Tim Wise tells it like it is...

From Counterpunch.org:

An Open Letter to Certain White Women Who Are Threatening to Withhold Support from Obama in November...

Your Whiteness is Showing

By TIM WISE

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

I know that it's probably a bad time for this. Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified.

That said, and despite the awkward timing, I need to ask you a few questions, and I hope you will take them in the spirit of solidarity with which they are genuinely intended. But before the questions, a statement if you don't mind, or indeed, even if (as I suspect), you will mind it quite a bit.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people. So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don't kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn't need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result--a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she's progressive, and she's a feminist. But that isn't your threat is it? No. You're not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton's birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be...?

See, I told you your whiteness was showing.

And now for a third question, and this is the biggie, so please take your time with it: How is it that you have managed to hold your nose all these years, just like a lot of us on the left, and vote for Democrats who we knew were horribly inadequate--Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, right on down the uninspiring line--and yet, apparently can't bring yourself to vote for Barack Obama? A man who, for all of his shortcomings (and there are several, as with all candidates put up by either of the twomajor corporate parties) is surely more progressive than any of those just mentioned. And how are we to understand that refusal--this sudden line in the proverbial sand--other than as a racist slap at a black man? You will vote for white men year after year after year--and are threatening to vote for another one just to make a point--but can't bring yourself to vote for a black man, whose political views come much closer to your own, in all likelihood, than do the views of any of the white men you've supported before. How, other than as an act of racism, or perhaps as evidence of political insanity, is one to interpret such a thing?

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they've had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman--hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downrightexcited to do so--but you won't support the black man. And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Look, I couldn't care less about the Party personally. I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk, and that I wouldn't be able to get clearance to be in some parade with Governor Dukakis. Yeah, seriously. But for you to act as though you are the indispensible voters, the most important, the ones whose views should be pandered to, whose every whim should be the basis for Party policy, is not only absurd, it is also racist in that it, a) ignores and treats as irrelevant the much more loyal constituency of black folks, without whom no Democrat would have won anything in the past twenty years (and indeed the racial gap favoring the Democrats among blacks is about six times larger than the gender gap favoring them among white women, relative to white men); and b) demonstrates the mentality of entitlement and superiority that has been long ingrained in us as white folks--so that we believe we have the right to dictate the terms of political engagement, and to determine the outcome, and to get our way, simply because for so long we have done just that.

But that day is done, whether you like it or not, and you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. Feel free to choose the latter. But if you do, please don't insult your own intelligence, or ours, by insisting that you've done so as a radical political act.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com

Andrew Sullivan sums it up...

As classy as she was classless; as graceful as she was rigid; as generous as she was stingy. And an indicator that he would gladly have her in his cabinet but not on his ticket. The character difference between him and her could not be better exemplified.

(Link)

She's still at it...

Ben Smith writes for Politico:

Ken Vogel sends over some quotes from Clinton's appearance in Yankton, SD, in which she clarified her case for staying: That she's won the popular vote and Obama had won the delegate count, and an argument can now ensue over which is fairer.

(Full Article)


Note to Hillary: Steve Jobs called. He wants his reality distortion field back.

To any Clinton supporter planning to vote for McCain...

Meteor Blades writes for Daily Kos:

McCainocrats: Eager to Tell Me You Told Me So?

by Meteor Blades
Sun Jun 01, 2008 at 08:00:37 AM PDT

I’m not prescient or plugged-in enough to have any special window on how many of you Clinton supporters who are saying you will vote for John McCain in November will come to your senses by then. Many people I respect think that most of you will. I suspect they’re right. I hope they are. But it’s obvious that more than a handful of you are serious in your vindicativeness and will join Joe Lieberman to support the Senator from Arizona over Obama. That would be the anti-choice, hundred-year-war, two-faced, Republican Senator from Arizona.

Thus is born a new subspecies, McCain Democrats, McCainocrats.

