Now people who are not politics nerds will begin to focus on the election. As I’ve said, I’m ambivalent about Biden, but I can live with it. See Howard Fineman and John Dickerson for commentary.
Category Archives: elections
What’s Wrong With John McCain?
A couple of videos for you today. The first, via Josh Marshall, shows some of the crew at MSNBC discussing John McCain’s juvenile ad campaign. Their conclusion? John McCain is so honorable he must be too out of it to understand his own ads.
[Video no longer available]
The other shows McCain just plain out of it, via Jed Report:
[Video no longer available]
Yet the two candidates are currently tied in the polls. I’m here in New York, where Obama will win easily, and I don’t know how people in other parts of the country are perceiving the campaigns. Any ideas?
Playing the Race Card
Here’s a question for you, posted by a commenter at The Guardian — “please do take as much time as you need to show the last time GOP won a presidential election without using anti-black race baiting.”
Well, let’s see — Bush v. Gore 2000, Bush surrogates no doubt working under Karl Rove’s direction took out McCain as an opponent in South Carolina by spreading a story about McCain’s alleged black love child, who is actually an adopted daughter. (Where is that child now, btw?) In the general election campaign I’d have to think about it, but perhaps one of you readers can come up with an example.
Bush I, 1988 — Willie Horton
Reagan, 1980 — Welfare Cadillac Queen
Nixon, 1969 — Ran against Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs and racial equality in more subtle ways. I’ve already written about Nixon’s 1972 RNC convention acceptance speech and how the first half of it was a regular cornucopia of race baiting.
Eisenhower, 1952 — I’m drawing a blank. I was only one year old for that election, though.
Anyway — Bob Herbert gets it exactly right. Just read what he says.
The Financing Flap
I have a hard time imagining the current flap over how Barack Obama has “destroyed” public financing of elections will actually get much traction from voters. Obama supporters are OK with it. McCain supporters will feign outrage, even though they never liked public financing. Everyone else will flip channels, so to speak.
And today, while editorialists are denouncing Obama, few seem to have noticed what Josh Marshall is pointing out:
I mentioned earlier today that it was quite a thing to see John McCain denouncing Barack Obama for breaking his word on public financing when McCain himself is at this moment breaking the law in continuing to spend over the spending limits he promised to abide by through the primary season in exchange for public financing. (By the FEC’s rules, we’re still in the primary phase of the election and will be until the conventions.)
I want to return to this subject though because this is not hyperbole or some throw away line. He’s really doing it. McCain opting into public financing, accepted the spending limits and then profited from that opt-in by securing a campaign saving loan. And then he used some clever, but not clever enough lawyering, to opt back out. And the person charged with saying what flies and what doesn’t — the Republican head of the FEC — said he’s not allowed to do that. He can’t opt out unilaterally unless the FEC says he can.
Here’s a video from last February in which Josh explains McCain’s, um, maneuverings:
I’m a little confused about why Obama’s decision is causing such a stir.
To be sure, Obama reversed course. He said he intended to stay within the system, and then he didn’t, so if his detractors want to shout, “Flip-flop!†it’s a reasonable enough charge. But if policy reversals are a politician’s biggest crime, John McCain might as well drop out of the race now.
Ultimately, Obama is a pragmatist. He wants to play by the rules — Obama isn’t violating any laws or doing anything unethical here — and maximize his chances of success. In this case, that means raising lots of money from his supporters. And this is scandalous … why?
Sidoti said Obama “chose winning over his word.†It reminded me of an extemporaneous speech Obama delivered to his staff in Chicago shortly after securing the nomination. He explained that the nation is counting on him and his team to win. “We don’t have a choice,†Obama said. The stakes are too high, and the responsibilities are too great. In this context, if that means withdrawing from a flawed campaign-finance system, so be it.
Two other points. First, it’s curious that Obama’s perfectly legal and ethical decision is sparking complaints, but McCain’s arguably illegal decision to “spend over the spending limits he promised to abide by through the primary season in exchange for public financing†is hardly generating any news at all. Obama is opting out of a system he never entered; McCain is playing fast and loose with election law. For some reason, the AP is writing caustic admonishments about the prior, not the latter.
