A "Hypothetical" On Backstabbing
So here’s a scenario for you:You are running in a primary election, against a formidable opponent. For the sake of argument, lets say that both you and your opponent are equally suited for the position you are running for. In the end, the goal of everyone is to have someone from your team take the final prize. So about three fourths of the way through the election, you are way behind, your opponent has continually beaten you, and all indications are that there is nearly no way you will ever be able to make a comeback big enough to win the primary. On top of this, all of the polls (and logic) show that if you win the primary and are nominated representative for your team, you will lose, and lose bad, to the other team, meaning everyone loses. On the other hand, your teammate has an excellent shot at beating the other team. Furthermore, the winner from the other team is already attacking your opponent, the almost inevitable winner of your team, in an early effort to kill your team’s chances of winning in the end. So what do you do?
It turns out, you refuse to concede the primary, and you come out with more and more desperate attacks on your primary opponent (who, lest we forget, is on your team). You decide to gang up on your teammate with your team’s enemy, freely exchanging attacks and talking points, in an attempt to take the challenger down (who again, is on your team, and almost certainly will go on to be the best hope of your team to win the big prize). You come out with attacks that undermine your teammate’s chances in the general fight, by claiming, for example, that your teammate isn’t fit to be the winner at all, an attack that will obviously be used against your teammate by your team’s enemy. And just for good measure, you decide you can’t win by playing by the rules (for this hypothetical scenario, lets call them Federal Election Commission rules), so you opt to have your supporters (who are also on your team) organize a 3rd party attack group (let’s call it a swiftboat) that can raise unlimited amounts of money to attack your opponent. This way your teammate (who again, is almost certainly going to be your team’s nominee, and who is the only one on your team who could beat the other team’s winner) has to contend with attacks from three directions at once.
So what is the logic, if any, in that scenario? If the ultimate goal is to have your team prevail against the other team, what is to be gained by A) staying in the race when your own candidacy would kill your team’s chances of winning, and B) stabbing your teammate in the back and teaming up with your mutual enemy, even though it is likely to fail, and even if it did succeed, you would certainly lose to that mutual enemy soon after. So what is there to gain from weakening (or attempting to weaken) your team’s only shot at winning? As far as I can see there is none, that is, if the goal is truly to have your team win in the end. The only way this scenario would make any sense is if you cared much more about something else, other than your team’s wellbeing, for instance, pride or long-held political ambition, or perhaps you (or your significant other) made a lot of promises to hand out favors after winning in exchange for money, and if you don’t win there will be a lot of angry people wanting their money back, hypothetically. Regardless of the reasoning, the obvious disconnect is that you don’t care about your party as much as you care about other things. This would be a classic example of cutting of your nose to spite your face.
For a counterfactual, we can take the example of someone in a similar position on the other team. This person had very little chance at winning (even though he had many millions of dollars and many strong sons to help him) the final showdown with the other team, if nominated. This person’s opponent, despite his advanced age, had a much much better chance of being the other team, and just so happened to be way ahead in the primary race. So the underdog in this situation, when faced with almost certain defeat in the primary, and almost certain defeat in the main competition if he somehow won the primary, decided to gracefully bow out of the contest, for the good of the team (and because he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning), instead of ganging up on his own teammate in a way that in all likelihood would have hurt his own team’s chances of winning the big prize. This is an example of a team that likes to win, and teammates, despite their differences, have some degree of honor, integrity and solidarity.
So my question is, why the hell is Hillary intent on sabotaging the Democrats, when she can’t beat McCain even if she did beat Obama? Also, why are her supporters standing by while she is tearing apart the Democratic Party and hurting our chances, even when all logic shows that her being in this race is the worst thing for the Democratic Party, plain and simple? If she doesn’t know when to quit, I just hope her supporters are smart enough to know what is best for the team, because in the end we are all on the same team, and it is time we recognize that and come together around our great nominee.