To Barack Obama: If You Won It, Win It!

All right, Barack, you’ve got your tiara and you’re prancing down winners’ row like Miss America. We get it, you’re happy. Sadly for you, the rest of us are damned pissed off and you’re the target of our rage.

You see, our girl, Miss Universe came “second” to you. Yeah, I know Miss Universe is superior to Miss America, but I consider that analogous to the popular vote and the delegate totals, respectively. She won with the people of the country she would like to represent, but you scored big with the judges. Here in pageant country, Texas, we call that an upset. In simple words: we’re just not that into you.

Here’s one way you might change our minds a little. Leave Miss Universe alone. I mean it. Get your blondies, your Heathers, and your frakkin’ Grease Lightenin’ fan club out of her face. That’s not making me giddy over you and it isn’t inspiring my inner sunshine, mkay? The more you antagonize Hillary, even in absentia, the more I begin to actively detest you and let me tell, you don’t want another Scorpio hating on you. You will not recover from it. Trust me.

The “pundits and the party leaders” have determined that you will be John McCain’s opponent in November, or at least until you go ‘splody in a great big ball of Howard Dean-scented flames. So be it. I believe that was an ill-made (see ethically- and monetarily-handicapped) decision. I have also decided that because of the way you’ve behaved, you juvenile, cheek-scratching, dirt-off-your-shoulder swatting, arugula-sucking, Spanish-ham nipping, policy-stealing, under-the-bus-throwing hack, that I can’t vote for you. I know, I know, you don’t care about me. I’m dirt on your shoulder and all that rubbish. Fine, fine, stop your kvetching.

You’re lucky right now. Many, many people who have decided not to vote for you have also decided not to vote for John McCain. That’s good for you. Here’s a chance that just might win you the election in November if you listen. Tell them how wonderful Hillary is, and how smart. Talk about the fact that you stole all of her old ideas because even the old ones were brilliant, just not as brilliant as the new ones. Tell them how you’ll call her every night to ask her advice because she’s infinitely more knowledgeable than you. Tell them how you really wish the SDs had picked her because even you would’ve slept better at night knowing that she was the one with her finger on the big red button since button literacy was one of the few things they didn’t give remedial classes on at Harvard. (And, we know you were in the remedial classes. Be honest.)

Once you’ve done all that, do the truly good thing and tell her to go back on vacation-whenever she comes back. You know that you-and your robber barons-are the reason the entire party establishment decided to stab a tried and true elder in the back. You know that, I know that, Hillary and Bill know that, but I think we’d all feel much better if it was said aloud, near a microphone and assembled press. Really, I think it’s time. Then, after that’s done, I want you to say, “I intend to win this on my own. I’m not gonna stand on the backs of black people and rich folks’ hired help to win this one. I’m gonna stand on my own two feet. Not on Hillary feet, or President Clinton’s. I will campaign in all 50 states in my campaign for the Presidency…But not today.”

Why not today, you may ask. I’ll tell you why, darling. It isn’t your time. You have a very long time to run for President. (Try 2016 on for size.) This isn’t a matter of entitlement on the part of the Clinton faction; it’s called practicality on the part of people in need. Wake up and smell the doom. The “paranoid holdouts” smell it something awful.

The country is in a tailspin of economic and cultural conflict. We are struggling to consume scarce resources, because the resources are, in fact, scarce and because money is even more so. Average people-who work for a living, who balance their checkbooks every other day in case a dollar’s gotten out of check, who mend clothes instead of replace them, who can afford to have air-conditioning in their homes but know damn well they can’t afford to turn it on during the worse days of summer-don’t have time for your brand of Hope-y Charms. Average people, when they aren’t toiling under the weight of an upside down mortgage for which there seems to be no remedy, are trying to decide if they can afford to live in a country where abortion is no longer an option-when for many of the poorest, it may be the only one. They are trying to decide how badly they want alienate their child who has just admitted for the first time the boy she’s been too embarrassed to bring home is really her childhood best friend, who’s lived next door all along. Can they see her in love and say they never want her to know the joy of a real wedding? They don’t know, but they’re trying so hard to decide.

Now, of all times, we can ill-afford someone who is only tepidly devoted to the vital needs of people in this country. That means you, Barack. You don’t care about these people. Don’t deny that. You are indeed caught up in the concept of yourself as President. You want to be the figurehead but you have no desire to do the work. You don’t care if you are another Jimmy Carter; you’re the first Black President, no matter what. They can’t take that away from you, can they? No, they can’t.

But we can.

And we have every intention in the world of ensuring that you never see the inside of the Oval Office.

You have insulted every one of us, if not with your actions, with your silence when our duly-chosen representative, our leader, was savaged in your name. You looked down like a boy-king as your regent was drawn-and-quartered when you had finally decided to ascend to your throne. You have no sympathy-certainly no empathy-and you couldn’t spare even a moment to sincerely defend her. There isn’t a second of this travesty that isn’t engrained in my memory, and that my future children won’t hear of as I think back on the greatness of one woman, and of the mightiest of glass ceilings that stands, more undead than intact, above our heads. There won’t be another like her, Barack, this woman who you’ve stopped with a brick wall when a historical bullet wouldn’t do.

And if there is, some woman who is so enormously prepared, she won’t run. Who would subject themselves to these months of endless torment just to serve a bunch of poor, starving, uninsured, commoners? I can name a woman, but I find myself hard-pressed to name another. Can you? It certainly isn’t Michelle.

It’s you, not us, who have stopped history from being made this year. Hillary would’ve been President without question. Not a byte of data refutes it. You, however, have an alternate destiny. You see, because it is our moral responsibility to keep you away from the White House. The country would never recover from four years of your brand of Democratic corruption in Washington. Eight years of fraudulent, criminal right-wing hucksters have nearly done the nation in, but you, you would be the death of it. So, while you sit there and contemplate the number of new registered voters you’ve got and all that mythical-somewhere someplace-money, remember that there is no amount of “kissing” or flashing your Ba-Rocks at us that will make us vote for you. It’s not the size of your Ba-Rocks or the capacity of your bank account; it’s the depth of your compassion and the breadth of your character.

That, sweetheart, is where you come up so short that you shouldn’t be allowed to be a Salvation Army volunteer, much less be elected President. Partly for those reasons, you won’t be.

The point of this long trip to why I’ll never vote for you is this: If you want me to keep being good and not be a McCain Democrat, you and your thugs-yeah, I said it, thugs-will begin to leave Hillary alone, starting now. Every time you bring her up and insult her, I send out an email. Every time you laugh about angry, “typical white wom[e]n,” a voter that I know personally will lose their will to vote. Every time you offend another state or another demographic that you “won’t need to win in November,” I’ll write another post like this.

Be nice to Hillary, be nice to Bill, and most importantly, shut the hell up. Accept your defeat as imminent, but bask in the notion that you have made “more history” than Hillary. Feel free to ignore that pain in your leg, that’s just me and the voodoo doll.

You say you’ve won this nomination and that you don’t need me-or my 18 million closest friends. All right then. Win without us. However, that means, you have to win without Hillary, too. She, no doubt, voted for herself. Therefore, she’s one more of those over-forty white broads you can do without.

Thanks partly to you, Barack, for the first time in my adult life, I’m not proud to be black in America. And frankly, I’m hoping to leave.