So over the past couple of days, I’ve had some interesting discussion/debate with a friend of mine in my union. He’s a Hillary Clinton supporter and he argues that she should stay in the race. His reasoning boils down to this: She’s a woman and it’s historic for her to have gotten this close so she has to keep running because, well, because she’s a woman.
(Sorry, Howie, if this does too much disservice to your argument… but hey, I linked to your site, so people can read it for themselves.)
As you can imagine, “because she’s a chick” doesn’t really do it for me as a compelling argument for why Clinton should stay in the race.
I have to wonder if there isn’t a bit of a generational thing going on, though. I’ve read of (and seen personally) some pretty vitrolic attacks by women over a certain age- somewhere in the range of 45ish and up- on younger women for being Obama supporters. It’s not just women, either; even many of Clinton’s male fans seem to think that there mere fact that she’s a female means she should stay in the race.
What I notice about these suggestions is that they don’t say anything about what Clinton might be able to accomplish, and they often don’t seriously seem to think about whether or not Clinton continuing the race is improving the Democratic Party’s chances of winning in November.
I will freely admit that, being a child of the 70’s, I don’t get why many of Clinton’s supporters are so angry. I grew up in an era where women could do pretty much anything they wanted. In my generation, more graduates of law school are women; there’s tons of women doctors; there’s been female astronauts and politicians. My state has two female US Senators and a female Governor. I work with female air traffic controllers and the list goes on and on.
So to those of us under, oh, 40 to 45ish, the whole “it’s about time and we have to vote for her because she’s a woman” thing as a reason to support Clinton doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, we want someone who not only has good policy (because let’s face it- Clinton and Obama are so close on policy, especially compared to McSame, that they might as well be the same candidate) but who can truly inspire us, move us, who represents a change from the politics of the past.
Now, to the older generation, Clinton represents that change. Hey, she’s a woman!
But to us, well, it’s no big deal. We’ve had women in charge. And frankly, someone who’s as intimately tied to the politics of the 90s, to Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategies and the lying in the Lewinsky deal and all of that, well, Hillary Clinton doesn’t exactly represent change. If she were to win, the last names of US Presidents would go: Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton.
Not a lot of change there.
I wrote a post the other day about how Hillary is done and should hang it up. I got a long, run-on comment. I’ll address it here and break it up for convenience’s sake.
Well, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black (no racism intended — I know you Obama-ites like to find racism under every rock while consistently turning a blind eye to the sexism that has been running rampant in this campaign).
Okay, right away, this is silly. The only time in the campaign that race was mentioned was when Bill Clinton shot off his mouth and blew off Obama’s strong performance in South Carolina by pointing out that it was no big deal because “Jesse Jackson did well in South Carolina”. That was seen as clearly being a racial deal because, as people might have noticed, Jackson and Obama are both black guys.
But other than that, the campaign hasn’t really seen Obama dealing with the racial issue much at all. Oh, he did in the area of his pastor, but it was a pretty good, strong, honest speech- one that we are NOT used to hearing from black OR white politicians. He basically said to white people “look, blacks were brought here as slaves, and of course they’re kind of pissed off; they’re poor and feel like they’ve missed out on the American Dream.”
And he said to black people “look, if you’re a white guy and you’re losing your job to affirmative action, of course you’re going to be pissed off. Today’s white folks didn’t own slaves and they don’t get why they should be penalized for the sins of the past.”
That’s a pretty honest speech.
To be brutally honest, the only candidate who has been actively suggesting that some kind of “-ism” is working against them is Clinton. She seems to think that there’s more people in America who have been voting against her (because she’s a woman) than there are voting against Obama (because he’s black).
This flies in the face of logic. Women have had the ability to vote for over 80 years, and they make up over half of the voters. Blacks have only had their right to vote protected for the past 40 or so years, and they are what, 10, 12 percent of the population?
By sheer NUMBERS women have far, far more power than blacks do, so let’s put the notion that women are downtrodden and fighting sexism here to rest, shall we?
You say Hillary “hurts the cause of the Democratic party,” but fail to see that you and other Obama-supporting bloggers are doing just that, by remarking about Hillary’s “blathering” and throwing around other insults (i.e., “she’s a ‘fighter’ and all the crap”).
Um, she is blathering. She’s throwing anything and everything out there for arguments as to why SHE should be the nominee, much of it lies, and hoping that something will stick.
She’s claiming she and only she beats McCain in polls. That’s not true. She claims she would do better in “swing states”, but the reality is that Obama puts more states into play than Clinton does. She claims that she “won the popular vote”, which conveniently ignores the fact that Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan and didn’t actively campaign in Florida, and it also conveniently ignores the hundreds of thousands MORE people that supported Obama in the caucuses in the states that use that system.