If your shrieking can be believed, you McCainocrats are premeditating ballot support for an exclusive club of racist, union-busting, woman-suppressing, bedroom-peering, rights-scoffing, warmongering, torture-backing, buccaneering, global warming-denying, privatizing, public land-grabbing, Supreme Court stuffing, empire-building, Constitution-shredding raptors. All for self-indulgent revenge. You’re unhappy that your candidate has not won the nomination. I understand that. Mine didn’t win either. But you’re not just unhappy, you're also willing to contribute to the election of someone who stands against most of what your candidate has been promoted as standing for. That, I don’t comprehend at all. Emotionally, intellectually or morally. I get the feeling you would vote for George W. Bush in 2008 if the 22nd Amendment weren’t in the way.

You McCainocrats might recall that you have ancestors.

There were George Corley Wallace Democrats, for example. Whether Wallace was really a racist or merely used racism opportunistically is a semantics game I’ll leave for others to sort out. Having lost an election in which his foe was deeply racist, Wallace vowed never to be "out-ni**ered" again. Until he was reborn and publicly repented of his segregationist ways, nobody could doubt that his policies epitomized Jim Crow apartheid. Because of those policies and his ferocious rhetoric, millions of registered Democrats abandoned the party in 1968 to vote for Wallace, running as an independent against Humphrey and Nixon. Four years later, he attracted droves of Democratic voters, peppering his campaign with racist code phrases (while claiming he no longer supported segregation), and winning six primaries, including Michigan, where the open primary allowed massive crossover votes from independents and Republicans, just as it did this year. After that, he more or less faded away, and most of his supporters drifted permanently over to the Republicans.

There were the Nixon Democrats. The "official" group in 1972, Democrats for Nixon, was led by former Texas Governor John Connally, a conservative Democrat on his way, like so many Southern Democrats of the time, to becoming a full-fledged Republican. They had no desire nor means to restore the Democratic Party to its pre-1964 status. They were on their way out the door for good. And so were the rank and file Nixon Democrats, many of them Wallace Democrats with no home.

Proving that politics repeats itself endlessly, one of the ads put together by Democrats for Nixon showed George McGovern as a flip-flopper on issues such as withdrawal from Vietnam. So, while McGovern was transformed by the Republican Committee to Re-Elect the President from a heroic World War II bomber pilot into a pinko pacifist, fellow Democrats who soon would permanently join that Republican Party made a devastating hit on him, deploying the flip-flopping trope that provided a solid punch against John Kerry, three decades later.

Still, many rank-and-file Democrats, especially Southerners able to trace their party roots to ante bellum days, needed more than patriotic appeals to shift their votes. The "Southern Strategy" was just the ticket.

Watergate put an end to Nixon, and the elections of 1974 and 1976 briefly interrupted but did not reverse the outflow of Republican-cuddling Democrats. Along came 1980 and the Reagan Democrats.

The B-minus movie actor who became an A-plus Republican icon, sprung his campaign from Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a coded paean to states’ rights to regain the Wallace-cum-Nixon Democrats who had voted throughout the Old Confederacy (except in Virginia) for Jimmy Carter in ’76. Reagan Democrats, including fresh recruits among white working-class Democrats from the North and West, liked their man’s tough-talking persona delivered with a smile.

Even when he was redistributing wealth upward paid for by doubling the national debt, breaking unions, demonizing government, privatizing public patrimony, supplying guns to terrorists, and attempting to gut as much of the FDR social and economic legacy as he could get away with, all with harmful consequences for the very demographics most Reagan Democrats came from, they stayed by his side.

There have been Bush Democrats, too, though mostly Mister Bush has just managed to hang onto the leavings of his predecessors, the aged and aging Wallace, Nixon and Reagan Democrats.

You McCainocrats don’t run in a direct lineage from all these ancestors. For one thing, they had issues, many of them unlikable, even detestable, but understandable. You, however, clearly have no guiding philosophy beyond surly revenge. John McCain can’t possibly give you what you want if what you really want is what you say Senator Clinton has been in the running for this year. Only on the margins does he contravene the rightwing cabal that over time seized the party and has now left it in disarray. His discernible stances on almost everything of note are, or should be, anathema to any Democrat who is a Democrat. Much of the rest of his views are just contradictory meandering. When he opens his mouth, you never know which side he will speak from.

