Why Kentucky Is Irrelevant for November

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Whatever data this chart about yesterday’s Kentucky primary voters is trying to present isn’t clear to me, so I’m going by the interpretations in the comments. But apparently about 14 percent of those who cast votes in Kentucky for Clinton yesterday plan to vote for McCain in November.

Put another way, 16% of yesterday’s Kentucky primary voters said they’d vote for McCain in November. Of those, 55% went to Hillary and 28% went to Obama.

A commenter:

One useful thing from MSNBC’s exit polling: of yer white Kentucky Democrats earning under $50k p.a., about 37% voted for Bush over Kerry, and 30ish% voted for Bush over Gore.

So the 34% who said they’d vote for McCain over Obama really are just the same people who, while registered as Democrats, almost always vote for a Republican president.

Another commenter:

It’s also interesting that Obama did better, percentagewise, amongst white Independents than white Democrats. Unsurprisingly, amongst whites who said race was important to their voting decision, 88% went to Clinton. People who voted for Clinton tended to believe that Obama shares the views of Wright; the converse is true as well. Both sides will be dissatisfied if the other candidate wins the nomination, but Clinton has 53% of the voters who don’t like *either* candidate (Obama has 13%).

So, basically, Clinton did well amongst voters who prefer McCain, voters who don’t like either Democratic candidate, and whites who voted significantly based on Obama’s being black. That’s a hell of an electoral coalition right there. I assume we’ll be hearing McAuliffe tout it real soon now.

Michael Tomasky:

The folks on television, for the most part, were a little too obsessed with Kentucky. They had air time to fill, so it’s understandable, but the fact of the matter is that Kentucky is irrelevant for November. So is West Virginia. They’re not battleground states. Battleground states are places where the two Americas, red and blue America, meet and fight for dominance. Ohio, obviously; Pennsylvania, sure; many Midwestern states, several Rocky Mountain states, two or possibly three southern states, arguably Oregon and Washington. But Appalachian states are not in conflict. They’re red. Lots of pundits don’t understand this yet. It wouldn’t matter if Obama lost Kentucky by 80 points.

There was much hand-wringing on television last night over why Obama did little campaigning in West Virginia and Kentucky. My guess is they decided that pouring millions of dollars into those states probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome all that much. Save the money for the general election.

Tomasky again:

Yes, there will come a point at which Clinton continuing to fight will look increasingly ridiculous. But even so, the Obama campaign and the media and maybe even the Democratic National Committee will say, “Look, he’s got 2,026; he’s won.” But the Clinton camp will say, as it has been saying, something like, “We don’t regard 2,026 as a real number. We say 2,209 is the number. And he’s not there yet. And we’re ahead in the popular vote, if you count Outer Freedonia and Inner Seutonia, as any rational person would. So we’re ahead. And we challenge Senator Obama to say otherwise.”

What happens then? Do the networks and cable channels literally stop inviting Clinton people on their air, because they’re just making fools of themselves? Of course they don’t. They want ratings, and conflict means ratings. And people willing to make fools of themselves on television definitely means ratings! Do the newspapers weigh in with haughty editorials saying, enough already? Sure they do. But does Clinton care about that? So what? What’s a newspaper editorial? Maybe if The New York Times actually withdraws its endorsement. But as long as she’s not directly attacking Obama, that seems a reach. Jokes by Leno and Letterman? She’ll just go on there, read a Top 10 list. All will be forgiven. Ratings.

Even if she’s not attacking Obama directly, I think she’s undermining his general election chances in other ways. By means subtle and not-so-subtle, Clinton is picking up the Appalachian vote by providing positive reinforcement to the worst impulses of the one demographic she can still call her own — white working-class non-urban voters who live in states in which the African American population is above 6 percent but below 17 percent of the total. (See David Sirota’s Race Chasm Theory.)

That little slice of Americana is giving her primary wins in states that will almost certainly go for McCain in November, no matter who the Democrats run. But by appealing to those voters she’s cultivating the negative talking points the GOP is already picking up to use against Obama — that he’s an “elitist,” for example.

The big “blue” states that Clinton won, like California, she won early, while she was still Ms. Inevitability. If the California or Massachusetts primary were held today, would the results be the same? I doubt it.

