Please, can we get over the primary battles?

Jeez, people! I thought we finished this in February!

Geez LOUISE it's OVER! The primaries are sooooo long over.

Look, I loved Dean. I supported him, gave money to his campaign, worked for him, voted for him in the primary (and my primary was long after we knew it was going to be Kerry). I almost cried the night of the Iowa primaries.

But about a month after the Iowa primaries, I decided "Ok, so it's Kerry. Let me go about falling in love with him." And I did.

I totally supported Kerry 110%. That's what you do in an election. You root for your guy or gal in the primaries, you pick yourself up and dust yourself off if your candidate doesn't get it, then you THROW yourself behind the party's nominee and go full-force. It was ALWAYS about putting a Democrat in the White House, to me.

Now that it's all over (???), I see no point in opening old wounds. Let's be constructive, let's put aside pettiness.

I've got NOTHING against any Clarkies, or original Kerry supporters, or original Edwards supporters, or Kucinich people (he was always closer to me ideologically), or ANY of the other hopefuls (um, I am hoping there are no Lieberman supporters here?).

I saw a car today with an old Wes Clark sticker on it and I got up next to her and gave her a big thumbs up. She smiled and did the same. We're all on the same team. Maybe that feeling is heightened for me since I live in a fucking red state and we feel the need to stick together more?? Who knows.

But let's engage in some constructive discussion. How can we move forward?

that is directed at people on this board by people that are supposed to be on the same side. Just because somebody sees something a little differently than yourself should be an opportunity to enlarge your vision of the world, not go into some dizzying red-eyed hate filled flame...Thank you for your sentiments....

btw there are gephardt people that I know and they are great people.

that was NOT on purpose, I'm just tired. For that matter, I forgot Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely-Braun.

Did I leave out anyone else? There were so many!!!

because a lot of people do for no good reason, they call him bushlite, but the guy is what it means to be a democrat on mostly all issues especially economic ones.

the Iowa caucus. Sure, I was bummed, and then started checking out Edwards, a little on Kerry and by the summer was totally behind Kerry - not ABB - read Brinkely's book and watched Going Up River.

Frankly, I like all these guys and hate the fighting.

It is soooo NOT constructive in any way.

Why must we do the circular firing squad?

I do. I was a Kucinich supporter but would have supported anyone, and Kerry was my number 2, I simply believed that he was way more progressive than people gave him credit for, and indeed its true, Kerry refused to stand for amendments banning gay marriage even though clinton wanted him to, as you may be able to tell, I like Kerry better than I do Clinton, not only because of the issues but because I truthfully like the man better. Why must we do the circular firing squad? because a lot of people love to complain that they were robbed in the primaries or whatever, personally I love Kerry, hes my favorite nominee of my life, I also saw going upriver and read Tour of duty, both profoundly moved me.

Democrats tend to be argumentative and feisty people who love a good debate. Dems whack each other a lot because a) it's fun and b) we can take it. This is how we hash out issues and debate ideas.

This is why Democrats have so many Unity dinners. (A time honored tradition that we absolutely need.) Unity dinners serve the great purpose of getting people who temporarily hate each other to sit down and break bread and see reason that the good of the party outweighs the low-down, dirty, uncrupulous thing that your opponent did to you in the last election. Then we publicly state how much we love each other, respect each others views and will work hard to elect the person we were convinced would spell the doom of West Civ just two days before. This is how real Democrats reconcile.

Repugs don't have many Unity dinners. More's the pity.

it would be nice to see a bit more loyalty on our side occasionally.

Ha, like that will ever happen.

My Mom used to talk about how all of her Irish Catholic Uncles would constantly be fighting about politics. The guys would almost come to blows and they were ALL Democrats. Oh, well, nothing new here I guess.

Stillo miss Wes though.

I thought we did too.

You're going to be accused of "silencing dissent!"

Funny (or tragic) thing is, one DU'er (I forget which) predicted this would happen if Kerry lost.

But I just don't hear Kerry, Edwards, Clark, Kucinich, Braun, Sharpton, Gephardt, and Lieberman supporters reliving the past...

The battles never really ended, they were just on suspend for a while. Too many people would rather be pissy about it than move on.

I started to wonder about a week ago if this fighting over nominees wasn't something that was just brewing under the surface, but repressed because of the urgency of the impending election.

Now it can all air out.

But let's not "air" ourselves out for months or anything. THAT would be depressing.

I would have been happy with any nominee. I don't hate any of the candidates and think they all would have made fine candidates (well, except for Lieberman but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for the sake of unity :)).

The primary battles were battles for the future of the Democratic party.

It is wise and essential that this debate be held.

"Why do so many people here dislike John Edwards?" or "Why do so many people here dislike Dennis Kucinich?" or "Why do so many people here dislike Wesley Clark?" or "Why do so many people here dislike John Kerry?" or...well, you get the picture. If we could all resist those darker impulses...

Edited: title of thread

That thread was in reaction to threads related to the DNC Chair issues, but people inevitably reacted with reasons that had to do with the primaries.

Whenever Dean's name comes up, we're going to have people referring to the primaries again, unfortunately.

Given some time, that may change (I hope).

but unfortunately if there's one thing Dems are good at, it's this bitter backbiting that never ends.

At this point in time, our national party is wandering about in the wilderness. We have control of nothing and even our own senators can't form a coalition to stop Bush's policies (like the budget). Soon the republicans may change the rules regarding filibustering as well meaning Bush can ram through any nutjob he wants.

It's time to move on. Dean, Clark, Edwards, Kucinich, Sharpton, Mosely Braun, Lieberman and Gephardt....all lost to John KErry.

And John Kerry lost to BUsh.

That's all there is to this. There's no need to go back and re fight it. As someone said, we can't know the results of an experiment that was never taken.