I’m no fan of third parties because history shows only one making the leap to even the lower rungs of national power. But I can at least understand voters who jump ship to a third party based on principle and symbolism and hope for a breakthrough in a direction amicable to their beliefs. You McCainocrats, on the other hand, are incomprehensible. Is the idea that voting for another four years of rightwing Republican rule would be worth it as long as you could say: "See? We told you Obama couldn’t win." Does the McCainocrat lunacy embrace the idea that four more years of a Republican in the White House would make Clinton a shoo-in for 2012?

If that’s what your telling me, if you’re willing to force the American people to suffer for your chance to say nah-nah-nah, I’ll have two words for you when you come around looking for my support for any candidate or any cause in 2012 or any other time in the future: Bite me.

(Full Article)

A letter to Hillary from a former supporter...

Andy Ostroy writes for The Huffington Post:

Dear Hillary:
What happened? No really, what the fuck just happened to you? I can't for the life of me figure out how a once-promising presidential campaign -- a sure thing for Pete's sake -- turned into a pathetic embarrassment? You've had such a head start in this quest to occupy the Oval Office. I mean, literally, you and Bill have been planning it since at least January 1993 when he became president. Was there a more plausible, natural, inevitable scenario than you following in his larger-than-life footsteps? And Chelsea after you? The Clinton Dynasty. Has such a regal ring to it, doesn't it?

But then 2008 rolled around and something terrible happened. Both you and Bill lost that famous mojo. It started in Iowa, where you were all but certain to win. Everyone, including yourself, anointed you the Queen of the Ball before the dance even began. And then you lost. Some inexperienced kid named Barack Obama came out of nowhere and stole your thunder. And then you sat down and cried. In front of the cameras, and the good folks of New Hampshire felt sorry and gave you their state. And just like that The Comeback Twins came back yet again. Never count out a Clinton, huh?. Ahh, but then came February. Damn February. The junior Senator from Illinois, that pesky Kid, won big on Super Tuesday -- despite your pickups in NY, NJ, CA and a few others -- and later in the month racked up an impressive string of eleven consecutive wins. Ouch. That's when the chorus of "Hillary Should Quit" calls officially began. But you'd have nothing of the sort. This was a battle, and you were in it till then end. And we admired you for it.

March was much kinder to you, as was April and May. You won big key swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and trounced The Kid in Appalachia. You even managed to obtain more delegates and popular votes in these three months than The Kid. But the "Hillary Should Quit" calls kept coming, weighing you down and casting an ominous cloud over your campaign. The endorsements kept going to Obama too (Richardson, Edwards, etc) and the superdelegates began to flow to your opponent in anything but a trickle, until he had more of them than you. Many even started to desert you, switching their allegiance. But you pressed on. Even with Bill out there accused of playing the race card and pissing off as many people as he once impressed, especially in the black community. To many, perhaps the "first black president" wasn't so black after all.

Then there were the many boneheaded comments you made. You remember, like the time you basically said that while you and the GOP's presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain, were tough enough and experienced enough to be commander-in-chief, Obama merely had "a speech." Didn't you realize how that irresponsible blunder would come back to haunt the party in November? Or how about the one where you told everyone that the "hard-working whites" won't vote for Obama. Honestly, Hill, with all those fancy degrees and years of elite lawyering, didn't you realize that some things were meant to be privately thought but not publicly voiced? And so the "Hillary Should Quit" calls continued unabated. Yet we were still in your corner.

You vowed to stay in the race and fight until the very last American exercised his or her inalienable right to vote. You vowed to fight for women everywhere. To be a role model for young girls. To show them that women can be just as tough, just as resilient, just as determined, just as ambitious and just as successful as a man. Your campaign was no longer merely about becoming president. It became a lesson for the history books. A paradigm-changing feminist movement. And we applauded your determination and stuck by you.