Sasha Abramsky:

As I wrote last week, the Democratic party’s presidential primary race is, to all intents and purposes, over. Obama’s going to be the nominee. Yesterday, voters in Kentucky gave Clinton another big victory – but at this point these victories are pyrrhic. They don’t help Clinton, but they do push the toxic issue of race ever more to the fore, which is a shame given Bill Clinton won the presidency, at least in part, because of his tremendous appeal to African American voters. Clinton might argue she hasn’t stoked this, but the argument’s a stretch. She’s explicitly said she is the candidate of “hardworking Americans, white Americans”. To win the southern states with the smallest African American populations, she has crafted a message of “electability” that is vaguely coded language for “I’m white”. It’s a shameful denouement to a largely honourable, and at least generally progressive, career.

And it’s all an act. She’s no more “one of them” than she’s a carrot.

So, here’s what I’d like to see coming out of Oregon. Sometime in the next couple weeks, the Clintons will have to bow to the inevitable. They need to find a graceful exit strategy and then set to work for the Obama candidacy. Both Clintons have shown their power to sway southern white voters. Now it’s time for them to put their political capital to good work. If the Clintons genuinely care about their progressive legacy, they’ll tackle the race genie head on. It’s out in the open now – if it wasn’t before, certainly it is after the polling in West Virginia and Kentucky. It’s one thing for Hillary Clinton to play dirty to win primary votes; it’s another thing if she doesn’t try to repair the moral damage after the primaries are over.

Clinton has pandered to the conservative Appalachian vision of America for weeks now. It’s time for her to recognise the country will be a healthier place if the message sent out by Oregon’s colour-neutral electorate proves more durable than that sent out by Kentucky’s voters. This isn’t about who wins more delegates; it’s about how those delegates are won and at what moral cost.

In Clinton Land, only sexism counts. Last night on MSNBC someone from the Clinton campaign was being interviewed on MSNBC, and she was going on about how Barack Obama needs to speak out about sexism, and the interviewer — might have been Tweety — asked if Clinton was going to speak out about racism. And the Clinton campaigner sputtered and shuffled and clearly was caught off guard by the question.

The difference between the two campaigns, IMO, is that while there is all kinds of blatant sexism and racism out there –some of which is being expressed by partisans on both sides –I don’t see the Obama campaign cultivating sexism to win votes. I do, however, see the Clinton campaign cultivating racism (and one hell of a victim complex) to win votes.

Let’s be clear. The Dems cannot win in November without a strong turnout by African Americans. I think they can, however, win without the “white working-class non-urban voters who live in states in which the African American population is above 6 percent but below 17 percent of the total” vote. That’s why Kentucky is irrelevant.

And the Clinton campaign already looks ridiculous to everyone but her die-hard supporters. She’s become a caricature. For those of us who defended her for years against the ravings of the Right, this is terribly sad.

Blah Blah Blah

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I tried to watch a bit of the primary coverage tonight, but I got tired of hearing the bobbleheads talk about Obama’s problem with white working-class voters. No one ever mentions Clinton’s problem with college educated voters, or city-dwelling voters, or black voters.

Sadly, the only relief to this tedium is commentary on Senator Kennedy’s brain tumor.

They’re saying Obama has won the majority of elected delegates, and the only way Clinton can win is to persuade the superdelegates to overrule the voters. She keeps saying voters must be heard from before the race is over, but ultimately she doesn’t care how they actually, you know, vote. Unless it’s for her.

Wake me up when it’s over.

Jaw Jaw

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The Right is still trying to paint Barack Obama as an “appeaser.” In a hopelessly muddled column that, I believe, originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick argues that talking to Iran would be appeasement. Glick writes,

OBAMA’S RESPONSE to Bush’s speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

This, of course, is a flat-out lie. Obama’s position is that talking is not the same thing as appeasing, which happens to be true. Look it up.

Glick continues,

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement.

I don’t have time to do an exhaustive search, but when did Obama say he intended to offer “military, technological, military and financial concessions” to anybody? The controversy over Obama’s position, I thought, was that he intends to have talks without “preconditions,” meaning (to me) that any deals that might be struck would be a result of talks, not that talks would be the result of a deal.

Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country’s enemies and done so to the US’s advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.

I believe that is, in fact, what happened.

But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy’s offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled.

