I think the best policy for those who still desperately cling to the hope that Hillary will win the nomination against all evidence or odds are best ignored, if for no other reason than they’ve fallen into a serious “the means justify the ends” mode where doing and saying anything is OK if it furthers the argument that Hillary should be the nominee.
However, one comment by ProudMilitaryMom at No Quarter caught my eye and I’d like to respond to it:
In all my wildest imaginings I never imagined that less than 24 hours after Hillary suspended her campaign some of her most ardent supporters would overdose on (as Pagan likes to put it) the Cult-Aide. I read and learned from a lot of these folks, they blogged and wrote and published diaries, they commented on various sites. These talented folks were fierce in their defense of Hillary as the best candidate and helped to bring the awful misogyny and outright lies of the Obots to light. These writers worked in place of the MSM which has forgotten journalism and deals in infotainment. What the hell happened?? Overnight some of these Hillary supporters were transformed into Obots. Have the pod people taken over??? Did Santa miss my house when he made that special run to drop off all the back-ordered Unity Ponies???
I may be able to point out some things on why this is the case:
1) In a party primary, basically all argumentative points needs to be taken with a grain of salt, both because candidates are often trying to create separation where there is none, and second, because most of the time people realize that they have to unite at the end anyway.
2) The vast majority of sexist things that have been said about Clinton have either 1) been said by the media, and 2) been said by some of Obama’s more extreme supporters. I’m not sure how Obama is responsible for the first, and I find it unfair to paint Obama with some of the words of his extreme supporters. It would be like attributing some of Hillary’s extreme supporters who are racist or claim that Obama is a Muslim and attributing them to Hillary herself. It’s not fair. One has to just realize that candidates can’t control all of their supporters and that they say dumb things sometimes. Was sexism a problem in the campaign? Yes, i think it was to an extent. Was Obama the root cause of this? No, I don’t think so, and calling Obama a sexist male won’t make him so.
The worst things I’ve seen Obama say are basically the “bitter” remarks and the thing about the “claws coming out.” Now, this might have been not totally appropriate, but it hardly makes him a bonified sexist.
Clinton people also like pointing to stuff like this:
Andrea Mitchell and Norah O’Donnell seemed to suggest Obama may have been — if not playing the gender card, then using language women voters might find offensive. Language such as “when she’s feeling down” “periodically” she “launches attacks.”
Nora O’Donnell: “He said, ‘I understand when she’s down, that she makes these kinds of attacks.’ It’s getting a little personal.”
Now, think about someone saying these lines in a gender-neutral race…where we don’t know the gender of the attacker and the person at the receiving end of the attack. I’m not sure how these come off as sexist. The word “periodically” is now sexist? A lot of people who do math and science for a living may disagree.
“Launches attacks” is now sexist? Saying that your opponent is “launching attacks” against you is probably as old as political campaigning itself. But it’s bad to say it when the competition is a woman?
As for the “down” remark, I would say there is a considerable difference between saying that Clinton does something when she’s “feeling down” versus when she’s just “down” because just saying “down” doesn’t automatically mean emotionally. It could be politically. Is she being pressed against the wall by attacks and she feels she has to respond. That seems to me to be an equally valid interpretation of that remark.
Is sexism a problem? Yes. But I think it came more from the dark corners of Obama’s support and from the media more than from Obama himself. In any case, if you’re going to nitpick about what Obama said being sexist, then things that the Clintons said that could be considered racist can be nitpicked as well. I personally don’t think either instance is a totally valid critisicm.
3) So, it’s worse to vote for a marginally sexist person who basically agrees with you on all the issues, and which the vast majority of women – including Hillary herself – appear to disagree with you on in regards to the sexism, than it is to vote for a candidate who would be the third term of the worst presidency in history. OK, I know that people have grudges, and it was a long, tough primary, and people are sad and angry that their candidate didn’t win (both men and women), but I think one can only carry all of this so far. Is losing Roe v. Wade really worth getting back at Obama for a couple of marginally sexist statements?
