(Originally posted at Orcinus and Firedoglake)
Both the Hillary Clinton and the Barack Obama camps emerged from this bruising primary flinging potent, and somewhat mirrored accusations at each other: that the Clinton camp had indulged in racism and racist appeals, and conversely that the Obama camp was rife with sexism. I wonder if, when they step back from the outcome and think about what's happened, they'll be able to recognize where these lines of thought originated -- and why it's a bad idea to continue indulging them.
Both charges, as it happens, actually arise out of what I think were core beliefs held by people in the competing camps. In the Clinton camp it was widely believed that a black man, especially one with as little experience as Obama, could not win the general election. Among Obama's supporters, it was widely held that Hillary similarly couldn't win -- not because she was a woman, but because she was that kind of woman: an unpleasant, grasping, overly ambitious bitch who turned people off. These beliefs in turned spawned the very real behavior within those camps that produced the competing charges against the other.
Both of these beliefs, as it happens, were originally right-wing talking points spouted by the Limbaughs and Goldbergs of the right, regurgitated by supposedly mainstream pundits like Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd, and gradually spread throughout our political discourse.
They were convenient talking points for partisans to absorb, ways to differentiate people's choices between two politicians who in reality are so close politically as to be nearly twins policy-wise. And they have damned near poisoned the waters for Democrats within their own party.
This struck me awhile back. Just as an example: I was talking to one of my oldest friends, a smart and politically involved woman who makes her living as a jewelrymaker in Missoula, Montana, back in early February, shortly after the Washington State caucuses, when I had largely been won over to the Obama camp. She was already ardently pro-Obama, but when the subject of Hillary came up, I was a bit taken aback by how viscerally she disliked the woman: she was cold, calculating, unsympathetic, too ambitious ... a bitch.
I'm sure she was as taken aback by the forcefulness of my reply: She sounded, I told her, like the women I used to meet when I went to militia meetings, the ones who sold books like Big Sister Is Watching You (all about the secret coven of witches operating out of the White House then); or for that matter, like the average Rush Limbaugh listener. The women who absorbed and internalized all that right-misogyny rampant in those worlds. And they all used the same kind of visceral I-can't-explain-it-I-just-hate-her rationale.
Well, she replied, I don't listen to Limbaugh or right-wing talk radio or watch Fox, but I still feel that way about her
Read More:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-right-wing-crap-polluted-democrats.html
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