When I wrote before the Iowa Caucus that nominating either an African-American man or a White Woman could backfire because the country wasn’t ready for it I was hoping to be wrong, I wasn’t. Recent actions by embittered Clinton supporters carry political rifts that reverberate across the media every hour. The sinking Hillary ship pulled the nuclear option and used race and gender to their advantage, now it’s all you hear race, gender, blah, blah, blah. It continues to play out even though Hillary lost. Especially now that some fringe feminists are threatening to vote for McCain. Enough already!
All the excitement in the base generated in the democratic party in the beginning has now dissipated. You had all these rank and file Dems rallying around Obama and Hillary simply because of what they were, not who they were, an African-American, a woman, I found that somewhat alarming before Iowa. I thought we were supposed to be gender and color blind I thought. I worried about the working class White Male voters as being key. Here we had a chance to reach out to the blue collar crowd and prove that the Democratic party is about higher wages, health care and building America up, not making the rich even richer by selling everything off which is all the Republicans do. Instead we were facing losing the white males to either a woman or a black man who I feared were not as open minded as the rest of us.
I thought Edwards was the best choice, not because of what he looked like, because of the content of his character. He was the best choice for health care, for combating poverty and for reaching out to the working class base that Democrats need to win. He would have made a great face for a Progressive agenda that would have been spared all the tiresome headlines about gender and race. Edwards, however, lost, and I can speculate till the cows come home and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. He was beaten out fair and square, well sort of, ironically, largely because he was not African-American or a woman. No not by the voters, his campaign was over before Iowa, simply because politics comes down to what happens behind the scenes, and a large scale battle was brewing between the Moderate Clinton camp and the Progressive Dean camp. Edwards was caught in the middle, as guys like Daschle and the Kennedys sided with a new rising star as their spokesman. Obama proved to be up to the challenge, and it was Obama, not Edwards, that would lead the call to change against the right-leaning politics of the Clintons, backed by a growing force in the Democratic Party of Progressives.
The Clinton machine didn’t go down easily, they throw everything at the wall until it stuck. Ironically, Hillary didn’t gain any momentum until she began to imitate John Edwards populist style, as working class white males suddenly became key. They flocked to her for some reason (hmmm, I wonder why) even though she did quite poorly looking populist if you ask me, choking down whisky shots in a thousand dollar pantsuit talking about the lake her grandpa showed her how to shoot a gun, oh spare me. Next she’d be saying she was the child of a mill worker. I found it all quite laughable. Then again, I see politics for what it is: bullshit!
Hillary threatened to take the party down if she didn’t win. Even though she came to her senses, the wounds she inflicted on the party will not heal easily, which brings us to today.
Women all over the country that supported Hillary are all up in arms now, jumping up and down about how Hillary is this grand victim of sexist coverage. Many supporters are even threatening to vote for McCain. WOW! Here you have hardcore feminists, even lesbians for God sakes, claiming that Obama’s victory has scared them so badly, they will vote for a widely touted chauvinist, navy pilot who has recently told his followers he plans to elect conservative judges that will overturn Roe vs. Wade and end a woman’s right to choose. I know it sucks to lose your candidate, but come on, That’s just plain stupid!
I’m not saying there was no sexist slant against Hillary, just as I’m not saying there was no RACIST slant against Obama either. Most of the clips the Hillary camp are citing today as examples were culled from the archives of cable outlets like FOX News anyhow, where few Democrats were even paying attention, those who did were probably laughing at the talking chimps.. Equally awful and racist clips can be dug up on what was said on Obama (just the other day a Fox Reporter said a simple handshake was a terrorist Muslim signal!). It gets worse though, since some of the racist attacks were perpetrated by the Hillary team, remember the dirty underhanded secret Muslim picture they released? The media ate it up and still shows that picture. This doesn’t diminish the sexism, however it does make you think. I mean, you could probably compile news stories on McCain’s age and call it Ageism, or Romney’s Morman discrimination, or Fred Thompson’s laziness and incompetence. The media dwelled on all of those things. Should we all go out and feel sorry for them?
Doesn’t this say more about the miserable state of our media and the alarming slide of journalism into sensationalized talking heads with loud mouths and nothing to say? Why blame Obama for the media when the media has been no ally of his either. Hillaryites have even pulled out a little graph that shows that positive news storys heavily favored Obama until just recently. Only problem is, the graph BEGINS at the New Hampshire Primary, it pays no attention to the unstoppable and inevitable victory Hillary Clinton was headed for last Fall, or so the media told us. Obama had to fight just to get a few meager headlines, which mostly were about his record fundraisers online (which Hillary ignored). Iowa turned all that around. Suddenly Hillary was the one under the gun. Her campaign stumbled, focused on the larger states, failed to organize properly in the smaller Caucus states, which Obama won handily (which is how he won Iowa in the first place). A desperate Hillary said Obama was “inexperiencedâ€, then “I take him at his word that he is not a Muslim,†then he was “un-vettedâ€, then an “elitist†then out of touch with the working class, the whites, then finally, when everything had failed, she pulled out the glass ceiling argument.
Carrying on about ANY politician, white, black, man, woman, Mexican, Cuban, Irish, Italian, whatever is a lousy idea. None of them are saints and have had to stab a lot of people in the back to get where they got. That’s the nature of power. Just because Hillary is a woman doesn’t make her any better than any other candidate. As the above mud sling shows, Hillary is a fairly underhanded politician. Surprise, surprise! Yet feminist groups choose to make Hillary’s gender the prime issue for her electability. Never mind the fact that she voted to send men and women off to die in Iraq, never mind the fact she has a pretty mediocre voting record that would make her a tremendous liability to voters in the Fall, never mind her monstrous failure in passing health care legislation, or that we never hear Hillary’s name leading the charge to any major legislation, never mind the fact that she has the highest disapproval rating of any of the Presidential Candidates. Let’s get Hillary elected because if she doesn’t get elected a woman may NEVER get into the White House.