The reason she’s hurting the cause of the party is because a lot of people trust and look up to her, and to win she has to keep saying that Obama isn’t good enough to be President. Once she’s lost the campaign and he’s the nominee, what will she say then? “Oh, he’s great, he’ll make a fabulous President”, right? Well, was she lying when she suggested that we wouldn’t want HIM answering that red phone at 2am in the White House, or is she lying when she now supports him?
The thing is, despite my strong and unwavering support of Hillary, if Obama is the nominee, I intend to vote for him, if only to give Senator Clinton a chance to pass HER healthcare plan which will, in fact, cover everyone, and to give other Congressional dems a chance to do good work without worrying about a presidential veto. But posts like yours make me think twice about casting a ballot for Obama. Because it’s not Hillary staying in the race that’s hurting the party; it’s demeaning posts like yours that are dividing us, by pitting Hillary supporters against Obama supporters, democrats against democrats, me against you.
Oh, horseshit. Obama has won. There’s no “if he’s the nominee”. He WON. He won more states; he won more delegates; he’s won more superdelegates; he’s gotten more people to donate to his campaign than she has; and he’s gathered way more money than she has. By any real measure of someone’s electability, he’s beaten Clinton.
Period.
I’m not “demeaning” Clinton. She is a powerful, smart politician. But she’s bad at some pretty important things. She apparently is a lousy manager; she had to fire TWO different top people in her campaign (her original campaign manager and later her chief strategist) and she blew through her money and big advantages she had going into the entire thing.
I’m not pitting anyone against other Democrats. I’m saying that once it’s obvious who’s won, it’s time for everyone to join ranks and to quit beating up on the nominee. THOSE people are the ones who’re harming the cause, because they’re continuing to run the nominee down in the (vain) hopes that somehow their candidate can win.
Clinton cannot win, not without tearing the party apart. The rules excluding Michigan and Florida were good enough for her and for Harold Ickes- one of her main strategists and supporters who is ON the Rules Committee- when she thought she was a shoo-in. Now that she’s not, suddenly she (and Ickes) are declaring that we must have those votes counted!
Puh-leeze. Do they think people are stupid? The very argument that Michigan’s votes absoutely must be counted is incredibly insulting because SHE WAS THE ONLY CANDIDATE ON THE BALLOT. That sounds like some third-world craphole dictator’s way of “winning” an election- print up a bunch of ballots that only have the dictator’s name on them, then declare that you’re not going to count them, then later change your mind and say that those ballots MUST be counted after all.
That, my anonymous friend, is exactly what Team Clinton’s arguments over Michigan boil down to. I’m embarrassed for Team Clinton even trying to make that argument.
You can make your point without insulting Senator Clinton, who has been a champion for all of us democrats for a very long time. If you’re so certain that your candidate is going to be the nominee, maybe you should start practicing being a gracious winner. After all, about half (more or less, depending on whose math you use) of the democratic party will need to be convinced to vote for your guy, and you won’t convince us by bad-talking our gal.
Um… I didn’t bad-talk your gal. (That’s pretty condescending language, really.) I haven’t slagged on her ability to BE President; I haven’t suggested that she’s incapable of it.
I said she ran a shitty campaign. She did; it was horrible. I said she blew through her money, to the point where her campaign was stiffing people who she’d bought things from; that’s also true. And I said that she’s apparently delusional if she thinks she can win, because she is.
It’s a big mistake for her to keep running, and the suggestion that somehow Team Obama needs to convince less than half of the Democratic Party that they need to vote for him is ridiculous.
Come November, the only thing that should make EITHER an Obama fan vote for Clinton or make a Clinton fan vote for Obama is the idea of John McCain winning the White House.
That ALONE should be more than enough to make people vote for the Democrat. If you don’t, then you’re a spiteful, stupid, shortsighted person who would rather sit at home in a snit over the fact that YOU FUCKING LOST than do something good for the nation.
My guy wasn’t even Obama. It was Edwards. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to win, what did he do? He suspended his campaign, stepped back, and told his supporters that he appreciated their support and that they had done good work for the cause.
That model is exactly what Hillary Clinton should do and what she should be doing now, not acting as though the tiny chance that she can win matters and that she owes it to… someone that she must keep fighting until the bitter end.
And frankly, Howie, the notion that she must keep running because she’s a woman and this is historic defeats the entire point. The point is that because she’s a woman *shouldn’t*, in an ideal world, matter! Yeah, it does matter; I’m not arguing. It matters that Obama is half black, too, and in an ideal world that shouldn’t matter either.
But to make THAT the central point for why someone runs is ridiculous and only gives more credence to the notion that the race or gender is a big deal. The more we move past it, the sooner we’ll ALL move past it.
