin.

While our electoral system is unquestionably flawed, the blame is still none but our own. We allowed ourselves to be mislead—twice. It is up to us now to ask harder questions and pay closer attention. We're at two wars and in a recession--obviously we've done something wrong.

Hillary Clinton has been doing nothing but campaign for Jon McCain for the past couple months. America needs a change. The past eight years have been a sharp decline for America both in its integrity abroad as well as economically at home. American society’s political and economic
divisions have only increased. Which candidate most represents departure and change: Hillary Diane Clinton, John Sidney McCain, or Barack Hussein Obama?

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