This country cannot house its houseless - feed its foodless.

I'm a Democrat.

That was a difficult thing to type.

The Democratic party has at more times than I can count over my almost lifetime membership in it infuriated me in the positions it's leadership has taken. There have been many, many times over the past several years that I've considered leaving the party.

So why would I remain a registered Democrat? Why not join the Socialist, or Green parties?

Distilled down to it's base there are two separate reasons I remain in the Democratic party.

The first is that the platform of the Democratic party is generally progressive in nature and I'm a progressive.

The second, perhaps more important reason is it's the largest and most organized alternative to the other major political party - the Republicans. A Republican party which at it's core has spent the last thirty years working to destroy everything that is good and decent about the country I love.

So I'm left to supporting an imperfect party that at it's best is able to win us things like Social Security but at it's worst it can barely stand up to save Social Security when it was under assault by Republicans who believe the governing rule of society should be survival of the fittest.

As long as I call myself a Democrat I recognize that doing so entails responsibilities to my fellow party members. Those responsibilities usually take the form of compromising on my personal preference for who will represent us in contests with Republicans.

At the start of this seemingly endless presidential primary I supported Kucinich. He was the most progressive of the bunch and his politics are closest to my own. He lost his bid for the nomination fairly early into the campaign.

My fallback candidate was Edwards. His commitment to social justice was Kennedyesque. He voted for the war while he was in the senate but had soundly renounced that vote. His candidacy crashed and burned shortly after Kucinich's.

At this point I was pretty pissed off. It seemed to me that the truly progressive voices were dropping out while we were left with what I considered establishment candidates in Clinton and Obama. Yes, these two candidates represented historical firsts but their was nothing about their candidacies that threatened official Washington.

I also had some sour grapes about how about how my candidates were treated by the media...

But after I calmed down and thought about it I realized that part of belonging to a political party is that not everybody in the party thinks exactly like I do. Everybody else has a say. I may disagree but as long as the goals of the party are something I can agree with, how we get there isn't as important.

Besides it didn't matter if I thought my preferred candidates would do better against the Republican nominee in the fall. My candidates lost.

So I compromised again. Ultimately putting a Democrat into the Whitehouse where the Joint Chiefs will have to answer to that person and who will make the next few Supreme Court nominations is the thing that's most important to me.

Tomorrow the primaries end and the supporters of one of the candidates are going to be asked to compromise and put aside thier considerable personal stake in their candidate for the sake of the party. Just like millions of their fellow Democrats have had to do during the course of this last year as their preferred candidates were defeated.

The choice is theirs and theirs alone.

Are they Democrats?

It's injustice I hate, not the Normans.

If I had to reduce down all the stuff that's important to me in this presidential election to one thing it would be that we elect a democrat to replace and undo legacy the most destructive presidency in the history of the Republic.

At the core of my being that's the thing that drives me.

To that end who we picked to be the actual candidate was secondary. Sure, I had my preferences. I supported Kucinich then Edwards then Obama. But in the end the actual candidate was just a vessel towards my dreams of ending the stupid war in Iraq and restoring constitutional government to the United States.

Along the way my fellow Democrats did something incredible which I'm proud to be associated with: they narrowed the field down to a woman and an African-American man thus assuring that whomever the Democratic nominee would be that individual would be making history.

But just because I recognize this fact and respect the importance of such to the individual constituencies within the party to which this possibility represents the fulfillment of a dream I'm still left with the number one thing that's important to me being the election of the democrat as the President of the United States. In this sense it's less important to me that we're making history rather than the Bush presidency IS history.

We could argue about tactics and electability with regards to Clinton vs. Obama vs. McCain until we were blue in the face but I would like to say that, from a purely strategic level, I agree with Rachel Maddow that a nomination fight that goes to the convention will mean with absolute certainty that John McCain is elected president. A convention fight means a Bush third term.

John McCain has carefully cultivated a public persona which the help of a pliant press in which he's a moderate, centrist politician. The Democratic candidate for the presidency is going to have to break that image down and show McCain to be the lying, dishonest, corrupt, warmongering pol that he is. This is going to take some time. Two months isn't enough.

Put aside everything else that's taken place this primary season and take away this central fact: the candidate that decides to take the primary fight to the convention will be hurting the chances that we will elect a democrat as president in November.

They'll be hurting the chance that we'll end the war in Iraq.

They'll be hurting the chance that we'll bring some balance back to the federal courts.

They'll be hurting our chance to slow global warming and our dependence on foreign oil.

They'll be hurting our chance to restore the constitution to it's rightful place as the backbone of our government.

They'll be ensuring that we get courts that refuse to protect the rights of women to make their own decisions over their own bodies, a Civil Rights Department that believes it's mandate is to protect the rights of corporations when threatened by employees and a Justice Department that believes torture and detainment without representation actually fit within the framework that the founders built this country on.

Finish the voting and work out a solution to Florida/ Michigan at the Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting on the 31st but then end this damn thing. The consequences are too great to play political games.

We need a Democrat to be the one sworn in come January.

Or we'll all be history.

You have just said the secret word, Alice. You have just won a trip to the moon.

Let me say this - I'm with most of my bloggy friends, most recently Blue Gal, in that it's well past time for Clinton to pull the plug on her campaign. It's near mathematically impossible for her to win the nomination despite yesterday's victory and drawing out the contest is just hurting the party's chances against McCain.

Here's an analogy that I think works pretty well-

This primary has taken the form of a knock-out, drag down fight with your spouse. There's been screaming, swearing and even the occasional accusation of infidelity or flirting with that McCain guy that lives down the street. Once in a while there's even an empty threat of divorce.

Occasionally this fight takes the the form of what might be considered hitting below the belt. Words are taken out of context. That old friend from college who tried to break you and your spouse up comes up yet AGAIN even though you haven't talked to him in years.

On rare occasions you find yourself sitting on the porch next to the dog, pouring your heart out to him. So you goofed up the laundry a little bit. So what? It wasn't your turn to do the laundry anyway, you made dinner. What's the big deal that you mixed the reds with the whites? It was just underwear. What does she care if it's white or pink? It's not like she's wearing it out in public and, well, um...

Ahem.

It seems to me that a lot of us are kind of feeling like this fight is going on longer than usual and are getting impatient for the make-up sex. That is, as they say, the best sex of all.

But as long as we're on the porch with the dog there will be no make-up sex.

In the meantime some of us try and tide ourselves over by the candidate masturbation offered at Taylor Marsh on the one side or Daily Kos on the other. Let's face it; this will never be a good substitute for the real thing.

So forgive us if we seem a tad impatient to get to the good part. Who can blame us? Nobody enjoys fighting. There's make-up sex to be had and there are things that are much, much more important than pink underwear.

People are being duplicated. And once it happens to you, you're part of this... thing.

Apologies in advance because I'm going to comment on "Bittergate," but I'd just observe that I have no doubt in my mind that Hillary Clinton and most of her supporters understand exactly what Obama meant by his remarks. If they didn't understand that that the last thirty years of the economy have left some Americans bitter then they wouldn't be Democrats.

So if Clinton understands Obama's remarks then what does that say about the outrage she's shown about those same remarks over the weekend?

I've said many times that the whole issue of choosing a candidate based on which of the demorcratic candidates had been vetted is silly. Republicans don't care if the mud is all ancient history. They'll just dredge it up again or, more likely, make up new mud to throw at the Democratic nominee.

So why are Democrats doing the same thing?