feminist blogs

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrates his grasp of history.

A few days ago I started to write a post. This was just after the media crucifixion of Geraldine Ferraro and after I’d seen the first video (above) of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s misogynistic and fact-challenged “spiritual advisor.” The post was going to be about double standards. Double standards for racism and sexism; double standards for how the media covers the Clinton and Obama campaigns. And how those two sets of double standards have wrapped around each other throughout this political season, a kind of double-helix nightmare. But then some stuff came up here in the Smoking Lounge that required attention, so I put the post on hold.

I may still write that post. But in the meantime, events have overtaken me. The Rev. Wright thing is going viral. On top of the Ferraro nonsense, the growing realization (among what remains of the reality-based community) that the Obama campaign is more Machiavelli than Mahatma, the immense resentment over how Hillary supporters and women in general have been vilified and dismissed — suddenly something shifted. A whole lot of people snapped.

Hillary supporters at DailyKos staged a walkout on Friday night: The Left Splits: Writers Flee DailyKos Over Clinton-Bashing; Daily Kos Writers Strike; Update on Daily Kos Writers Strike.

Taylor Marsh reports that she’s getting a high volume of emails from Democrats vowing they will never vote for Obama. And the comment thread on that post (over a thousand comments) tells the same tale.

And those are self-identified Democrats.

As for the rest of the country — by which I mean the general electorate — the Wright thing alone is enough to render Obama untenable in November. Look, I’m an old leftist, and things like “God Damn America” don’t shock me at all. It’s true, our nation’s sins are long and deep. Wright is right (heh) about many things.

But even I feel a bit sick to my stomach when I watch him preach. It’s the sexism that disturbs me. Women have never had to work twice as hard as men just to prove themselves? (I’m betting they don’t celebrate Women’s History Month at that church.) And we may not get passed over by cabs, but then we do have that tiny little problem with being raped and murdered. When I picture myself standing alone on a dark street in New York trying to hail a cab, I next picture myself lying dead in the alley.

The dude is also just creepy as shit. “Riding dirty,” helpfully accompanied by a visual demonstration? Crowing over “the chickens coming home to roost” after 9-11? Combine that with the stuff that does shock non-leftists — God Damn America, the KKK of America bit — and what we have here, kids, is what’s popularly known as “toast.” Anybody wanna keep talking about how Obama will turn the red states blue?

Actually, yes. The party leaders, the pro-Obama media, and of course the blogger boys are all in denial. They just keep serving up ever bigger pitchers of Kool-Aid. Maybe we need to stage an intervention.

In Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales, Kate Zernike looks at the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Eliot Spitzer sleazemelt, and asks “where does society stand on gender matters?”

PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.”

It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?

Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.

Ah yes, that younger generation. The twenty-somethings who are convinced that sexism is irrelevant because they haven’t hit the the double standard or the glass ceiling yet. It reminds me of an editorial in the Boston Globe earlier this year by a 25-year-old woman who acknowledged the debt to earlier feminists, but concluded that women her age feel confident in their “abilities” and know that it’s safe to turn their attention to other problems. But maybe there’s hope:

Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.

“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”

I’m going to skip right over the fact that “tears” and “scolding” are part of the sexist narrative against Hillary, and if you’ve bought into it you might want to do a little re-calibrating on our post-feminist progress. Right, I’m going to skip over that. Not mention it at all. What I’m going to focus on is this next thing:

It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”

There’s some truth in what the old dude speaketh, though he should have clarified that the young women’s “power” is a fleeting illusion based purely on their appeal to genuinely powerful men, and it expires the instant they pass their sell-by date. But when this same wisdom is delivered by old crones (feminists over 40 or so), our daughters complain that we’re scolds or dinosaurs or simply jealous of how young and pretty they are.

Which, again, is one of those little indicators that the Land of Postfeminism is still a long ways away.

This article was published last fall, and the information in it was probably available before then, but I’ve just now discovered it:

Sen. Barack Obama had hired Pete Rouse for just such a moment.

It was the fall of 2005, and the celebrated young senator — still new to Capitol Hill but aware of his prospects for higher office — was thinking about voting to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. Talking with his aides, the Illinois Democrat expressed admiration for Roberts’s intellect. Besides, Obama said, if he were president he wouldn’t want his judicial nominees opposed simply on ideological grounds.

