Erica Jong:
Patriarchy:1000, Hillary:0By: Josephine Hearn
Feb 15, 2008 06:05 AM EST
In an ironic twist to the historic Democratic nominating contest between an African American and a woman, the balance of power may be held by a more familiar face: the white male.
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The exact percentage of white males varies slightly depending on whether the penalized Michigan and Florida delegation superdelegates are counted, but the overall percentage is at least 46 percent. Overall, men of all races represent 64 percent of the party’s superdelegates.
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But superdelegates have never reflected the diversity of the Democratic party as a whole, nor were they designed to. They represent the party insiders, a group in which white men still dominate.
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Among the more than 700 superdelegates named by the Democratic National Committee, Clinton leads Obama by 231 to 140.5 (the eight members of Democrats Abroad receive a half vote.). Among white men, at least 81 were supporting Clinton and at least 63 were backing Obama. Many more remain uncommitted.
moreBy Greg Sargent - February 12, 2008, 11:43AM
In a sign that the spin war over the significance of super-delegates is underway in earnest, Harold Ickes told assorted Hillary supporters on a private conference call yesterday that the campaign wants them to start referring to super-delegates as "automatic delegates," according to someone on the call.
The person I spoke to paraphrases Ickes, who is spearheading Hillary's super-delegate hunt, this way: "We're no longer using the phrase super delegates. It creates a wrong impression. They're called automatic delegates. Because that's what they are."
The worry appears to be that the phrase "super-delegates" implies that "they have super-powers or super influence when they don't," the source says, describing Ickes' thinking. In other words, the phrase suggests that they have greater than average clout and that they have the power to overrule the democratic process, giving it the taint of back-room power politics.
The new term "automatic delegates" appears to be ostensibly a reference to the fact that these folks are super-delegates automatically, by virtue of their office or position.
I haven't yet seen any evidence that Hillary surrogates are following Ickes' directive, but if we start hearing the new term, we'll now know why.
moreSuperdelegates:
Hillary 234
Obama 157December 2007:
Hillary Rodham Clinton leads Barack Obama by more than a 2-1 margin among those who have endorsed a candidate. But a little more than half of those contacted — 365 — said they haven't settled on a Democratic standard bearer.
"The fact that under half have publicly committed shows me how open the Democratic race still is," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant who is not affiliated with any campaign. "It's a sign that the race isn't totally done in many people's minds."
Clinton has the endorsement of 169 superdelegates. She is followed by Obama, 63; John Edwards, 34; Bill Richardson, 25; Chris Dodd, 17; Joe Biden, 8, and Dennis Kucinich, 2.
link Hillary’s campaign and surrogates get on message:
Bill: Obama is the "
establishment candidate"
Mark "Blackwater" Penn labels Obama the "
establishment candidate"
Larry "Former CIA" Johnson:
Barack Obama, Establishment ManYet despite the phony claims by men for Hillary, Obama wins the
union candidate labelHillary, on the other hand, is the
candidate of lobbyists (video), unlike Obama whose record-breaking fund raising is being driven by
individual donations from hundreds of thousands of people.
The Obama is “establishment” meme, the gender- and race-bating are all part of Hillary’s campaign divide and conquer strategy: Bill says most of Obama’s caucus supporters:
Of his wife's recent travails, he said, "the caucuses aren't good for her. They disproportionately favor upper-income voters who, who,
don't really need a president but feel like they need a change."
linkHuh?
Mark Penn says the
22 states Obama won are “insignificant”:
A
quote from Mark Penn that should go over extremely well: "Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”
Reminds me of the "Mission Accomplished" moment.
Summary:
Hillary is not a victim:
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I mean, honestly, I’m appalled by the parallel that Ms. Steinem draws in the beginning part of the New York Times article. What she’s trying to do there is to make a claim towards sort of bringing in black women into a coalition around questions of gender and asking us to ignore the ways in which race and gender intersect. This is actually a standard problem of second-wave feminism, which, although there have been twenty-five years now—oh, going on forty years, actually, of African American women pushing back against this, have really failed to think about the ways in which trying to appropriate black women’s lives’ experience in that way is really offensive, actually.
And so, when Steinem suggests, for example, in that article that Obama is a lawyer married to another lawyer and to suggest that, for example, Hillary Clinton represents some kind of sort of breakthrough in questions of gender, I think that ignores an entire history in which white women have in fact been in the White House. They’ve been there as an attachment to white male patriarchal power. It’s the same way that Hillary Clinton is now making a claim towards experience. It’s not her experience. It’s her experience married to, connected to, climbing up on white male patriarchy. This is exactly the ways in which this kind of system actually silences questions of gender that are more complicated than simply sort of putting white women in positions of power and then claiming women’s issues are cared for.
Now, what I know from the work that I’ve done on the Obama campaign is that there are tens of thousands of extremely hard-working white men and women, as well as black men and women, as well as actually a huge multiracial and interethnic coalition of people working for Barack Obama. And so, for Steinem to sort of make this very clear race and gender dichotomy that she does in that New York Times op-ed piece, I think it’s the very worst of second-wave feminism.
edited to remove double word
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