You parsed and nuanced and molded the process to fit your end-goal of ultimately snagging the nomination from the grip of The Kid by convincing the superdelegates that you had the better narrative. That you were the more electable candidate. Since neither you or The Kid would end the campaign with enough pledged delegates to win, in an effort to make your case even more compelling, you threw as much shit up on the wall as you possibly could in the desperate hope that something would stick, ie that you had more popular votes; that we should re-seat Michigan and Florida's delegates; that only you could win back the Reagan Democrats. At this point, while we continued to support you, we grew a little leery of your motives and a tad weary of your disingenuousness.

No matter how many "Hillary Should Quit" cries we heard, we still believed in you and went along for the ride, no matter how bumpy. We defended you wherever and whenever we could. Like Bill, we made excuses for you, and chalked up your blind ambition and your regrettable gaffes to long days, late nights and the general stress of the campaign trail. We vowed to support your valiant fight till the end, right along with you, no matter how taxing it became.

And then the unthinkable occurred. When asked last week by South Dakota's Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper about all this "Hillary Should Quit" nonsense, you said: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it." Jeez, Hillary, are you out of your fucking mind? Even if you didn't mean it, to suggest that as a justification to stay in the race, Obama could be assassinated before the primary season is over, is perhaps the most shocking, shameful, morally reprehensible thing you could have possibly ever said. How could you? Do you realize that with that one comment you threw away whatever shot you may have had to fulfill your dream of convincing, brainwashing and/or bullying the super D's into handing you the nomination? How could you implode like that? It was a despicable act of desperation and, quite frankly, it was pathetic. With that one reckless opportunistic blunder you not only threw away the campaign, but your legacy as well. A once valiant warrior, you are now just a sad footnote in history. An embarrassment. I suspect you will never recover politically from your monumentally insensitive RFK comment, made in the very same week that Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor.

And so I can no longer support this destructive campaign of yours. It's time for me to say "Hillary Should Quit." You have taken your insatiable hunger for the presidency too far. You've let so many of us down. You will not be president. You will not be vice president. It's time to step aside and let the Democratic Party and the nation heal, ultimately with Obama as our nominee and hopefully our president as well. It's time for something different. You just convinced me that America needs more than politics as usual, especially your kind. I am so disappointed, Hillary.

(Link)


I had promised myself that I would not dignify what's left of Clinton's campaign by making any more posts about her here (it's all about Obama vs McCain now).
But this was so poignant, I had to repost it.

Olbermann nails it...

Good night and good luck indeed, Senator Clinton.
Your career is over.

An essay that needs to be read...

Reprinted from Melissa Harris-Lacewell's blog:

Hillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein

It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.

None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s pre-occupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.

And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny—the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women—ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.

Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.

Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much `race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, orshould come, in all colors.

Barack Obama has said he wants to embrace the new notions of race and the racial progress that has occurred. He is not post-racist, but recognizes the newly raced relations as they exist at present. Nevertheless, he must give a speech on race although he says he does not want to be a racial candidate. He recognizes that the country has new-old racial hierarchies with complex identities and that he himself represents white and African blackness, whatever this might mean for him. Meanwhile Hillary says she is running as a woman, and never gives a speech on gender because white angry men and women, would not be pleased by this. So patriarchy, or sexual discrimination, or the structural hierarchy of masculinity with its racialized and class aspects is never mentioned in her campaign. She uses whiteness as her weapon and pretends to be speaking about gender. But she never once mentions the unacceptable misogyny of this country, or the sexual hierarchy of the labor force, or any of the great racial and class inequities that define women’s lives today. This is a misuse and abuse of her gender.

Feminisms of all sorts have moved beyond the idea that feminism is a white woman’s thing; or that feminisms should be particularly beholden to the white mainstreamed part of the U.S. women’s movement. Large numbers of women, especially women of color, but many white women as well, know that race and gender are inseparable and that is why most of these women, whatever their color, are voting for Barack Obama. Hillary should not be allowed to push feminism backwards for her own political ambition. It is not surprising that it is older white women who disproportionately support her. They identify with old notions of womanhood—a homogenized notion that all females share an identity, and race and class are not connected issues to be named and spoken. This is why younger women and progressive women from the civil rights and women’s movements, some of whom are older, disproportionately support Obama.

