Lots of folks have been linking to this Frank Rich column, and rightly so:
But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.
Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over what role misogyny played in her defeat. A few female Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on YouTube and Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote for Mr. McCain.
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.
That said, lots of feminists — and not only those who supported Clinton in the race — remain pissed off about the level of misogyny Clinton faced during the race. And rightly so.
And many anti-racist feminists and womanists remain pissed off at how many (not all) Clinton-supporting feminists — and Clinton herself — minimized or denied racism during the primary race. And rightly so.
We shouldn’t say that we have to heal these divisions before the election. Because, you know, that’s not going to happen. These divisions are deeper and more enduring than a single election cycle, and will take more than six months to heal.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t elect Obama rather than McCain in the meanwhile, of course. But that’s the sideshow, not the main focus. Fighting racism and sexism is important for its own sake, not because there’s an election coming up.
(Disclosure: In case folks are wondering, I will quite likely be voting for Cynthia McKinney — although I’d vote for Obama if I lived in a swing state.)
P.S. Check out Michelle Obama Watch, if you haven’t already.
Oh, but didn’t you hear? Obama is going to cure racism. And cancer. And the economy.
(All I’m hoping for is that after the elections, the dollar rate stops plummeting and maybe even picks up a little. I don’t think most American politicians realize just how much their economic responsibility affects the day-to-day lives of millions of non-Americans. A gradual withdrawal from Iraq would also be nice, but I think he’d need two terms to pull it off.)
I’d like to hear you expand on your reasons for voting for Cynthia McKinney. I worked on her first successful Congressional campaign and supported her in the election where she lost her seat. I’m curious to hear what inspires your support.
I respect your decision to vote for McKinney … however, I think it might be difficult to determine this cycle what’s a swing state and what’s not.
Wait – you mean Oregon won’t count in the general election?! I get to vote for Bullwinkle?! BONUS!
Just kidding.
The media pundits (sic) who harp on the Clinton/McCain crowd will ignore Rich’s column, because they are not interested in responsible commentary. They want the dedicated eyeballs of angry viewers, who will be more drawn to stories of conflict, however fabricated, over stories of more complex problems (Israel and Hamas, anyone?). Chris Matthews will go to his grave playing that YouTube clip of the angry Clinton supporter denouncing the “unqualified black man.” It makes his liberal sexist heart go thrum. “Hey, sweetie, play me that clip again. Oooohhhh yeah, that’s the stuff.”
There’s a good article on this on Slate as well.
http://www.slate.com/id/2193470/
There may not be droves of female Clinton voters flocking to McCain, but there do appear to be significant numbers of Clinton voters (both sexes) deciding at least for right now that they aren’t going to vote for Obama, either.
Robert, I wonder if that isn’t wistful thinking on your part. From Iris’ link:
Of course, if it’s neck-and- neck in swing states, even a small group of voters can make all the difference. But that applies in the other direction, as well; a small number of Bob Barr voters can make the difference against McCain, and doing better than John Kerry in motivating young voters and voters of color can put Obama over the top.
I’ll be very, very surprised if McCain wins.
W.B., I’m sure that I’ll post more about McKinney as we get closer t0 November. But in a nutshell, if I vote for her, it’ll be because on almost every matter of policy, McKinney and the Green Party Platform are superior to the Democratic Party’s nominee and platform; and as a protest vote against the two-party hegemony.
Jeff, that’s a fair point. However, by the time I vote (due to Oregon’s vote-by-mail system, which allows us Oregonians to begin voting weeks before the election), the polls will be pretty accurate. I’m confident I’ll be able to tell if Obama is winning by a large margin or not. (There is no chance that McCain will be winning Oregon by a large margin.)
I didn’t mean electorally significant, just numerically significant. You may well be right that those voters won’t end up making much or any difference in the electoral college total. But I encourage all Democrats to continue saying that the women who are unhappy about Clinton’s loss don’t matter and can be ignored. ;)
Obama is going to get his hat handed to him, I think. He hasn’t had to face an ideologically distinct opponent yet, and I believe that his complete lack of credible expertise, his foreign policy naivete, and the fact that he’s running against the one guy who’s widely perceived as having been right about the war, are going to cause a crushing disillusionment among the middle third of voters. He could keep those voters if he could keep the election about lofty rhetorical themes like change, hope, etc., but he couldn’t do that against Clinton, and he surely won’t be able to do it against the Republicans. People care about racial healing, but they care about gas prices too.
It’s not so much that McCain is going to win, as that Obama is going to lose. If we had run Huckabee, Obama would have a chance. But McCain is competent grandpa; uninspiring, maybe, but we’re pretty sure he’ll get the barn built like he says he will. Obama is the fresh-faced contractor talking about a whole new paradigm in barn-building, and talking louder and louder the more people start asking questions like “so, what barns have you actually built?”
Perhaps that’s wishful thinking, but I’m simultaneously predicting a Democratic landslide in the Congress because of my party’s appalling Congressional performance in the last several years, so apparently I have a split personality when it comes to my wishes. ;)
And many anti-racist feminists and womanists
Help me out here. What’s the distinction between the two?
Robert, I agree that Obama’s inexperience will likely be his biggest weakness, but your diagnostics of the race are precisely backward. On almost every single issue, Americans prefer the Democrats over Republicans (and certainly on gas prices, which you mentioned). This is a year where the fundamentals are such that the Democratic brand roundly trounces the Republican brand. Even more so than in 2004, the Republicans’ strategy will to veer away from specific issues and to establish grand themes.