We all know what the “some reason” is, and what’s going on out of our sight. Corporate interests and the deep pocket/true believer types running rightie media infrastructure are flogging Obama’s campaign finance decision and doing whatever they can to blow it up into a major scandal to hurt Obama. They’re calling/writing/emailing/faxing every columnist and editorialist and news manager in America to be sure they “get” the rightie view of things. And then the rightie view is reflected in news coverage, whereas what we might call an “objective” view is frozen out.
The AP in particular is bought and paid for. Let’s not even pretend otherwise.
David Brooks repeats the propaganda — I mean, it’s David Brooks, so you know he will toe the line even as he pretends to be sorrowful about it all — but he also says,
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
“Machiavellian” is hyperbole, IMO, but on the whole I believe this is correct. During the Endless Primary, people kept portraying Hillary Clinton as a scrappy fighter, and don’t we want somebody who will fight for us like that? But while Clinton was exhausting herself in public histrionics and losing, Obama was finessing the delegate game and winning.
It’s called fighting smart, not hard.
Brooks continues,
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades.
Exactly. But then Brooks says,
Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.
Brooks has to put a rightie spin on things; it’s his purpose in life. But Barack isn’t renouncing “politics.” He’s renouncing the sick political culture that has been strangling elections and government these past few decades. The same culture, I might add, that Brooks and his ilk thrive in like mold in a petri dish.
The Gender and Other Gaps
Michael Finnegan writes for the Los Angeles Times that women voters overwhelmingly prefer Obama to McCain.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a wide gap last week: Women favored Obama over McCain, 52% to 33%.
The survey also found that voters who cast ballots for Clinton in the Democratic primaries preferred Obama over McCain, 61% to 19%.
Over the weekend, Frank Rich argued that the groundswell of female Clinton supporters moving to McCain was mostly a myth, based on anecdotes not supported by data.
How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.
The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.
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.
The problem with these artificially created narratives is, of course, that many in the electorate buy into them. For example, “everyone knows” that Republicans are better on national security than Democrats. History says otherwise, but no one argues with The Narrative. Thus old propaganda perpetually re-seeds itself.
So, there probably are some Clinton-supporting women out there who have switched to McCain, in part because they’ve inferred from media that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s why it’s so important to get the fact about McCain out to the public and not allow right-wing “swift boat” games to overwrite the facts.
For example, Michael Finnegan writes that many people don’t realize McCain opposes reproductive rights.
In the days since Clinton abandoned the race and endorsed him, the political arm of Planned Parenthood and other women’s groups have rallied behind Obama and joined forces to attack McCain. Among other things, they have highlighted McCain’s opposition to abortion rights. The Republican’s moderate image, they say, has misled many women into thinking he supports abortion rights.
“It’s astonishing the extent to which that’s just assumed about him,” said Hesla.
The argument that Obama must choose Clinton as a running mate or risk losing women voters has been rebutted by reality. What about those white working-class voters Clinton managed to win over in the waning days of her compaign? Thomas Schaller argues that having Clinton on the ticket would not help Obama win “swing” states.
With the notable exception of Arkansas and its six electoral votes, what state would Hillary deliver that Obama is not already going to win? Forget all this talk about the parts of the Democratic coalition to which she appeals. If he cannot pull together the elements of that coalition himself he’s going to lose anyway in swing states, whether those are states that he won in the primary, like Colorado or Virginia, or states that he lost, like Ohio, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Conversely, if Obama can reassemble the two halves of the Democratic coalition, he’s going to win the swing states and the election, despite the intraparty tensions that arose during the primary. (The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll seems to indicate he’s already made substantial progress.)
His fate in swing states does not hinge on having a polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Whatever advantage she offers him in bringing in skeptical Democrats will be offset by losses among Clinton-fatigued independents and soft Republicans. Many despise her, and if they’re looking for an excuse to vote against Obama, picking Clinton as his running mate will provide it.
