There's only one thing that makes sense of the Clinton campaign's clumsy and classless injection of race into her primary battle with Barack Obama. And that is that her victory in New Hampshire -- impressive though it was -- threatened to transform her into a special-interest candidate.
Hillary would not have won that battle without exaggerated support from women. Despite having campaigned vigorously as a candidate who just-so-happened to be a woman, her lifeline came from affinity voters.
How then to compete against Obama, who has -- as Al Sharpton recently complained -- run a race-neutral campaign? A man standing as a general-interest candidate despite his historic racial qualifications.
The answer, it seems, has been to inject race into the campaign by any means necessary. The effort has run the gamut from old-school racism -- Andrew Cuomo's execrable "shuck-and-jive" comment -- to tired racial paradigms -- a Clinton pollster's assertion that Hispanics don't vote for black people -- to anti-racism-as-racism -- the bizarre suggestion by a Clinton surrogate that Obama had been adopted by white America as its "imaginary hip black friend."
As distasteful as this campaign has been, it has worked. The media have segued neatly from Clinton's tears and her outpouring of support among women in the granite state to Obama's standing as a "black candidate" -- now awkwardly forced to defend the legacy of Dr. King from slights by the Clinton machine.
So much for the post-racial transcendence to which he has aspired; Obama has now even been yoked -- however tenuously -- to the discredited politics of Louis Farrakahn, thanks to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's smear job this morning.
[A note to anyone covering that piece: Since when is it reasonable to hold a political candidate responsible for everything that's ever been published in his church's fucking newsletter?!? What horseshit.]
And so, while Obama is being forced to clarify that he is not, indeed, a Nation-of-Islam sympathizing closet anti-Semite, no one is looking much at Clinton's very real troubles winning over the hearts and minds of male voters.
From Rollingstone.com/politics
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Only by employing some variation of "fuzzy math" can a minority (male) voter be annointed as the norm voter, but the majority (female) voter represents an affinity voter.
I may still not agree with everything you said, but realize my ire was raised by the headline, which you may not have written.
To whomever wrote that headline: Your headline has nothing to do with the content of Tim's article and merely conveys your own personal biases/attitudes towards Ms Clinton. Please keep your objections to actual substance, in the future ... or, at a minimum, keep your headlines on topic.
Scapegoating and blaming the female because the male is unable to show respect is what immature people do who don't know how else to act.
Some self-examination of conscience needs to happen here, especially with many of the white males who write articles about Clinton. So many of the articles are full of fear as if Clinton is some frightening and powerful demonic force, all evil can be attributed to, she does so many dire and sinister deeds - at least in the minds of the white male journalists. Hum... I think it is just fear of a woman. Imagine....
I'm for Edwards because he seems to care more about poverty and corporate greed than either of these two candidates, but I hate watching people like you poison the field for women and African Americans.
this from msnbc
The Obama camp injected race into the campaign to peel away black voters in South Carolina.
Knowingly.
Intentionally.
Injected race.
This has become a very distracting and disturbing addition to hate campagining we now see as normal.
Women have lifetimes of experience voting for people with genitalia different from our own. Really, more men should try it sometime.
(female Obama voter)
Apparently so were Al Gore and John Kerry since the Republican attack machine was revved up for their candidacies as well. Some Obamaniacs seem to think the problems between Democrats and Republicans all come down to the Clintons. The only reason they're divisive is because a certain portion of the country (Republicans) dislike them. Again I remind you that Gore and Kerry would have to be labeled divisive as well since there was a good portion of the public who refused to get behind them as well in 2000 and 2004.