That is such a stupid argument I don’t know where to begin. There is an increasing number of prominent woman candidates working in Washington, even on the Republican side. We’ve had two female Secretary of States, an attorney general, governors, Supreme Court Justices, prominent and powerful veteran Senators and the list goes on and on. Saying that Hillary is the only chance is insulting to the numerous achievements of women in politics, as if the only way a woman can get elected is if her husband was already President. Besides, let’s face it, voting for someone based on their outward appearance or gender and not the content of her character is sexist, flat out, straight up, no escaping it!
The Hillary supporting feminist groups that banked so heavily on Hillary are shamefully misinforming millions of American women. First off, they turn this whole deal into a big gender war that is as divisive as Johnny Cochran turning OJ’s trial into a race thing (which had black women cheering the release of a wife-beater). It’s misleading and inaccurate and very divisive. Hillary’s nomination did not mean she would become President either. She was equally, an enormous gamble to take. Instead of race, it would have been gender and Hillary could have caused a defection of independent White males to McCain, the big tough military dude. It could have been disastrous.
Secondly they have the gender blinders on so narrow, that they have failed to cite the enormous turnout of younger woman for Obama. Many young women place little stock in voting for someone just because of their gender. They haven’t faced sexual discrimination to the degree of earlier generations and are voting gender & racially blind. Many Feminist groups did NOT endorse Hillary either, including a prominent Pro-Choice group NAARAL. Isn’t this a tremendous victory for America? Isn’t this one step closer to equality? Isn’t this something that should not be torn down with a wrecking ball and, in fact, praised?
Third, I think it seems pretty obvious when you examine the facts, that Obama defeated her fair and square. As far as issues went, Hillary and Obama were virtually identical, only how they’d institute Universal Healthcare separated them, everything else was trivial. Obama won because he changed the way fundraising works and raised the largest sum in history, for the first time beating the Republicans, he mobilized the youth vote (men & women), who rarely even show up to polls, and he got them to turn out in Caucus states that ultimately brought him his victory, and he out-maneuvered her, in front of the camera and in the smoke-filled rooms, while withstanding every nasty tactic she threw at him (and believe me she got nasty). He played by the rules and turned her own negative campaign into a weakness. There were no widescale reports of women being turned away at the polls or husbands keeping the wife indoors. There were no overtly chauvinist attitudes in the Obama camp or her not being taken seriously, SHE WAS THE FRONT RUNNER! The giant Clinton Dynasty collapsed under its own weight, plain and simple.
Finally, someone has got to lose a primary, it’s life, deal with it. As a supporter of John Edwards (who I still contend was, the best candidate), it stung to see him lose to Obama. At first I was angry, I got over it. So I know you Hillary folk can too. We all knew the score when we got into this, that someone had to lose either the first female President or the first African-American President. What makes your cause so much MORE important? Besides, you know it wasn’t gender that crushed her, it was her poor organization (for God sakes’ she’s $10+Million in the hole, that’s bad organization). Obama choose more experienced advisors (so much for the inexperienced argument) and it showed. Pumping the gender argument to the point where you have woman’s group organizers going around talking about voting for McCain may help Hillary pay the bills, however it threatens to do something far graver for women in particular…elect John McCain! Who do you think will get the blame for that? Especially when McCain packs the courts with conservative whackos that will likely overturn Roe vs. Wade. Feminist groups stepping into the fray is an enormous gamble, like a thousand to one shot that may end up defeating Obama, crushing the momentum of the Democratic Party and certainly Feminist politics, who will appear Ralph Nader like, even potentially making it harder for a woman to run for President next time (especially Hillary) branding a female candidate for President as too politically risky to take a chance on.
In other words, it’s a tremendous mistake for women’s groups to push this issue. This late in the game they have nothing to gain and everything to lose, not just for themselves, for ALL women, these groups DO NOT represent all women, nor can they speak for them, yet somehow, they can screw things up for all women, that’s for sure. Don’t you just love American politics (sarcastic).
The landscape has changed, it may be hard to see, however the days of Billy Jean King and the bouts of the seventies and eighties are in the history books. It would be wise to learn from the mistakes and understand that gender politics simply didn’t work (as demonstrated by the failure of the E.R.A.) especially since it divided women more than anyone and pushes men away.. The fact is, you HAVE come a long way baby, and there is still some way to go, although, you cannot change people’s minds with activism, laws, or even having a Margret Thatcher-like (over compensating the toughness) President (did it work in England or India?). It is the kind of thing that can only be phased out over time. I know that’s a bitter pill to swallow, change by evolution not revolution is never as satisfying and not always the answer. Sometimes though, it is the only way.
For now, we must put aside our differences and work for the benefit of ALL Americans. The time has come to put a lid on the problems created by George W. Bush and it will be no easy task. Our party nominated a candidate fair and square. It’s time to put it behind us and concentrate on defeating the deceptive and stealth conservative John McCain. This election is too important for us to be divided, we must stand tall, proud and unified. Otherwise we will prove another stereotype, that the American Left gets caught up on meaningless intellectual points rather than unify to win elections and get to work!