Exactly why does secrecy make the deal less of an “appeasement”? Later in the article Glick says Obama “wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.” Legitimacy? What did legitimacy have to do with anything then? I recall Kennedy had face-to-face meetings with Khrushchev at some other point in his presidency, as did Eisenhower. Our heads of state in those days were not burdened by the Bushies’ childish attitude that we should punish people we don’t like by not talking to them.

As I remember it — again, I’m sorry I don’t have time for history research this morning — the negotiations over the Cuban missiles were kept secret to allow both governments to stand down from the crisis without losing face to their respective citizens. Kennedy had been concerned that if he attacked Cuba, the Soviets would retaliate by attacking West Berlin. Basically what happened is that while publicly saber-rattling, privately the Kennedy Administration was willing to concede a great deal to the Soviets to prevent war. And vice versa.

More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And – most importantly of all – Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.

Kennedy didn’t want war, but Khrushchev didn’t want war, either. This made for a decent basis for striking a deal. I agree that Teddy R.’s advice to carry a big stick probably is still operative, but I haven’t heard that Obama plans to dismantle the U.S. military. Oh, wait …

Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs.

The plain fact is that the stick’s not as big as it used to be. Back in the day the Soviets rightly feared us, as we feared them. But after getting bogged down in Iraq all these years, who’s afraid of us now?

And saying that one will not openly threaten war is not the same thing as surrendering the “war option.” But to threaten a war option we must have a credible war option, and thanks to Iraq I don’t think we do.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

We need to talk about military priorities. Every day we spend in Iraq whittles the stick down a little more. Talk to people in the military, and they will tell you they are seriously concerned about our military readiness. Once we’re out of Iraq it’s going to take years to build the military back up to what it was before we invaded. Military spending needs to be redirected toward restoring our military instead of pouring whatever billion dollars we pour every month into the sands of Iraq.

Put another way, Iraq is the biggest reason we’re neither feared nor respected any more. “Shock and awe” devolved into disgust and ridicule.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama’s pledge represents a massive act of appeasement.

Let’s see, what is the definition of appeasement? The American Heritage dictionary defines it as “The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” But merely talking to someone is not appeasement. Again we see right-wingers thinking like eight-year-olds who punish other children they don’t like by refusing to sit next to them.

The notion that we are “rewarding” somebody by engaging in negotiations assumes that the heads of hostile governments actually feel bad that we won’t talk to them, or that our mere presence at a negotiating table is a special privilege only to be handed out to the deserving. This is the way children think.

And as Glick says, we’ve not held summits with the leaders of Iran for 29 years. We can see how well that’s turned out.

Glick goes on and on, and I’m out of time to write further, but skipping down to the last paragraph she says “in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance.”

Preferring attitude over substance is a brilliant description of the Bush Administration’s approach to foreign policy. The Bushies have no substance; they just whip out their ever-shrinking sticks (double meaning intended) and threaten to hit everyone they don’t like. The challenge to an Obama administration will be to put aside the attitude and embrace substance. I don’t know if that will work, but it’s worth a try. Nobody’s done it in a while.

White Nationalism

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Glenn Greenwald points to this genuinely disgusting column by Kathleen Parker, in which she writes,

“A full-blooded American.”

That’s how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren’t racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.”

Parker argues that Fry isn’t necessarily racist, mind you.

Who “gets” America? And who doesn’t?

The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It’s also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.

It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. …

…We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. …

…What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Clinton’s own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.

Glenn points out that Barack Obama’s white grandfather fought in World War II, but somehow Barack Obama hasn’t earned the same “blood equity” that whiter candidates have, nor is his DNA properly “cobbled.” Gee, I wonder why that is?

Of course Parker is a racist. She’s worked out some system in her head by which she can justify being more comfortable with the white candidates than with the black guy, and then she kids herself she isn’t a racist. But she is.

Anyway — Since my ancestors starting earning “blood equity” in the Revolution, I assume I have the authority to tell Parker she doesn’t know America from grapefruit. Conservatives cling to a much-beloved fantasy that the “America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years” was somehow all of a piece culturally until recent times. Fantasy, I say. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the fact is that American culture has been in constant flux since the first white guys sailed into Chesapeake Bay to found Jamestown. Each group of immigrants, from the 17th century on, both changed whatever culture they found here at the time and were changed by it.

As I wrote in the earlier post, if we could reconstitute Daniel Boone and show him around, he wouldn’t recognize this country at all. I think they had apple pie in his day, but much of “traditional” American culture — baseball, jazz, barbecue, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” — didn’t exist in Daniel Boone’s America.