And then Rouse, his chief of staff, spoke up. This was no Harvard moot-court exercise, he said. If Obama voted for Roberts, Rouse told him, people would remind him of that every time the Supreme Court issued another conservative ruling, something that could cripple a future presidential run. Obama took it in. And when the roll was called, he voted no.

Here’s what that tells me about Obama:

1. At the age of 44 this man had no clue why voting to confirm a young, anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights ultra-conservative to the Supreme Court was a bad idea for the women of America. Or he simply didn’t care.
2. This article is reproduced on Obama’s own website, so apparently he still hasn’t figured out #1. Or he still doesn’t care.
3. When he did change his mind it was only to preserve his presidential chances. Defending the rights of female American citizens wasn’t enough.

In the fall of 2005 the feminist sphere was aflame with calls to block Roberts’s confirmation. And while we were doing that, this chump was sitting in his Senate office making absurd noises about Roberts’s “intellect”.*

And you trust this clown?

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*Allow me to remind you that Roberts’s vaunted intellect has led him to oppose abortion rights, equal pay for women, and to question “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.”

Not that you can hear me there in your padded room, but maybe if I yell loud enough something will get through: you’re fucking up. You may win the battle (getting your man the nomination) but you — and we — will lose the war (the general election). Hello, President McCain.

Countless Democrats are now silently making the decision that they will never, ever vote for Barack Obama. Why? Because of you. Because you’re fucking insane.

And if Democrats are making that decision, guess how this will play with the rest of the electorate.

Calm down, take a Xanax, shoot some smack, do whatever you gotta do. Read the posts below, follow the links, and try really, really hard to see how the rest of America sees you. ‘kay?

For my daughter’s sake, don’t go there Keith

How you can tell when anti-Hillaryism is sexism

Democratic Firestorm

…and the Blogger Boy Obamabots are liars. (Can you tell I’m getting fed up with these clowns?)

The latest round of nonsense in the blogosphere has inspired eriposte at The Left Coaster to set the record straight with Campaign Fairy Tales:

The fact is that Sen. Obama and his campaign have used numerous, often false, talking points and negative attacks against Sen. Clinton for many months. Some of these attacks easily cross the line that Hart has drawn and some are exactly along the lines of what Markos and Aravosis claim the Obama campaign has not done.

And then he goes on to document some of the more egregious examples. This is one to keep handy for the next time an Obamabot starts in with The Ballad of Barack the Pure of Heart and His Evil Nemesis Hillary the Monster Bitch (With Periodic Claws).

I want to talk about Obamamania. But to do that, first I need to say up front what I don’t mean by Obamamania, at least for this discussion.

I don’t mean reasoned support for Barack Obama because of his positions (his actual positions, please) or his electability or his potential as a leader. There are valid arguments to be made that Obama is more appealing on all those points than Hillary (though personally I disagree). There is also the argument that a Clinton presidency would mire the country in another four to eight years of 90s-style wingnuttery (an argument I respect but ultimately reject, because I think the exact same thing awaits Obama).

And I don’t mean support for Obama from the African-American community, a phenomenon with which I’m deeply sympathetic. Just as millions of women (of all races) see their gender reflected in Hillary, millions of African-Americans (of both sexes) see their race reflected in Obama. You can call it identity politics, but what I call it is the chance to finally feel represented after 200 years in a so-called representative democracy. I begrudge no one that yearning.

What I mean by Obamamania is the delusional fervor that Obama inspires in the blogosphere, in the media, and in the college kids who power his ground game. It’s a fervor that is impervious to truth, reality, sometimes even basic common sense.

The truth is that Barack Obama is a Democratic politician who has figured out how to harness Republican-style politics. It’s not just the right-wing talking points he embraces, but the whole emotional approach. It’s the triumph of fantasy over reality, and it has two big components: marketing and pseudo-religion.