Then there are those three states where Hillary Clinton has personal ties. There’s no scenario in which Obama loses Illinois and New York and wins 270 electoral votes. Her help in two of the three states is moot. As for Arkansas, political scientist Jay Barth, an Arkansas native who teaches at Hendrix College in Conway, says the level of skepticism toward Obama is so high locally that an Obama-Clinton ticket might not take the state’s six electoral votes anyway. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is not this year’s version of Lyndon Johnson in 1960.
I’ve thought the Hillary as Working-Class Heroine phenomenon would likely be short-lived, anyway. In all her years in public life she had never been remarkably popular among white working-class voters. She managed to whip up some enthusiasm in that demographic through a well-targeted media campaign combined with the fact that her opponent is, um, black. I don’t see her owning those voters enough that she could deliver them in November, especially since the top of the ticket is still, um, black. Some of that innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate is not a myth.
Along with Schaller’s argument, Salon published a piece by Ed Kilgore arguing that Clinton should be Obama’s running mate. (Ed Kilgore is one of those “Democratic strategists” that many of us feel are more of a drag on party strategy than an asset, but he makes a good living.)
First, Kilgore argues that a “unity ticket” would bring the two feuding halves of the party together. Matt Yglesias demolished the “unity ticket” argument last May, and if anything the recent polls show us the two feuding halves are coming together quite nicely, thank you, without the “unity ticket.”
Kilgore also makes a lame “well, who else you gonna call?” argument. There are a wealth of veep possibilities, I say. They all have their minuses to go with the pluses, but then, so does Senator Clinton.
Still Crazy After All These Years
It’s sad when the big, flaming revelations du jour are all stuff you already knew. For example, finally somebody who covers Washington politics admits that, in the months leading up to the Iraq War, she was under tremendous pressure from corporate execs to present a pro-Bush, pro-war narrative. I dare say most of us (meaning, y’all Mahablog regulars, who are a brilliant crew) realized this was happening at the time. Now, five years later, they’re starting to admit it. Frightening.
Here’s more stuff in today’s news you already knew:
David Corn: Phil Gramm has “long been a handmaiden to Big Finance.”
Mike Allen: “McClellan: White House Wanted Him to Stay Silent”
Emptywheel: “George Bush Authorized the Leak of Valerie Plame’s Identity”
Meanwhile, righties continue to be predictably insane. For example, Captain Ed is dutifully exonerating Big Oil and OPEC for high oil prices. You’ve probably heard about Little Lulu’s meltdown over Rachel Ray wearing a paisley fringed scarf. Dunkin’ Doughnuts pulled its Rachel Ray ad, and America is now safe from jihadist doughnuts. And for the latest on Auschwitzgate, see Sadly, No: “Best Bitch Slap Ever.” You will laugh.
BTW, did you know that yesterday was the Idaho primary? Obama beat Clinton, 56 percent to 38 percent. Naturally, Jeralyn interprets this to mean Hillary Clinton is the smart choice to beat John McCain in November. However, the real news — and this is something I didn’t already know — is that Ron Paul got more popular votes than Obama. That Idaho’s a real bellwether.
Here’s a must-read: In today’s New York Times, veteran pollster Mark Mellman explains why people should stop getting hysterical about Obama’s “problem” with working-class whites.
First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had. Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.
Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters. … Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry.
See also Ben Smith.
Now Who’s Being Pushy?
Picking up from yesterday’s post, “Not Equal” — another early controversy of feminism was over job requirement exams, such as strength tests for firefighters, that eliminated women. People asked: Should the exams be “dumbed down”? Should women be given separate tests so they could pass?
I believe the majority of feminists argued that if the ability being tested was one that truly might be required to do the job, then the test should be the same for men and women. However, it was argued, strength or height requirements for some jobs were purely arbitrary and had nothing to do with performing the job. On the other hand, a minority of feminists did argue that women should be given separate tests that would be easier for them to pass. Anti-feminists, of course, picked up the latter argument and said allowing women to be firefighters or police officers meant relaxing standards on the tests, which would lead to fire and police departments going to hell.