If you spend much time with American history, surely you understand that different parts of the country developed very different “heritages,” in part because of the differences in immigration patterns. This was very apparent in the 19th century. The cultural differences between the slave-owning South and the free-soil North were particularly striking, and traces of that difference linger to this day. But there were also big cultural differences between, say, New England and the upper Midwest.

At the same time, although my fore-parents have been on these shores for just about three centuries, to native Americans I’m still an interloper. I respect that.

For a more nuanced look at what White America is going through, check out this column by Gregory Rodriguez. Although his DNA may not be properly cobbled either, I say Rodriguez understands America better than Parker does. (And per Parker’s own criteria my bloodlines make me the authority in these matters.) Rodruguez writes,

Last week, exit polls in West Virginia showed that Barack Obama might be facing some fierce racial resistance if he becomes the Democratic nominee. More than half of West Virginia Democratic voters — 95% of whom are white — said they would be dissatisfied if Obama won the nomination.

Is this white supremacy? No, in fact it might be its opposite, an acknowledgment that white privilege has its limits. With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elites that are threatened by the changes; rather, it’s the nearly 70% of whites who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans. Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants — legal or otherwise — and that their culture is being subsumed. When Clinton promises to make their voices heard, she’s appealing not to Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism but to the fear of white decline.

They’re bitter, you know, whether they’ll admit it or not.

Granted, not everyone who fits under the rubrics of “white, working class, not college educated” is going to vote against Obama. But by rallying to Clinton’s faltering candidacy, some sectors of white society might be trying to solidify the old racial boundaries of American nationhood. It’s not so much that they are hoping to reclaim their place, but that they are seeking to carve out a niche and demanding that, at the very least, the presidency remains “theirs.”

Like black or Latino activists who insist that a particular congressional district should be represented by one of their own, the disgruntled white working-class, non-college-educated voters might be demanding that their majority status still translate into something at least symbolically meaningful to them.

I say it’s splitting hairs to claim this isn’t a variation of white supremacy. For a very long time white supremacy has been all about building up the flagging self-esteem of unexceptional white people. But Rodriguez points out that we’re turning into a nation in which everyone’s in a minority.

Romantic notions of ethnic self-determination and multiculturalism may have once served to dismantle empires and garner attention for forgotten minorities. But today they are more likely to nurture the kind of white nationalism on which Clinton has placed her last political hopes.

Parker’s skewed perception of people’s “bloodlines” and “DNA” rests on the biased fantasy that the United States is a white nation. If the United States is going to be a functional nation in the 21st century, we’d best learn that we’re all in this democratic government thing together.

Sectarian Sexism

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Steve M. makes a point about sexism and Senator Clinton:

And where are, say, Condoleezza’s Rice’s “Fatal Attraction comparisons”? Where is the “locker-room chortling on television panels” about her? Rice is a national figure, an architect of the worst foreign-policy disaster in living memory, a top aide to possibly the most hated president ever — where’s her nutcracker?

A lot of us keep saying this and it falls on deaf ears, but here I go again: Quite a bit of the nastiness that’s uttered about Hillary Clinton is uttered specifically because she’s Hillary Clinton (even if it relies on readymade sexist tropes) — or because she’s Bill Clinton’s wife. (Remember, the people who helped paint the negative portrait of Hillary in the 1990s were painting one of Bill at the same time.)

This is pretty much was I was saying here —

I think some of the vile remarks aimed at Senator Clinton are expressions of dislike about her specifically, not of women generally. The problem is that our national political discourse has become so polluted that many who express dislike of Clinton believe they are supposed to toss in some vulgar personal insults of her.

Put another way, righties (and some pundits, like Chris Matthews) fear and hate Clinton specifically and fall back on sexist language as a means of expressing their fear and hatred. Yet many of these same righties are capable of admiring other women and addressing them in respectful language. [Update: Well, OK, that last statement does not apply to Chris Matthews.]

In rightie world, conservative women are beautiful and accomplished. Liberal women are harridans and ball-busters.

As I recall, a couple of years ago some of the same righties who can’t use “Hillary” in a sentence without throwing “bitch” in as well were floating the idea of Condoleezza as a presidential candidate. I believe there are some who still think she’d be a swell veep candidate on a McCain ticket, and of course I think that would be a grand idea, too! Let’s hope it happens! Nothin’ like tying McCain to Dubya’s office wife to sink the ticket!