I’ve already posted about the marketing angle. Maybe I’m particularly alive to it because I remember Reagan’s “Morning in America,” a campaign that was so vacuous that the first time I saw the commercial I thought it was for McDonald’s. That’s no joke: at the time Mickey D’s was running a very similar ad campaign for their Egg McMuffins. It was all soft focus, feel good, start your day happy kinda stuff. When “Morning in America” came out I damn near freaked. “What the hell are people supposed to be voting for?” I asked my husband indignantly. “Sunshine?”

But millions of people bought it. They looked at Ronald Reagan and saw a cowboy, a hero, a genial grandfather. I looked at Reagan and saw a great big can of processed cheese. And truth be told, that’s pretty much what I see when I look at Obama. Barack’s got a great high-concept shtick, but for chrissake, it is a shtick.

The other element is pseudo-religious fervor, something that the Republicans mastered with Bush 2. For years now Democrats have been giggling at the useful idiots on the right who put up prayer lines for President Jesus, but the same mentality is what’s driving a lot of Obamabots. Simon Woods explores this phenomenon in ‘We Are The Chosen Ones’: A new hymn to Barack Obama.

A few weeks ago, covered in Hillary badges, I approached a young couple in California and, as I was about to offer up my pearls of electoral wisdom, they just began singing at me. And they were singing Yes We Can, the song by Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.Am, whose video has become a phenomenon on YouTube.

If you’re familiar with the religious right, you recognize this behavior. It’s exactly what right-wing Christian kids do. They sing at you. You can start talking to them about anything from the reality-based world — evolution, abortion, homosexuality, the possibility that Bush isn’t Jesus — and they start singing. They stand there with their ponytails and little crucifix necklaces and sing a batshit Christian hymn about holding fast against the devil.

The lure of religious certainty is especially strong for young people, and Obama knows that. That’s why his campaign has deliberately crafted its message to sound as much as possible like modern Christian outreach.

Obama has created the impression that Clinton supporters, like the Pharisees in the temple, are obstacles to change: “I want to speak directly to all those Americans who have yet to join this movement but still hunger for change. They know it in their gut… But they’re afraid. They’ve been taught to be cynical.”

Straight out of the Christian playbook. You’re just afraid to let Jesus into your heart. You want to believe, but you’re distracted by the scientists and the liberals. You’ve been taught to be skeptical. But all you have to do is let go, and let Jesus in. Just believe.

To people like me, this message is worse than ineffectual; it’s repellent. I’m not fooled and I’m not interested in electing a self-proclaimed messiah. But to a lot of naive young people, it’s extremely compelling. “He’s infallible,” one young Obama supporter is reported to have said. Campus Crusade for Christ, Hare Krishnas, Obamamania: variations on a theme.

Some people on the left will argue that this is all to the good. If Democrats have figured out how to harness the useful idiot vote, what’s the problem? It’s great, right?

I’m not so sure. As politicians keep rediscovering, fanaticism is dangerous. Something about two-edged swords. A few of the more unhinged Obama fans are already talking about burning Denver to the ground if Obama isn’t the nominee — rhetoric that will play straight into the hands of the Republicans. And what happens when the Obama worshippers get a peek at those feet of clay? Jesus and Krishna aren’t around to screw up, but Barack is. Actually he doesn’t even have to screw up; he just has to start governing in accordance with his actual policy positions as opposed to the imaginary ones the Obamabots credit him with.

But a more immediate concern is this: I’m simply not convinced that Obama’s support is as widespread as his followers believe. Like all religious fanatics, Obamabots make an amount of noise that is disproportionate to their numbers. And their noise is drowning out a big proportion of Democrats.

Which brings me to the blogosphere.

It’s no secret, I think, that most of the liberal blogosphere has become a one-note 24/7 Obama rally. People who support Hillary, particularly women, have been relentlessly insulted, silenced, even banished from sites like DailyKos. The nastiness of the Obama guys — most of them are guys — is breathtaking.

But their Obamamania is of a slightly different flavor than what I’ve discussed so far. Political junkies are not immune to the marketing stuff and pseudo-religion that captivates so many Obamabots, but they do tend to be a tad more cynical than the average bear. Cynicism, no matter what Obama says, is necessary if you’re going to analyze politics.