Lanny Davis’s latest screed against the Obama campaign reminds me of the separate standards argument. In “Four Things the Obama Campaign Couldn’t Resist Doing To Anger Clinton Supporters,” Davis lists these as unforgivable sins committed by Obama:
1. He announced the John Edwards endorsement the day after Clinton’s West Virginia win.
2. The evening of Clinton’s Kentucky win, Obama gave a speech reminding everyone he had a majority of pledged delegates.
3. The Obama campaign has hired someone to vet veep candidates.
4. Obama is considering Bill Richardson as veep.
In other words, the Clinton campaign is furious that Obama executed some smart political maneuvering to prevent Clinton from building momentum (#1 and #2), is not waiting to begin preparation for the general election campaign in deference to the tender sensibilities of Clinton supporters (#3), and is friends with somebody the Clintons don’t like any more (#4).
Basically, Clinton supporters don’t think Senator Clinton should have to take the same tests as the guys to get the job. They want Obama to dumb down his campaign so Senator Clinton can catch up. Otherwise, he’s not being fair.
The irony is that, in some ways, Obama has done just that. Chuck Todd pointed out on Hardball last night that Obama stopped running a campaign against Senator Clinton about three weeks ago. This has allowed some of Clinton’s numbers to improve a bit vis à vis Obama, since she’s still campaigning against Obama. Yet the Clintonistas still think Obama isn’t playing fair.
You can’t please some people.
See also Steve M. and Bang the Drum.
Not Equal
Clinton supporters worked double-overtime all weekend complaining about sexism and smearing coming from the Obama campaign. Andrew Stephen at New Statesman explains:
Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media – consciously or unconsciously – are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.
You want an example? Stephen continues,
Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January, although virtually every follower of the media coverage now assumes that it was Clinton who started the negative attacks. Following routine political sniping from her about supposedly admiring comments Obama had made about Ronald Reagan, Obama suddenly turned on Clinton and stared intimidatingly at her. “While I was working in the streets,” he scolded her, “. . . you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.” Then, cleverly linking her inextricably in the public consciousness with her husband, he added: “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”
Um, that’s the best you’ve got? I fail to see what’s “sexist” about pointing out Clinton’s ties to Wal-Mart. Why is this not “routine political sniping,” as was Clinton’s twisting of Obama’s “Reagan” remark?
Oh, wait; we’re defining “sexism” as “criticism of Hillary Clinton.” Gotcha.
Before you get all huffy and remind me of the Hillary nutcracker, let me say once again that there really is vile and ugly sexism being aimed at Hillary Clinton, and this is not OK with me. But Clinton undermines her own argument and the cause of feminism by conflating all criticism of her with sexism.
In the years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, a charge often leveled at feminists was that they wanted equality while still clinging to the protections and perks assigned to being female, such as the expectation that men would open doors for us and clean up their language in our presence. Personally, I was willing to open my own doors and put up with some blue language in exchange for equal pay — which I never got — and I think most feminists felt the same way.
But Senator Clinton embodies the old anti-feminist stereotype. She can sling mud all she likes, but be careful what language you use in front of her because, you know, she’s a lady.
There’s no question that our culture and news media are rank with sexism. However, the Obama campaign itself is not the source of it, and seems to me the Obama campaign has treated Senator Clinton with more care and deference than Clinton and her surrogates have shown him.
Case in point: Geraldine Ferraro — the same Geraldine Ferraro who complained awhile back that Obama wouldn’t be a serious contender if he were white — accused Obama of being “terribly sexist.” Here are her examples, as told to Phillip Sherwood of The Telegraph:
His response to Mrs Clinton’s reminiscences about learning to shoot as a girl at her grandfather’s summer cabin in Pennsylvania. Miss Ferraro said: “He walked up and down the stage with his microphone like a stand-up comic and ridiculed her as an Annie Oakley,” she said, quoting his reference to the legendary female sharpshooter. “Would he have ridiculed a man by comparing him to John Wayne? Of course not.” His apparently dismissive description of Mrs Clinton as “likeable enough” during a televised debate before the New Hampshire primaries. His role in an earlier debate in Philadelphia when several of the male candidates running at the time were said to have ganged up on her, prompting Mrs Clinton to complain about the “boy’s club” of US politics. His “failure”, Miss Ferraro claims, to speak out against other sexist acts such as lewd T-shirts, the men who shouted “Iron my shirt!” at Mrs Clinton and jibes about her “cackle”. Mr Obama also apologised to a female reporter he called “sweetie” in an aside that received widespread coverage.