If McCain wants to win, he has to approach the race as the underdog. No balancing act in picking and choosing which policies to support in an effort to play Stoic, Reasonable Man – that only works for frontrunners. He has to, more so than Obama does, establish a single unifying theme, promote it passionately, and have the voters view every one of his major positions through the lens of that theme. (Essentially, the same way Obama overtook frontrunner Clinton.) Personally, I think the best such theme for the Republicans in 2008 will be all-around xenophobia. Illegal immigration was the one winning issue for Republicans following the 2006 midterms, and discontent with the economy can be spun into generic China-baiting (which may be particularly effective in the Rust Belt), and then throw in war and terrorism and Arabs for good measure. (A “war and terrorism” theme by itself, I feel, will be insufficient this year.) To top it off, your opponent is a black guy with an unAmerican name. Strategically, this whole strategy means ceding the Southwest for a clearer shot at the Upper Midwest swing states.
If Obama wants to win, he should start campaigning aggressively, *now*. Take the current post-nomination bump and run with it. The Republicans would prefer to have an essentially neck-and-neck race until Convention season, where they would pile on the negative attacks and give Obama little chance to recover. (Swiftboating, remember, did not start in earnest until August of 2004 and reached its full stride in September; Bush maintained a small lead throughout the quiet summer.) The Democrats have the energy, momentum, and the coffers, and by opening up an early lead, they force the Republicans’ hand in terms of what attacks they’ll use, giving the Dems more time to deflect and counterattack. There’s also the fact that negative campaigning simply is less effective coming from a challenger or a dark horse as it is coming from the frontrunner.
It is my personal opinion that it won’t be as easy for the Republicans to take down Obama the way they did Kerry – which, historically speaking, they only barely did. I think the Democrats’ conundrum is that voters generally prefer Democratic positions over Republican positions but Republican politicians over Democratic politicians. The latter makes it easy for Republicans to take a bland, typical Democrat (Dukakis, Kerry, etc.) and recast him in the eyes of the public. However, this year, voters’ preference for Democratic positions is sharper than usual, while thanks to his charisma, historicity, and “Obamamania”, Obama is already defined in eyes of many people, and will be harder to cast as “generic Democrat” in the eyes of others. Buuuuttt… that could be wishful thinking on my part.
Okay, that’s my wheezing punditry for the day.
“Womanism” is a term invented by WOC (I believe by Alice Walker, though I could be wrong) as a way to distance themselves from feminism, which they saw as irredeemably white and middle-class.
sylphhead – Personally, I think the best such theme for the Republicans in 2008 will be all-around xenophobia. That one failed spectacularly for the Conservatives in the UK in 2001. It just reinforced their image as ‘The Nasty Party’. It didn’t work because too few British people were electorally invested in a need to protect the populace from immigration and protect the economy from other nations – and the Tories had nothing to say to them about the real bread-and-butter stuff of improving healthcare and education. My hope is that the USians are similarly inclined, preferably so similarly that McCain won’t even try such a corrosive strategy.
RonF – what sylphhead said. It’s definitely more a matter of chosen identification than differences in policy, though it’s likely that womanists have different priorities, not to mention life experiences, to anti-racist feminists like me.
(Disclosure: In case folks are wondering, I will quite likely be voting for Cynthia McKinney — although I’d vote for Obama if I lived in a swing state.)
Is Cynthia your fallback choice? It seems that quite a few people have turned to her now that HRC is out of the running. It seems that she is suddenly considered a woman. I find this new re visioning of her by white feminists to be extremely offensive. WOC only count when it is convenient.
I hear you, but I think you’re misunderstanding where I’m coming from. In the Democratic primaries, I supported Obama, not Clinton, and I posted against anti-Obama racism from Clinton and some of her supporters several times. (I also posted against anti-Clinton sexism.)
Voting for McKinney in the Democratic Primaries was, obviously, not an option for me. But I can vote for her in the general election (assuming she’s the Green Party nominee), and if Oregon isn’t a swing state, I will.
And I’d say the exact same thing if Clinton were the nominee instead of Obama. McKinney’s better than either of them, from my perspective.
And by the way, I’ve been a supporter of McKinney’s for at least as far back as 2003 — see here and here.
I never did figure out what was so all-fired capital-F Feminist about Clinton II. I’ve been hoping all along to vote McKinney, since I’ve been registered Green all along.
Dissident Voice on the trouble with trying to establish the one-person = one-vote rule in all 50 states.
Oh, and just so we White feminists don’t have to (sometimes) look like clueless, racist jaggoffs all on our lonesome, check out the charming comments about McKinney at Seattle’s The Stranger blog: The aptly named Slog.
I love it when supposed edgy “liberal” lefty mags have a fan base that spouts the same obnoxious shit you could read at Fox or MSN without breaking a sweat.
It’s amusing, when presented with the GOP meme of Obama’s lack of “experience”, to consider that Abraham Lincoln had even less experience in elective office prior to becoming President. Of course, I suspect that many present day “Republicans” wouldn’t have voted for Lincoln either.
Ampersand- Thanks for the response.
I’ve got only three things to say: SUPREME COURT, SUPREME COURT, SUPREME COURT.
Okay, that’s only one thing. But it’s the one that really matters.
Letting McSame into the White House — however it is done — will only end up allowing the Republican Right to finish off this country.
Women, African-Americans — all of us. We’ll all sink together.
The next President could get to pick as many as four new justices. We know the sort McCain would put in there. Even those who have no regard for Obama as a candidate have to face the reality of that.