Of course, IMO there’s another layer of sexism under that. Condoleezza is “OK” because she is so obviously subordinates herself to her boss. Strong, opinionated women are acceptable to right-wingers as long as they are tethered to a powerful, conservative man to keep them in line. Think Lynn Cheney.

There’s no question that many have a problem with powerful women. Note that one of the most common insults tossed at Hillary Clinton is that she’s ambitious. Heaven forbid that a woman should be ambitious! If we say a man is ambitious, that’s a compliment, but ambitious women are scary.

Again, think Lynn Cheney. There are few women in Washington who are pushier and more opinionated than Mrs. Cheney — not to mention more powerful, in a behind-the-scenes way — but she’s seen as being pushy and opinionated on behalf of the cause of conservatism, so that’s OK.

(Years ago, I read a sociological paper about a tribe living in near stone-age conditions. The women of the tribe were not allowed to leave the village and enter the nearby forest; only men could enter the forest. This was not because women were weak and needed protection. It was because of what we’d call magic. The tribe believed that female power is stronger than male power, and if female power were to combine with forest power all hell could break loose. Since males have less magical power, it doesn’t matter if they enter the forest or not. Sometimes I think our psyches haven’t progressed as much as we’d like to think.)

What does this say about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign? On the one hand, many of the people who strongly dislike Hillary Clinton do so out of a kind of sectarian sexism. To right-wingers, all liberal women are unnatural creatures who not only abort all their babies, they also desire power for its own sake and, once they get it, they cannot be controlled by the hand of man. But at the same time, all liberal men are Frenchified wusses. And I think a lot of righties confuse liberal with libertine, although somehow being a libertarian is OK.

In other words, gender role bias is subordinate to ideological bias. Righties don’t hate her because she’s a woman; they hate her because she’s perceived as a liberal woman.

I agree with Steve that it’s illogical to think that, if Clinton loses, it will be years before another woman can contend for the presidency. She came damn close. For a time she was considered unstoppable. The sexist knives didn’t come out in media until after her own campaign blunders revealed her vulnerabilities.

But the pundits are not exactly gentle with male front-runners who stumble, either. And if it’s a Democratic man who stumbles, pundits will look at the camera and intone, “Is Joe Blow losing this election because he’s a Frenchified wuss?” You can count on it.

Old Tricks

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Joe Gandelman writes that Senator Obama’s response to “appeasement” charges shows us it ain’t 2004 any more.

Obama turned the proverbial lemon (being attacked by Bush and being put on the defensive and having to answer) into lemonade (going after Bush by rattling off specific criticisms, using humor and sarcasm and tethering McCain tightly to Bush one after McCain made a major speech in which the Arizona Senator tried to inch himself away from the most unpopular President in modern polling history).

The biggest change, however, is that Obama seems unafraid to engage in foreign policy debates with Republicans. Chris Cillizza:

In elections past, Democrats have sought to avoid an extended fight with Republicans over foreign policy, preferring to instead fight on the more familiar — and friendly — ground of domestic issues like health care and the economy.

The 2004 election may well have signaled a sea change in that strategy, as Bush effectively turned the election into a referendum on the threat of terrorism and the importance of national security as Democrats were unable to mount an effective response. …

… It marks a remarkable change in tactics that speaks to just how much the political landscape has shifted since 2004. McCain and Republicans are certain to work to frame the national security/foreign policy debate in their favor, but Obama’s initial response is a sign that they may have to adjust their tactics in the runup to the November election.

If you watch much MSNBC, you are sure to catch Pat Buchanan saying the GOP will turn Obama into McGovern. (Forget 2004; Pat thinks it’s still 1972.) The “Democrats are soft on national security” is a bluff the Right has pulled since the post World War II era. About the only presidential candidate who successfully called them on it was John Kennedy, who countered the Right’s bogus charge with an equally bogus “missile gap” claim.

I’m calling it a “bluff” because, if you think about it, the GOP’s actual record on national security issues since the post World War II era really isn’t any more glorious than the Dems’. Dem and GOP presidents alike have had some successes and some blunders. The Republican advantage on national security issues is based more on chest-thumping and tree-peeing than on their record.