Mind you, one of Senator Clinton’s selling points is that she’s tough enough to take on whatever the Right throws at her. Yet she wilts over being called “likable enough”? (Although it was fine for her to say that Obama wasn’t a Muslim “as far as I know.”) And she wants Obama to play the gentleman and defend her from the nasty people who made fun of her laugh, but it’s not her place to defend him from racism?
Oh, yes, racism. That’s the other charge the Clintons have been making — racism hasn’t been much of a factor (even though data suggest racism has been an “unusually salient” factor in some of Clinton’s wins). Certainly the Obama campaign hasn’t been complaining about it. Yet we might wonder why Senator Obama was assigned Secret Service protection before any of the other candidates? The campaign isn’t talking.
(IMO Obama doesn’t talk much about racist factors in the race because he is taking great care not to run as The Black Candidate. He’s palatable as a candidate to many white Americans only as long as he seems to be transcending racial issues, I suspect. This tells us something about the racial factor in the campaign.)
Eugene Robsinson writes about Clinton’s campaign,
Clinton has always claimed to be the cold-eyed realist in the race, and at one point maybe she was. Increasingly, though, her words and actions reflect the kind of thinking that animates myths and fairy tales: Maybe a sudden and powerful storm will scatter my enemy’s ships. Maybe a strapping woodsman will come along and save the day.
Clinton has poured more than $11 million of her own money into the campaign, with no guarantee of ever getting it back. She has changed slogans and themes the way Obama changes his ties. She has been the first major-party presidential candidate in memory to tout her appeal to white voters. She has abandoned any pretense of consistency, inventing new rationales for continuing her candidacy and new yardsticks for measuring its success whenever the old rationales and yardsticks begin to favor Obama.
It could be that any presidential campaign requires a measure of blind faith. But there’s a difference between having faith in a dream and being lost in a delusion. The former suggests inner strength; the latter, an inner meltdown.
Die-hard Clinton supporters do seem to be in meltdown mode. More and more they seem just like wingnuts, dismissing all critics of Senator Clinton as “Hillary haters,” just as those of us who criticized the Bush Administration were just “Bush haters” in the eyes of the Right. You can point out the serious documented blunders made by the Clinton campaign all day long, but that doesn’t register with the Clintonistas. She’s only losing because of sexism.
Truth is, if Second Wave feminism weren’t already dead, Clinton’s campaign would have killed it. She would have proved to the women haters that women aren’t ready for equality.
See also: Bob Herbert, “Roads, High and Low“; Gary Younge, “Clinton has run her campaign the same way Bush has run the country“; Michael Tomasky, “The Hardest Word“; John Harwood, “The White Working Class: Forgotten Voters No More.”
Update: Roger Cohen, “The Obama Connection.”
Recount
I’m still watching “Recount” on HBO, and so far the portrayal of the Florida recount jives with what I remember. How’s about you? Spot anything that contradicts history?
Update: Howard Kurtz rattles on for about 15 paragraphs on how Recount was not historically accurate, but these are the only concrete examples he gives of inaccuracy:
I suppose whether that last item is true or not is a matter of opinion. On the other hand, James Baker is so pleased with the film he is hosting a screening next week at his public policy institute in Houston.
Identity and Ism
Ism #1: Racism.
Jonathan Darman reports for Newsweek that, even though Hillary Clinton is more popular among white voters than Barack Obama, John McCain is even more popular among white voters than Hillary Clinton. However, for a Democrat,
Clinton’s white support is unusually high: at a comparable point in the 2004 election, Democratic nominee John Kerry received the support of 36 percent of white voters, compared to George W. Bush’s 48 percent, and in June of 2000, Bush led Al Gore 48 percent to 39 percent.
I believe I read somewhere that African Americans are the only voting demographic that never gave George Bush a majority of popular support, even during his glory days after 9/11. This, I believe, gives African Americans bragging rights as the smartest voting demographic.