My thoughts about Hillary Clinton have their own history, which also coincide with her history. I have not been a fan of hers. I have written critically of her for more than a decade now. She has never spoken on behalf of women or as a candidate with a woman’s agenda, let alone as a feminist when she was in the White House. Many of us who are her contemporaries were active in the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Movements and Anti-Vietnam War movement—while she chose not to be. Her one speech addressing the exploitation of women was delivered in Beijing, China, as though it is women outside, but not inside the U.S. who face untold discrimination. Now she runs for president and has become agun-toting, war mongering white woman who asks for your vote if you are an angry white Reagan Democrat. Maybe she thinks manly gender is the answer for breaking glass ceilings for women.

I would argue that she is not breaking gender boundaries but rather has embraced and extended masculine/misogyny for females. And misogyny always comes in racialized form. She remains female in body and hence parades as a decoy for feminist claims. And her white self is central to this decoy status. Susan Faludi wrote in the New York Times that Hillary is having a success with white male support because she is willing to battle, and engage in rough play like one of the boys. She is supposedly willing to “join the brawl” and as such has won their confidence. She has “broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys” opening the way for women to finally make it “through the glass ceiling and into the White house”. Barbara Ehrenreich inThe Nation hesitantly embraces this assessment and then more forcefully criticizes Clinton for her ruthlessness. Ehrenreich writes that Clinton has “smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way…demonstrating female moral inferiority.”

Hillary has proven that sometimes the best man for the job may be a female posing to be a man. In other words, Hillary has simply clothed herself in men’s tactics and strategies. She can nuke with the best of them. Hillary not only authorized the war in Iraq but she repeatedly continued to do so for several more years—up until the time she began running for president. She allowed, along with Bill Clinton, the egregious trade blockade against Iraq as hundreds of thousands of children starved to death after the `91 war. She more recently has supported Israel’s terror bombing of Lebanon and has newly endorsed “the total obliteration” of Iran.

But this is just part of the sad story. Hillary’s embrace of a masculinist machismo embraces the very misogyny that most feminists want to dismantle. Instead of challenging the gender divide Hillary simply slides over to the other side of it. Instead of offering a new vision of what it might mean to have a female president she offers us old versions of white privilege and war mongering. But the structural privilege of patriarchy is ignored and obfuscated with Hillary’s race card. Nevertheless many (white women write, like Marie Cocco in the Washington Post (May 15, ‘08) that she won’t miss the misogyny of the campaign when its over—she lists the sexist T-shirts, and array of commercial goods circulating at present. While I abhor any form of degradation of girls and women, or any human being for that matter, I am also hesitant to see this as a sufficient critique of the problem.

Hillary Clinton should never be demeaned for being a woman. But being a woman comes in all colors and classes. Hillary has done the unforgivable. She has used race—the whiteness card—on behalf of gender. We, the big `we”—the huge diversely defined feminisms in this country and across the globe—are better than this. Black feminists in this country, during the 1970’s and `80’s women’s movement made sure to break open the race/gender divide and clarify that gender is always racialized and race is always gendered. No person ever experiences one with out the other. Only when whiteness parades as an invisible standard can you think that gender and race can be separate. As such Hillary is white and a female and Barack is black and male. They are each both. Everyone is.

Hillary’s manipulation and misrepresentation of her gender reveals her sexual decoy status. Being female is not enough to allow one to claim their gender as a political tactic. Such claims must be rooted in a commitment to end gender discrimination and their racial and class formulations; not pit races and classes against each other in the hopes of being the first woman president. Clinton does not share a political identity with women of all classes and colors and nations simply because she has a female body. She first needs to claim that body and demand rights for it—reproductive, day care, health, education, etc. She has no multi-racial woman’s agenda because she has no anti-racist agenda.

Meanwhile she is thrilled that she won big in West Virginia. West Virginia is “almost heaven” to Hillary. She says it shows the country that she can win the “hardworking white Americans” in November. But West Virginia is not heaven, nor is it like much of the rest of the country. It may look like what the U.S. used to be, but that is exactly the point. It does not have the diversity of color, age, culture that defines the U.S. today. Neither does Hillary’s vision.

