You know that feeling when your skin prickles with indignation? That’s what Clinton is doing to me right now. Clinton’s assertion about hard-working, white Americans is shameless on multiple levels. (But shameless has become a redundant term when talking about Hillary lately.) Not only does it tactlessly imply that minority Americans are not hardworking, but it conveniently ignores that more white Americans voted for Obama than Clinton. This country is still a largely white country, and nobody can win primary after primary if a large component of the population is not voting for them.
Nobody is denying that race is a factor in this year’s elections, and what Clinton has done is use this in the worst way possible. I have no doubt that Clinton has been able to reach communities in unprecedented ways (as has Obama), but if she truly had a broader reach, a “broader coalition”, she would be winning. It really is that simple.
Hard-core democrats are not going to vote for a pro-Iraq war, pro-life candidate, no matter how they feel about the democratic nominee. The general election will depend on independents, swinger-types, but also importantly new voters… and guess who they went out to vote for during the primaries. It’s not Hillary.
It will matter hugely that a large chunk of the country have hated Hillary Clinton for much of her political tenure. What Hillary Clinton’s campaign has done is something truly bizarre. It used to be that liberal democrats were routinely put in the position of defending the Clintons against often irrational hatred from conservative Republicans by trying to sift their personal sordidness from their political successes. (There is that infamous statistic that Americans were the most sympathetic to Hillary during the Lewinsky scandal because we envisioned her weeping and betrayed.) But now it’s the conservatives who are touting her “resilience” and “electability” while liberal Democrat wring our hands (or in my case, scowl furiously) at Clinton.
And here’s another key point, that many of the rhetoric around her continued campaigning is missing…
But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now…. I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites. (more)
I’ve also been incensed by the sorry lack of coherent criticism against Obama (which has not meant no-criticism). That’s another post rant, though. This one’s all about Clinton, and her affect on my scowl-reflex. If by some complete failure of our political apparatus Clinton becomes the nominee, I will personally march into Congress and demand a recount, redecision, redo. Okay, no I won’t. But dammit, there will be outcrying.