Conversely, we might ask ourselves, Why are so many white voters so stupid? I’ll give that some thought.
A recent Newsweek poll suggests a “lurking racial bias in the American electorate,” Darman writes. Do tell. I’m not surprised by racism. I’m surprised people are surprised by racism.
Shortly after Obama declared his candidacy last year, I got a call from some guy from BBC radio who wanted to know if Americans were ready to elect a black POTUS. I said I didn’t know. In truth, I figured in a general election an outstanding black candidate might win some northeastern and West Coast states, but not much else. Now it appears Obama is a serious contender in most states outside the Deep South-Appalachia axis. This is heartening. Darman continues,
In 2000, only 37 percent of voters thought the country was ready for a black president. Now, 70 percent of voters think a black candidate like Obama could win the White House.
Responders weren’t being asked if they personally wanted a black candidate to win the White House; just whether they thought one could. They might have been overestimating the racism of fellow voters in 2000 and underestimating it now. Or, perhaps the difference is that in 2000 those polled were presented with a Generic Black Candidate, whose blackness was his only identifying feature. In 2008 there’s a complex and multifaceted flesh-and-blood human being running for president who is black. That’s a whole ‘nother thing.
And Obama is not running as The Black Candidate. If he had, he would have done even worse among whites, I’m sure.
Ism #2: Sexism.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is running as The Woman Candidate. It’s a sales point she seems to emphasize more and more as time goes on.
I recall the first time she brought up Being the First Woman President in one of last year’s “gang” debates with the multitude of Dem candidates. I thought it odd that she would present herself as a groundbreaker while there was an African American on the stage with her. It spoke volumes that she didn’t take him seriously.
As someone who is close to the Senator’s age, I well remember Second Wave feminism. Those were heady times, as the movement helped women achieve positions previously held only by men. Clinton is trying to evoke the spirit of Second Wave feminism in her campaign.
But I thought the ultimate goal of feminism was to create a society in which women would be treated as individuals, not as stereotypes. Clinton seems to want to have it both ways, complaining about sexism while presenting herself as the Generic Woman Candidate. However, Senator Clinton is a complex and multifaceted flesh-and-blood human being. There are a great many reasons one may choose to support or not support her that have nothing to do with her being female.
Further, some of Clinton’s supporters will, on Monday, complain that Clinton is only losing the nomination battle because of sexism and on Tuesday argue that Obama is unelectable because of racism. Well, then, I guess we’re screwed either way, huh?
In a recent interview, Clinton denied the campaign had been particularly racist but complained it has been way too sexist. IMO there’s some truth in this. The racism so far (other than what the Clintons have churned out themselves) has been kept low to the ground or confined to Faux Nooz and affiliates. Sexism, on the other hand, has been woven tightly into most news coverage and commentary about Clinton. But it’s not as if the sexism is going to go away for the general election, or that she’ll be awarded extra Degree of Difficulty votes if it’s her against the white guy.
And to argue, as Clinton did, that somehow sexism is a worse problem than racism is offensive. As I said above, if Barack Obama had run as The Black Candidate he would have been out of the race a long time ago. Clinton, however, has gone a long way as The Woman Candidate.
Does she honestly think that Obama’s strongest non-racial demographic groups — younger and better-educated progressive voters — are especially sexist? Or that these voters are more sexist than general election voters as a whole? Please.
I predict the first woman president will be an accomplished politician who will not run as The Woman Candidate, but as herself.
Ism #3: Ageism.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’ve heard that in polls older voters are more concerned about McCain’s age than younger voters. Interesting, if true.
Inasmuch as voting for POTUS is, for some, about electing a National Daddy, I would think age by itself might not be that much of a handicap. Age combined with apparent infirmity is another matter, however. As JFK used to say, a President has to have vigor. (JFK was, of course, hiding some of his own infirmities.)
Being a silvery-haired white guy buys McCain some support that Obama or Clinton would have to work for, but being a really old silvery-haired white guy does work against him, I suspect.
Update: Spot on commentary by Terence Samuel.