Hillary is a sexual decoy. She looks like a woman but is not a feminist nor does she speak for or on behalf of most women. She speaks for white people while identifying with her gender, as a woman. But she has trumped herself here. If a female prepares to bully the rest of the world with war and white privilege hopefully we—the big `we’—the `we’ that spans across our differences will defeat the political forces she represents.

And this means building a coalition for the November elections that makes sure that a non-misogynist agenda is part of the anti-racist politics of the Obama campaign.

Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is SEXUAL DECOYS, GENDER RACE AND WAR IN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY, (London: Zed Books, 2007).Thanks to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Carla Golden, Rosalind Petchesky, and Richard Stumbar for reading an earlier draft of this discussion.

White Voters, Obama and Appalachia

DHinMI of DailyKOS has posted a well-researched and revealing rebuttal to the argument that Obama has an alleged "problem with white voters".

Since it includes many helpful graphics to illustrate the argument, I'm just going to link to it rather than repost.

A must-read!

(Full Article)

Quick links...

According to ABC News, Obama now leads in Superdelegates.

(CNN reports: He's still slightly behind)

Peggy Noonan calls on white women to step up for Obama and save the Democratic party from destruction by Clinton.

Angry Black Bitch comments on Clinton's decline

Angry Black Bitch writes in her blog:

At some point my brain registered the follow quote from Senator Clinton citing an AP poll in an interview with USA Today "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Blink.

"There's a pattern emerging here," Clinton added.

Oh honey, that pattern has emerged…it is out of the closet and leading the parade!

For the record, this hard working American is tired as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

The sad thing is I can’t even be insulted because I’ve lost respect for this woman, her candidacy and the entire Clinton legacy.

This shit is just pathetic and embarrassing to those of us who wasted our loyalty in response to what has been revealed to be a clever two-term pander to secure our lesser than equal and not quite desirable yet somehow still capable of making the difference between Clinton/Gore and Dole/Kemp black votes.

Yeah, I voted for her husband…twice.

Clearly I played myself…twice (wince).

But oh honey child the lesson has been learned…big time.

So I lift this vodka cran in a toast to the most amazing free fall from inspiring politician to complete gaping asshole of my lifetime.

You’ve come a long way baby will forever have new meaning…

(Full Article)


Amen sister!

Cash-strapped Clinton dipping into personal finances... again

CNN reports:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has loaned her presidential race $6.4 million over the last month, bringing the total amount of money she has lent herself to $11.4 million.

And she is willing to lend herself more money, top adviser Howard Wolfson told reporters Wednesday, a day after Clinton eked out a narrow victory over Sen. Barack Obama in Indiana's Democratic primary but lost to him by a landslide in North Carolina.

The $11.4 million she has lent her campaign this year is about the same as the amount she earned from book sales and her Senate salary, Wolfson said.

(Full Article)

The dangerous Clinton/McCain gas tax con...

Rachel Beck writes for the AP:

Sure, a gas-tax holiday seems like a good idea, at first. According to the presidential candidates touting it, it would yield cheaper gas, which in turn would produce less expensive packaging, food, etc.

It's trickle down at its best ... until you drive over one of those super-sized potholes that jolts your car and rattles your teeth.
That's because the idea proposed by presidential candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton to ease the federal gas tax would strip the U.S. government of about $10 billion for roadway and transportation projects.

And the plan doesn't even guarantee that lower taxes will lead to lower gas prices. Just the opposite might happen if the tax holiday spurs more demand for gas at a time when supply is already constricted.

It's basic economics. But it gets muddled when mixed with politics.

McCain and Clinton are trying to capitalize on motorists' dismay over gas prices topping $3.60 a gallon nationally. That's more than 20 percent higher than a year ago and it's hurting average Americans as they face mounting economic stress due to soaring food costs, fewer jobs, declining home prices and volatile financial markets.

McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, recommended the gas-tax moratorium during an April 15 speech where he laid out his economic plan. He called for cuts in the federal gas tax — 18.4 cents a gallon for gas and 24.4 cents for diesel — from Memorial Day to Labor Day — the peak summer driving season. He also wants the United States to stop adding its emergency stockpile known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a move that would lower the worldwide demand for oil.

Combined, he said, the two proposals would reduce gas prices, which would have a trickle-down effect. "Because the cost of gas affects the price of food, packaging, and just about everything else, these immediate steps will help to spread relief across the American economy," McCain said in the speech.

Clinton, who is still battling with Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination, announced her support of the tax holiday on Monday, and said she would make up for that lost revenue by imposing a windfall profit tax on oil companies. "I understand the American people need some relief," she said in an April 28 speech.

Before anyone starts counting on the potential savings, it's important to know that a gas tax moratorium might not give them much.

As economists explain it, gas prices typically rise in the summer months because demand is higher. Now, refineries are already running near capacity. If lifting the federal tax reduces gas prices, that could boost demand even more. Supply can't grow — in economics terms it is known as being inelastic — so it could drive prices back up.

That means the economy wouldn't get the intended stimulus, and consumers would see no benefit or could even be worse off.

(Full Article)


A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Daily Kos' Meteor Blades sums it up...

Yet another voice in the chorus...

Daniel Henninger writes for the Wall Street Journal:

Other than ensuring the Greatest Show on Earth will continue, does it matter that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama Tuesday in Pennsylvania by nine-plus points? Barack Obama is the nominee.

No matter how many kicks the rest of us find in such famously fun primary states as Indiana and South Dakota, it's going to be McCain versus Obama in 2008.

I believe the cement set around the Clinton coffin last Friday. The Obama campaign announced it had received the support of former Sens. Sam Nunn of North Carolina and David Boren of Oklahoma.

Both are what some of us nostalgically call Serious Democrats. They represent what the party was, but is no more: sensible on national security, spending and middle-class values. Obama receiving their imprimatur is like hands reaching out from the graves of FDR, JFK and LBJ to announce: "Enough is enough. This man is your nominee. Go forth and fight with the Republicans." Make no mistake: Superdelegates with sway took notice.

(Full Article)

Oops! Clinton surrogate on video praising Farrakhan...

Then Mayor Ed Rendell praising Farrakhan...



Whatever you think of Louis Farrakhan is irrelevant here.
The fact is, the Clinton camp has painted Jeremiah Wright's praise of Farrakhan as tremendously negative, and has hammered Obama for his association with Wright.
Yet another shining example of Hillary's hypocrisy.

Shame on you Hillary! You must now denounce and reject Ed Rendell!

Source: Everywhere.

Clinton backer deliberately stoking Wright flames...

In the cornucopia of desperate tactics and gutter politics that has come out of the Clinton campaign, none is more pathetic and despicable than the insidious and unrelenting race-bating.

Now, Clinton surrogate Lanny Davis stoops to a new low with his blatant fanning of the Rev. Wright flames (considered by many, black and white, to be a "dead horse" at this point) in the Wall Street Journal today.

Davis' FUD (obviously aimed at superdelegates), raises questions that either no one is asking or, more probably, no one cares about.
Indeed, the national and state polls reflect the "non-issue" status the Wright flap has been relegated to in the minds of voters.
Obama leads by nearly 7 points in the national average, and has been steadily closing the gaps in states that were believed to be easy victories for Clinton.

The real irony is that the recent decline in Clinton's poll numbers had nothing to do with the Obama campaign.
Rather Clinton and her subordinates have shot themselves in the foot successively over the last few weeks.

Mr. Davis has chosen (unwisely) to raise the Wright specter in a desperate attempt to take the attention off of Hillary's recent cavalcade of blunders, missteps, and outright lies.

Sorry Lanny, it wont work. The public is on to you and your not-so-fearless leader.
The voters are simply not that stupid, and are bound to be insulted by your assumption that they are.

D'OH!

Aide: Clinton misheard Richardson question

MSNBC reports (via AP):

Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared Thursday to deny published reports that she told New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that Barack Obama cannot win the general election. But her campaign aides later said the New York senator had misunderstood the question.