And the fact is that the Bush Administration finally, and stupidly, has revealed their hand. By now it is blatantly obvious to all but 27 percent — Bush bitter enders — that the Bushies have no bleeping clue what they are doing regarding foreign policy. And although plenty of Republican candidates are moving away from Bush now, GOP politicians stood with Bush so solidly for so long that The Smirk is the face of Republican national security policy. Bush is to the GOP what the Doughboy is to Pillsbury.

So, Republican smear machine — bring it on.

See also E.J. Dionne, “Brand on the Run.”

The Belittled Woman

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[Updates below]

Rick Klein writes that some Clinton supporters are organizing a “boycott” of the November election and the Dem party if Senator Clinton is not the party’s nominee.

Just talked to a 55-year-old Columbus, Ohio resident named Cynthia Ruccia, a spokesperson and organizer for a group calling itself “Clinton Supporters Count Too.” She said the group — numbering in the hundreds, and organized in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan — stands ready to boycott the Democratic Party if Clinton doesn’t win the nomination, and will work against superdelegates who support Obama over Clinton as a means of registering their displeasure with the party.

“We have a plan to campaign against the Democratic nominee,” the group said in a press release Thursday. “We have the (wo)manpower and the money to make our threat real. And there are millions of supporters who will back us up in the swing states. If you don’t listen to our voice now, you will hear from us later.”

Ruccia tells ABC News that she believes “millions” of women share her group’s views, though they have only begun to make contact with like-minded women. They’re disgusted, she said, that Democratic Party leaders haven’t more aggressively denounced sexist media comments and coverage in the campaign, and are angry at the drumbeat for Clinton to get out of the race.

“We’re just at the boiling point,” Ruccia said. “Women will sit back and be quiet about things for a while, but we’ve had enough. Unless Hillary Clinton is our nominee, we are not going to support the nominee.”

There’s no question Senator Clinton has been the target of some hideous sexism, as Libby Copeland documents in today’s Washington Post and Marie Cocco in yesterday’s WaPo. I also think we’ve seen that sexist expression is more socially acceptable in our national political discourse than racist expression, which so far has been heard mostly “on the ground” and not on MSNBC. Sexism has a lot to do with Clinton’s “negatives,” the people who just plain don’t like her and won’t budge from that position no matter what she says or does.

However, there are a few points I think some Clinton supporters are overlooking.

First, just because someone is the victim of sexism doesn’t mean she would make a good President of the United States. Hell, I’ve been a victim of sexism plenty of times, and I think I’d make a terrible POTUS. (Better than the current one, of course, but I’ve seen refrigerator mold that would do better than the current one.)

I get the impression that some older women (disclosure: I am female and 56) are die-hard Clinton supporters because electing her would be glorious payback for the countless indignities they’ve suffered through the years. I can understand how this would be emotionally gratifying, but emotional gratification is not exactly the point of electing a POTUS.

Second, I think some of the vile remarks aimed at Senator Clinton are expressions of dislike about her specifically, not of women generally. The problem is that our national political discourse has become so polluted that many who express dislike of Clinton believe they are supposed to toss in some vulgar personal insults of her. They think it’s expected of them, because it’s the way all public political figures are treated these days.

Third, although sexism trumps racism in national discourse, in voting behavior I believe we’ve seen that racism trumps sexism. As far as voters are concerned, I believe Barack Obama’s race is a bigger handicap than Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet he has more votes than she does.

Fourth, I think the single biggest reason Hillary Clinton is behind is that her campaign has made huge strategic blunders. On the other hand, while Obama’s campaign has made some tactical goofs, strategically it’s been brilliant. In other words — she’s losing because she’s losing, not because mean old stupid men have taken something she has earned away from her.

Fifth, the fight over seating the Michigan and Florida delegates has nothing to do with sexism. It’s about Clinton trying to pick up a couple of easy wins by gaming the rules. She originally agreed those states’ primaries didn’t count, and only changed her tune when she realized she needed the votes. In Michigan, she agreed not to participate in the primaries but refused to take her name off the ballot, even after Obama and Edwards did, then tried to claim Michigan as a “win.” Does anyone seriously believe that if Obama had tried to pull the same trick on Clinton, the Clintonistas wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder about it and called it “cheating”?