4) The election has always about defeating McCain. Yes, Obama and Clinton were running against each other, but they were both running against McCain as well. If the ultimate goal was to defeat McCain, and the primary was a battle to see who did the best job of it – even if you don’t agree with the choice, isn’t it best to work with what you’ve been given? You don’t think Obama is electable? Then help make him electable. You don’t think he’s done enough to spell out his positions on the issues? Then send the campaign an email asking for issue papers. However, cheering for Clinton at this point is just about equivilent to still hoping that the New England Patriots will, by some miracle, win the last Super Bowl. It ain’t happening.
WHOA- hold on, back the truck up! Not one single thing that we know about Barack Obama changed just because Hillary gave a speech! Sad, so sad.
Actually one thing did change: He is the democratic nominee for President of the United States, and Clinton is no longer a candidate for that position and even endorsed Obama for that position. That seems to be a rather major change in status to just gloss over. So you’re for Clinton and trust her judgement….except when it comes to endorsing Obama? (but she was forced to! Yeah, about as much as a team is forced to quit playing when the clock hits 0:00 in a football game).
The article then goes into a list of bad things Obama apparently has done, which is largely irrelevant since the race is over. You don’t keep running a Presidential campaign against your opponent after the Presidential election is over, do you? Yes, yes, people still have to vote at the convention, but seriously, no one is listening anymore. If they didn’t buy these arguments over the past 18 months, why will they buy them over the next 3? The answer is that they won’t.
Also, it’s hard to argue that Obama has thrown Clinton’s voters under the bus when Clinton herself has endorsed Obama and he has praised her quite a bit over the last 2 weeks. In fact, Obama himself has done just about everything he can to not throw her supporters under the bus.
As for the electability issue – it’s more of an issue of Clinton’s last holdouts hoping that Obama loses than it is a matter of Obama not being electable in the first place. Polls would seem to suggest that it isn’t the case. If you ask them why he’s not electable, they’ll bring up the usual suspects: Wright, Rezko, etc. Basically everything that had basically 0 impact on the primary campaign, and hasn’t seemed to have damaged his popularity among the general election crowd either (and there was certainly enough attention on those things for them to know about it). I’m wondering if these people’s heads would explode if Obama does win.
On Friday, Obama was the “selected” not the nominee. He will never be the legitimate nominee.
Just because they gave Obama 4 of Clinton’s delegates and they didn’t seat Michigan and Florida 100%? I hate to tell these people this, but even if the DNC had given Clinton 100% of what she wanted, she still would hve lost. Was it right that they gave Obama 4 of Clinton’s delegates? No. Does it matter in the end? No. Last time I looked, He still lead Clinton by 128 pledged delegates. So it’s 126 without those 4 delegates. So it’s about 80 if you gave Florida and Michigan 100% voting rights (something which I don’t think one could legitimately argue about in Michigan’s case under the rules. Florida, maybe, but not Michigan). She’s still behind. Other than that, it’s up to the superdelegates, and at best you couldn’t argue an Obama win using supers as any less legitimate as a Clinton win with supers.
This idea that Clinton was “robbed” of the nomination is a fantasy. The math just doesn’t add up. It’d be like finding 5 stolen votes in an election which was determined by a margin of 1000 votes, and claiming that the election was stolen because 5 votes were stolen. Is it OK that those votes were stolen? No. Does that make the winner a less legitimate winner? No, because the margin of victory was considerably larger than the votes in question.
Oh yeah, and since we’re counting those primaries now, doesn’t that mean those votes are now counted? Everyone is including Florida in the popular vote count, and many people are including Michigan now. How do votes that are being counted not count?
And for all of this crying about rules and process, it’s ironic that they appear to stand ready to reject a nominee who indisputably won the most pledged delegates and who indisputably has the most superdelegate indorsements because he was effectively able to work within the system better than Clinton – the very system which these people claim to hold so dear. When Obama wins the nomination vote in Denver 4000 to 200 or so or whatever it will end up being, those 4 Michigan votes are going to look awfully insignificant. Are they still going to claim that it was stolen then?