What makes up the shortfall for the blogger boys is a third ingredient: misogyny. Supporting Obama gives them license to hate Hillary. It’s a license to engage openly, enthusiastically, in misogyny of the most feverish kind. Hating Hillary has traditionally been the preserve of wingnuts, and the liberal boys have felt constrained (though not entirely) to stay away from too much Clinton-bashing. But now, with Hillary running against their man Obama, they’ve got their opening. Finally they’re free to engage in the crazed heart-racing hatred that only the guys on the right have been able to enjoy. Can you imagine how liberating it must be? That’s why they’re so giddy. They’ve been repressing this for years!

Go slog through the comments at the big boy liberal sites. Did you know that Hillary Clinton’s heart is a black rotting mass of pure evil? Did you know that if you sliced open her brain it would be crawling with maggots? That her crimes are unspeakable? That her lust for power is insatiable? That she is a monstrous, foam-dripping beast who won’t be satisfied until she’s destroyed the party?

Reading at places like DailyKos and Democratic Underground has become a disorienting experience. I keep wondering if somehow I’ve blundered into Free Republic by accident. Or if maybe all the commenters are really Freepers in disguise. The rhetoric is the same. All the right-wing anti-Hillary hysteria from the past 16 years: it’s all there. Apparently it’s never occurred to the boy bloggers that inculcating a whole generation of new voters with anti-Clinton propaganda is an incredibly risky strategy and pretty much the opposite of what you need to do to build broad party strength. Or maybe they just can’t help themselves.

From where I sit, it looks for all the world like a significant slice of the left has been body-snatched by wingnut-like pod people. The gullibility, the cult-like adulation, the frantic misogyny, the insistence that anyone who disagrees is The Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed — the whole batshit crazy package has arrived.

Is this good news for the progressive movement? The Obamabots think so, but then they’ve shown a marked inability to hear anyone’s voices but their own. What I’m hearing is that a whole lot of lifelong progressives and Democratic voters — people like me and my friends and family — are becoming seriously alienated. Women over 40 resent being tossed aside like so many used Kleenexes. Working folks aren’t buying the Obama Magic. And older people know that what we need is a tough fighter, somebody with the wisdom and sheer gumption to get the job done. Obama’s speeches are so much handwavium to this crowd.

If Obama does become the nominee, then his campaign is going to need some new material. You know, maybe some more of whatever it is that brings people out in droves to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Lots of analysis this weekend, with people finally taking a realistic look at how the general election might play out.

One of the best pieces I’ve seen is Ten Key States Update and a Perspective on Pennsylvania. Two main takeaways:

1. Hillary is stronger in more of the swing states, the ones that Democrats must win in order to take the White house.

2. Hillary’s demographics are better. She’s pulling the voters who used to be solidly Democratic but have gone increasingly Republican in the past couple of elections: women, Latinos/Latinas, and older voters (also the working class, though that’s not mentioned in this piece). Again, can we just have a moment here to contemplate why this particular coalition — a winning Democratic coalition — is so uninteresting to the Big Boy Bloggers? Why they only seem to be interested in voters who look like them?

Jonathan Last in the Philadelphia Inquirer covers some of the same territory in Who can go the distance? His focus is more on the delegate battle, but he also makes the point that voter demographics are in Hillary’s favor for the general election. (Via riverdaughter.)

In Hillary and the Invisible Women, Tina Brown explores Hillary’s appeal to women of a certain age:

“All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don’t want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they’d prefer a ‘fresh (cheaper) face.’”

And I might add, the netroots and political pundits and the Democratic party honchos don’t want them either. They are the single biggest segment of the American electorate, and their votes are considered little better than an annoyance.

Anglachel, my new favorite blogger, covers the Obama campaign’s implosion this past week in Unpopular Votes and Obama’s Legimitacy Crisis. The money quote comes at the top: “I think Obama has lost the nomination with his own behavior (plus the antics of his campaign) since last Tuesday.” And then she explains why.

Finally, there’s a plethora of articles and posts out there now on the problems with caucuses, but Donna Darko at Hillary 1000 cuts to the chase with a simple list showing turnout by state. We all know (or at least all the political junkies know) that the caucus system favors Obama, since caucuses are tailor-made for college students and yuppies. Working people, the elderly, and many women are far less likely to have the means, the time, or the inclination to spend an entire day or evening in a confrontational political meeting. You know, there’s a reason somebody invented the secret ballot.