"That's a no," she said at a news conference when asked if she had made the comment to Richardson, after saying she wouldn't discuss details of their discussion.

"We have been going back and forth in this campaign of who said what to whom and let me say this, that I don't talk about private conversations but I have consistently made the case that I can win," Clinton said.

Spokesman Mo Elleithee later said Clinton had misheard the question and thought she was being pressed anew on whether she'd be willing to disclose what she'd said to Richardson, who eventually endorsed Obama — and not her — for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"Senator Clinton was simply reiterating what she had just said — she doesn't talk about private conversations," Elleithee said.

(Full Article)

Yeah... right...

Oops! Clinton chief strategist busted giving Columbia the "wink, wink" on trade...

Susan Davis writes for the Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate opposes.

Attendance by the adviser, Mark Penn, was confirmed by two Colombian officials. He wasn't there in his campaign role, but in his separate job as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, an international communications and lobbying firm. The firm has a contract with the South American nation to promote congressional approval of the trade deal, among other things, according to filings with the Justice Department. (See the related article.)

Clinton strategist and public-relations specialist Mark Penn, pictured here after a Democratic debate in New Hampshire in January, met this week with Colombia's ambassador to discuss a bilateral trade deal.
Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Mr. Penn's campaign-consulting firm, received more than $10 million in payments from the Clinton campaign as of the end of February, according to federal election filings.

Mr. Penn declined to comment. Howard Wolfson, communications director for Sen. Clinton's campaign, said in an email that "Mark was not there on behalf of the campaign" and referred further questions to Burson-Marsteller. "Sen. Clinton's opposition to the trade deal with Colombia is clear," Mr. Wolfson added.

A Burson-Marsteller spokesman didn't return calls or emails seeking comment.

(Full Article)


CNN reports:

Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn said Friday it was an "error in judgment" for him to meet with the Colombian ambassador to advocate for a free-trade agreement Hillary Clinton has said she opposes.

"The meeting was an error in judgment that will not be repeated and I am sorry for it," Penn said in an issued statement. "The senator's well known opposition to this trade deal is clear and was not discussed."

The meeting, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, occurred Monday. Penn appears to have been acting in his role as chief executive of the international communications and lobbying firm, Burson-Marsteller Worldwide. The Colombian Embassy hired the firm to help achieve congressional approval of a bill allowing free trade with the country — a proposal Clinton has sharply criticized.

From MSNBC:

Clinton chief strategist Mark Penn "met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate opposes. Attendance by the adviser, Mark Penn, was confirmed by two Colombian officials. He wasn't there in his campaign role, but in his separate job as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, an international communications and lobbying firm. The firm has a contract with the South American nation to promote congressional approval of the trade deal, among other things, according to filings with the Justice Department."

Also this unrelated gem...

Appearing on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night, NBC’s John Boxley reports, Clinton managed to joke about her Bosnia misspeak, saying: “It is so great to be here you know, I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it… Why? Yeah, I was pinned down by sniper fire.”

Apparently she thinks her blatant lies are funny now.

Clinton supporter: Obama will win

From CNN:

A key Hillary Clinton supporter appeared to be a bit off message during a recent interview with a Canadian radio station.

"If I had to make a prediction right now, I'd say Barack Obama is going to be the next president," Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said in a Canadian public radio interview this weekend. "I will be stunned if he's not the next president of the United States."

(Full Article)

Ouch!

The Clinton political limbo dance continues...

One more time... "How low can you go?... Everybody! How low can you go?..."

Mike Wereschagin and David M. Brown write for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.
"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Obama's lead in national polls has slipped since clips of the retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright began being played on national news programs. The uproar prompted Obama to give a wide-ranging speech on race in America a week ago. The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was "hate speech."

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

(Full Article)

Desperate to shift attention away from her bald-faced lie about dodging bullets in Bosnia, Clinton shamelessly stokes the smoldering racial fires of the Jeremiah Wright controversy.

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

Barbara Ehrenreich writes for The Huffington Post:

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

(Full Article)

A must read!