Sixth, if a man were in Clinton’s current position in the race, the powers that be would be leaning on him to quit, too. Scott Lehigh writes,

LET’S SAY Hillary Clinton’s remaining primary rival were not Barack Obama but a white male. Suppose she were ahead in pledged delegates, led in the popular vote in DNC-approved contests, had raised the most money, and had attracted the most contributors.

Let’s further suppose that her rival had responded to her success by suggesting he might pick her as his vice-presidential nominee. And that, as she gained more momentum, he asserted that superdelegates should nevertheless make him the nominee because he could attract the working-class voters the party needed to win in the fall.

Clinton supporters would likely find those suggestions sexist.

And yet Clinton and her camp have made the same suggestions in this campaign. Clinton’s political arguments have found a broad acceptance among her backers – an acceptance that’s hard to imagine if a similar case were made by a lagging rival in a race Clinton led.

The only reason the media bobbleheads are still pretending the nomination fight isn’t already over is that the drama Clinton is generating is great for ratings. And, frankly, the only reason most of the Democratic Party is putting up with her is that she is who she is. If Chris Dodd or Joe Biden or Dennis Kucinich were in Clinton’s position and trying to win the nomination by tripping up the front runner (and can you imagine them doing that? I can’t), the Dems would have pulled the plug on this nonsense a long time ago.

Regarding the NARAL endorsement — although I support its cause, I’ve had no use for NARAL for some time. I’ve long believed NARAL is ineffectual and exists mostly to collect donations that will pay the salaries of its executives and staff. I think it was odd they decided to endorse Obama before the nomination fight was officially over, although I believe I understand why they did it. The nomination fight is, for all practical purposes, over, and it’s time to take on John “free ride” McCain, whose election would be a disaster for reproductive rights.

However, the backlash to NARAL’s endorsement has all the markings of an eating-our-own feeding frenzy. Just one more reason the Clinton nomination fight needs to stop now, and in fact should have been stopped a couple of months ago.

Updates: Michelle Cottle interviewed “high-level advisors, staffers, fundraisers, and on-the-ground organizers” of the Clinton campaign to find out why Senator Clinton is losing/lost the nomination fight. And guess what one factor is not mentioned?

Sexism.

Lots of other reasons, which mostly came down to the campaign’s own misjudgments and mismanagements. But not one person interviewed said that Hillary Clinton got shoved out of the nomination by the paternalistic establishment.

See also my post of March 3 in which I talked about why I support Obama over Clinton, and why I think Clinton supporters are not being honest with themselves about their own reasons and behaviors.

Channeling Neville Chamberlain

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President Bush once again waved the Bloody Allegation of Appeasement to trash a Democrat, in this case Barack Obama. For the record, I’m not as offended about this as is Will Bunch. Mostly I just find Bush’s little speech utterly pathetic.

Here’s the most unpopular president in our lifetime, a man whose foreign (as well as domestic) policies have been unmitigated and often unparalleled disasters, criticizing someone else regarding foreign policy. Frankly, Bush is so clueless that being criticized by him is something of an honor.

Here’s what Bush said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

FYI, the American senator being referenced was Republican Senator William Borah (R-ID), a right-wing isolationist and Nazi sympathizer. This blogger has some good historical background.

If you watched Hardball tonight, you saw a wingnut radio talk-show mouthpiece named Kevin James who literally was screaming about appeasement and Neville Chamberlain. Chris Matthews put James on the spot to explain exactly what Neville Chamberlain did to earn the label of “appeasement.” It was obvious James had absolutely no clue. He was screaming that Obama was going to do “the exact same thing” that Chamberlain did, but it turns out that James had no idea what Chamberlain did. And Tweety called James pathetic. It was hysterical. I hope somebody makes a YouTube video of it; I’ll post it here.

I wrote a couple of years ago that righties don’t know what the word appeasement actually means. I’m glad Tweety is catching up to me.

Just for the record, I dug out an essay from last year that argues Bush is a lot more like Neville Chamberlain than, well, just about anybody.

Update: Here’s the video:

Burma Update

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I have a brief update on the unfolding tragedy in Burma posted on the other blog. Note in particular that much of the aid being sent into Burma by international aid organizations is being stolen and warehoused by the military junta, according to the New York Times.

The Buddhist Peace Fellowship asks that we direct our donations to the Foundation for the People of Burma (FPB), which has been using resources and contacts already in Burma to reach people in need.