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Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Poisoning the Well
I'm pretty significantly depressed this evening.
I went to a going-away function some friends at work threw me and I chatted with a friend of mine who I haven't talked to in months. As it turns out, she was a huge Clinton supporter and launched into a tirade about how Obama was terribly sexist throughout his campaign and that she planned on not voting in the general election as a result.
I have read a bunch of pontificating about how Clinton supporters are wounded and hurt that their candidate didn't win. I have read a bunch of commentary arguing that the benefits of Clinton's gender (in terms of her strong female following in the primary) were far outweighed by the rampant negative sexism employed to tear her down. I have bought into the general notion that most of this anger and grief over Clinton's fall was centralized among so-called "low-information" voters.
Well, I got a dose of reality tonight. My work friend is a highly informed, highly intelligent corporate litigator. She is the first truly engaged friend of mine I've come across to hold the views I noted above.
My conversation with her makes me depressed because a lot of the anger and vitriol that my friend (and thousands of other Clinton supporters out there) holds in her heart could have been mitigated somewhat by Clinton bowing out more gracefully without launching a months-long umbrage campaign about how all the horrible sexism in this country was the main thing holding her back.
Look, there was sexism in this campaign and there was racism. All true. But, let's be honest. Clinton didn't win the nomination for much more enormous reasons than her gender.
She ran an antiquated 1990s campaign in the 21st century.
She failed to attempt to leverage online donors until it was too late.
She relied on the profoundly flawed advice of Mark Penn, who will likely go down as one of the worst campaign strategists in modern memory.
She failed to contest the caucus states.
She ran an "experience" campaign in a "change" election season.
And the list goes on and on.
It really galls me to think that a strong progressive women like my friend will be turned off enough to either not vote (like my friend) or vote for McCain due in large part to Clinton choosing to pour gasoline on the simmering flames of sexism among her supporters.
I won't sleep well tonight.
Posted by Metavirus at 6/24/2008 10:21:00 PM
Tags: Barack Obama , Election 2008 , Hillary Clinton , Primaries , Sexism , Women
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1 comments:
I suspect the Democratic Party was ultimately wrong about the long primary being healthy, probably due to a phenomenon related to this well known psychological theory. The only way to realistically pick Clinton over Obama was to focus on very minute details like the posture, fashion, and perceived attitude of the candidates (and as we see this is still occurring). On the other hand, voting for McCain would be the single most destructive response possible for any progressive person to make in this election. Just wait until McCain picks a VP from the list of crazies he has going, I can almost guarantee that it will turn away every die-hard Clinton supporter.
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