It’s kind of bizarre reading about supposed “feminists” who are reportedly claiming they’ll vote for McCain rather than Obama, now that “their” candidate, Hillary Clinton, is out of the running for the presidential nomination.
First of all, John McCain is clearly the candidate of the anti-abortion crowd, but that’s not the half of it. He’s also the candidate who says Anthony Scalia, John Roberts and Sam Alito are his kind of judges. We’re talking here about guys (yeah, guys) who think a woman’s place is in the home, and who only recently ruled that if she’s discriminated against on the job, and doesn’t learn about it for a decade or more, a woman can’t do anything about it, because the original offense of underpaying her happened more than 180 days ago. McCain is also the guy who, after his wife suffered a serious car crash and became disabled, dumped her for a younger, richer woman. A feminist’s dream, this guy.
And how about Hillary Clinton? When she was supposedly getting
her “White House experience”—you know, the “co-presidency” she was
supposedly part of during the eight years her husband was president and
she was First Lady—she and Bill oversaw the “end of welfare as we know
it.” What that fine piece of legislation did was limit people to five
years on the dole. That’s for life. It doesn’t matter what misfortune
befalls you later on.
Now many single women left to raise kids
by fathers who either ditch them or who never stepped up to the plate
as fathers in the first place, have a hard time, between lack of
adequate child care facilities and discrimination on the job, keeping
the rent paid and food on the table. Many of them need government
assistance well beyond that five years—a period of time not long enough
to even get one kid into full-time school, much less two or three. That
didn’t matter to Hillary, the great champion of women. She and Bill
were busy triangulating and figuring out how to keep their White House
position, and that meant selling out poor people, and especially poor
women with kids. Welfare had to go.
Even on abortion rights,
Clinton has been a waffler. In 2000, running for Senate in New York,
she said she would be a staunch defender of the right to choose. But by
2004, she was saying abortion was a “tragic” choice, and was supporting
parental notification laws for minors seeking abortion—a position she
continues to hold. But abortion isn’t a “tragic choice” for everyone.
For some women—rape and incest victims, or women who are victims of
abuse come readily to mind—abortion may be a blessed relief. For some,
it may be no more tragic than an appendectomy—and it should be no
harder to get, or to pay for than one either. There is a reason why the
National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) voted unanimously to
endorse Obama, who has said abortion rights are about more than just
women’s right to control their own bodies, but are about basic issues
of equality.
What the cries of “McCain, McCain!” by disappointed
Clinton backers really represent is an example of sour grapes, as well
as of a certain perhaps hidden element of racism. It is as if blacks,
had Obama been the loser in this nomination battle, were to say,
“That’s it, we’re voting for McCain!”
Obviously,
African-American voters have had to endure this problem for years. When
their candidate, whether it was Jesse Jackson, or Shirley Chisolm, or
Ted Kennedy, was defeated, they have had to look to their broader
interests and decide whether to vote Republican, sit out the election,
or just shrug and vote for the winning Democrat. Consistently, they
have chosen the third option, disappointment after disappointment.
Blacks
are supposed to stick with the Democrats, no matter what. Clinton
backers, however, don’t feel handcuffed in this way. Some of them,
apparently, feel free to abandon all their liberal principles and vote
for a right-wing, anti-abortion, fundamentalist Christian-coddling
warmonger if they don’t get the candidate they want from the Democrats.
If
these grousers and poor losers in the Clinton camp thought honestly
about it for even a moment, they’d realize that had Clinton won the
most delegates, and if African-American and liberal, educated white
backers of Obama, in response, were to adopt their position and bolt to
McCain, Clinton would be a historical asterisk, with no chance of being
elected.
In the end, I suspect that most of the whining and the
threats to switch to McCain represent only a small, if vocal, minority.
The truth is, in the course of 54 primaries, Obama won a majority of
female voters—a point rarely made in media reports on this contest. The
same can be said of those “white—hard working white” voters who
supposedly went for Hillary Clinton in states like West Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Ohio. In fact, numerically speaking, Obama won more of
those white, working class voters than did either John Kerry or Al Gore
before him. Meanwhile, many of those male (and even female) voters who
voted for Hillary Clinton are probably people who were going to vote
Republican in the fall anyhow. We know there was an organized campaign,
after all, by Republican activists, to throw the election to Clinton,
who was seen as being easier to defeat in the fall than Obama. That
effort almost certainly gave Clinton her narrow win in Indiana, and
padded her margins in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (Indeed, it wouldn't
surprise me if some or even most of those women shouting that they were
turning to McCain turned out to be Republican plants doing the bidding
of Karl Rove or whoever has taken over his place as RNC dirty tricks
manager this year.)
As for Clinton’s fallback position of trying
to make herself the vice-presidential candidate on a “dream”
Obama-Clinton ticket, Obama would have to be crazy to go for it.
Clinton brings nothing but disaster to the Obama campaign. He doesn’t
need her to win New York, New Jersey or California, all of which he
will win by a landslide without her in November. He doesn’t need her
for Illinois (her home state, whatever efforts she made to try to
pretend she was a rural Pennsylvanian during that state’s primary). She
certainly doesn’t help him in the south, with the possible exception of
Florida. She doesn’t bring any “balance” to the ticket, given that both
senators have almost identical voting records on domestic issues. And
as for the swing states—Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico,
Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, etc.—she may do more damage than good, given
the number of independents and Republicans who have been drawn to
Obama, but who have negative feelings about the Clintons. Moreover,
with the right vice-presidential candidate—and it’s not Clinton—Obama
may even have a shot at not just Virginia, but also North Carolina and
even Mississippi—states where the percentage of black voters is high
enough that, with an energized black voter turnout, the liberal
Democratic vote could be enough to turn the trick.
The Hillary
Clinton campaign has all along been about entitlement. She began her
race for the White House acting as though it was a coronation—something
she deserved after enduring eight years in the White House as second
fiddle to husband Bill. Now, having been defeated, she’s acting like
she deserves second fiddle. But the truth is, Clinton, by her shabby
appeals to racist voters, by her resort to red-baiting of her opponent,
by her ghoulish reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in
June 1968, and finally by her refusal to denounce and apologize for her
shameless and calculating backing for the invasion of Iraq, has
rendered herself unfit for a spot on the Democratic ticket.
It is Obama supporters like you with your vile blogs that make many of us lean towards not voting for Obama. We do not know this man....but we have learned some of his associates are questionable. It is amazing the types of people he used to gain his position as a community leader, state senator and US Senator. I could care less about his race. Many think he is the Messiah.....I think he is just another politician who "waffles" just as much as any other politician depending on what way the wind is blowing (Israel and Palestine is a good example.) I also worry about his lack of experience. And don't use JFK as an example....his inexperience gave us the Bay of Pigs and almost WWIII.
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June 07, 2008
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