That’s Jerome Armstrong, the original Big Boy Blogger, trying to talk a little sense into the other Big Boy Bloggers. He says:

Obama does have phenomenal fundraising numbers among upper income boomer liberals and their offspring, no doubt. Except that, when you listen to the Obama campaign talk about its victories lately, I have this inclination to see right through it– that they are not talking about support of the people, but instead having gamed the process. “The Math” as one of their talking point leaders, Jonathan Alter, likes to call it. But, as riverdaughter calls it, “people are just now starting to notice that he gets more delegates by suppressing Clinton voters than by actually, you know, winning.”

The latest being that Obama “won” Texas (you know, like Bush “won” Florida). Clinton won the state 51-47, by over 100,000 votes, and yet, Obama, his campaign, and all his supporters now say they won Texas. Why? Because of the undemocratic proportional allocation of caucus delegates, such as an urban areas that voted Obama being worth more delegates than a Latino stronghold for Clinton in another part of the state, because of a previous election. That’s not a Democratic system– its a relic of machine-age politics. And to claim a “win” based on a system like that is not people-powered politics.

The deeper problem here is that the Obamabots are only interested in one kind of “people-powered” politics, and that’s the kind that doesn’t include women, Latinos/Latinas, blue-collar workers, and the older generation — the people who vote for Hillary. It’s weird, since two of those groups (women and older people) are not only a huge proportion of the electorate but also the most likely to vote, year after year. The Big Boy Bloggers have been talking for ages about building a winning coalition to elect Democrats, but for some reason this particular coalition is strangely uninteresting to them. It’s almost as if there’s some kind of psychological problem going on.

Gee, what could it be?

From My DD:

The story of this election thus far has had three parts, and they’ve all played out about the same.

First act: Obama won a maverick-like victory in Iowa, upsetting both Clinton and Edwards. He went on the national covers, and lept to the lead in NH polls. Nevertheless, Clinton came back and won convincingly in NH.

Second act: Obama won a huge blowout in SC, and rode out of the state being declared the next JFK for Dems, with all the Kennedy & Oprah hoopla you could imagine, leading up to the Feb 5th states, especially the California primary. The polls and press said that Obama would win it all that day. Nevertheless, Clinton won the bigger contests, including the pivotal CA contest by 10 percent.

Third act: Obama had the best February past the 5th imaginable, winning every single contest, many by blowouts. He took the lead nationally against Clinton, and outraised her 2:1. Riding into the OH and TX contests, he only needed a victory, and with the help of outside forces, outspent Clinton by a 3 or 4:1 margin in OH & TX. Nevertheless, Clinton won, in Texas by 4 percent, and in Ohio by 10 percent.

Yes, there is a pattern.

If Hillary were a man, do you think the punditocracy would be demanding that she get out of the race? She’s obviously the choice of rank and file Democrats. She keeps winning, for chrissake. But the way the male media goes on, you’d think she’s Huckabee.

Look at these two maps. Notice the similarities.

The first one is the electoral map from the Presidential election in 1996, the last time the Democrats won the White House.

The second one is the current delegate map for Obama and Hillary, except I’ve changed Obama’s color from green to red. I’ve done this so you can see more clearly what I was trying to point out yesterday: Obama’s primary wins are in states where Democrats don’t have a prayer in November. The exceptions are a few states in the Upper Midwest (his home state of Illinois is the biggie) and New England, but for the most part the pattern is striking. Obama’s delegate map looks like a Republican electoral map.

Think about it. The Democratic nominee is being chosen by voters in states where we know the Republicans will win in November.

The only way that’s good news is if you think a bunch of wingnut red staters are actually going to vote for Obama in November. And if you think that, you’ve been listening to the Obamaniacs too long. Trust me: 20-year-olds on college campuses do not represent the general electorate.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic strongholds and — crucially — in the states we need to swing our way in order to take the general election, people are lining up to vote for Hillary.

You know what I wish? I wish the pundits and the media and the über-hip bloggers would stop smoking their own farts and pay attention to what a whole lot of people in this country actually want.