Can’t vote for your candidate, because they oppose my candidate

During this year’s round of arguments about the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was a lot of contention about the merits of inducting Jim Rice. The thing about Jim Rice is that a single glance at his career, his record, his team, the era, etc, etc, shows that he is a borderline candidate. There are arguments for putting him in, and there are arguments for leaving him out. Either way, he remains on the borderline.

The thing is, and it was Joe Poznanski at his wonderful blog that pointed it out, when you start to make the arguments, you narrow your focus to those things that are relevant to the question. His home and away stats, or the relative on-base percentages of players of his era, or whatever you have looked into to differentiate Jim Rice from the people who are slightly better or slightly worse, those things seem to expand as you focus on them until you become convinced that they are the really important things, the things that really make a guy a Hall of Famer. And even more important, the crap that those morons on the other side of the argument are spouting is the most ridiculous bullshit that was ever shat by a bull. Or an ox, even. And pretty soon you are either saying that Jim Rice was the most feared hitter for half a century, or you are saying that he was a worthless hack and if he had been signed by the Dodgers nobody would ever have heard of him.

And then, six months later, those same people, once they’ve calmed down, will realize once again what was obvious from the beginning: he’s a borderline Hall of Famer.

Is the internet to blame? Yes, to some extent, the medium encourages a sort of oppositional approach that bleeds into hostility and confrontation. Furthermore, as I’ve often said, the Internet is the Medium of the Cheap Shot, so once you get started, people take cheap shots at you, which gives you a grievance and an oppositional attitude (if you didn’t have one before), and heightens the proverbial. But mostly it’s what happens when you get involved in a discussion of minor differences along a spectrum in an in-or-out situation.

I think that’s what’s happening with the primaries. We have two strong, wonderful candidates, and only one of them can be the nominee. There are real differences between them, both in character and in policy, and it is reasonable (and, for Democrats, important) to make distinctions between them for the purpose of preferring one to the other. But once your focus has narrowed to the differences, it seems as if the differences are the Most Important Things in the World, and that the other candidate is not just inferior but Eeevil.

Hillary Clinton is not running the most vicious, racist and negative campaign in the history of democracy. Barack Obama is not a dopey ignoramus who is too pathetic to stand up against the slightest whisper of attack. Nobody drops out of a campaign the week after they win a primary. Neither is the Messiah. Neither is an agent of the Republicans. Neither is much further to the left than the nation as a whole. Neither is unaware of the niceties of politics. It will be easier to remember all of this once it’s all over.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.