How Dare She?

Obama won't sanction groping staffer Favreau

When Barack allows staff members to engage in such degrading behavior, he teaches all of us - including his daughters - that women can be treated this way. That degrading others is okay. That's bigotry.

I've chronicled the juvenile arrogance and snarky, entitled sexist comments from Barack Obama and his staff for almost two years now. I knew it wasn't going to stop. And now comes more.

A reader emailed me the Jon Favreau story. Revolting. He's the boy on the left in the picture above, who thinks it's funny to grope the former first lady in a grotesque, entitled sort of way. The pictures got out about the same time Barack named Jon his head speechwriter -- and where is Barack's moralizing now?  Where is the Barack who's always exploiting his daughters to claim his interest in women's opportunities? Eerie silence. We all know if that same picture had involved a black person Barack would be whining at the top of his smoke-filled lungs about how racist everybody is.

Recall the New Yorker Magazine cover a few months back that dared to poke fun at Michelle and Barack? Barack's staff and his blog-protectors went ballistic. Nary a sense of humor in the Obama camp. But those guys are all certain that women should laugh at this degradation from the young boy Barack has chosen to be his speechwriter. 

A reader sent this link from The Reclusive Leftist, which starkly describes what's wrong with that picture and Barack's refusal to acknowledge the depth of the degradation it furthers:

Sexism is a deeply learned behavior with a thousand manifestations. You can’t quarantine the big pieces of it — rape, legal discrimination — as if they exist in a vacuum apart from the rest of society’s values. From frat boy joke to date rape, from gangsta rap to domestic violence, from pink housework toys at Wal-Mart to the boss who won’t promote a woman into top management, from “Math is hard” Barbie to the physics lab where men harass their female colleagues relentlessly, from Girls Gone Wild videos to the jury that acquits a rapist because the victim was wearing a short skirt — it’s a system. A giant, all-encompassing, self-reinforcing system.

When Barack allows staff members to engage in such degrading behavior, he teaches all of us - including his daughters - that women can be treated this way. That degrading others is okay. That's bigotry. That's hateful behavior.

For anyone who thinks people should laugh this off, I would remind them of the policing Barack and his staff did of every tiny thing his opponents said and did during the campaign. Sen. Clinton mentioned Barack and RFK in the same sentence? She must want him assassinated. Bill Clinton mentioned Jesse Jackson and Barack in the same sentence? He must be racist. The New Yorker satirized the Obamas? They're racists. Someone in McCain's audience said Barack was a Muslim. THEY'RE RACISTS! Obama's speechwriter pretends to sexually assault Sen. Clinton? Oh come on, Barack says, get over it.

In the CNN clip shown on the Reclusive Leftist link above, Wolf Blitzer is practically laughing about this picture. He didn't acknowledge there was anything wrong with it and instead suggested it was "a sign of the times" that people get upset about things like this. A sign of the times? What does that even mean? Any respectable news anchor should have discredited the abhorrent behavior and been asking hard questions of why the President-elect team's concerns with equality don't extend to women.

That is a textbook example of a double standard. For reasons that confound me, women in our country are now choosing to live under that double standard. Women in the media shouldn't stand for this; women in politics should speak out; high profile women in business should demand that Barack fire the speechwriter. In short, women should take themselves seriously, and then expect that others do so.

At least one woman in the media dares to reprimand Barack.  A reader sent a link from Dee Dee Myers on this, in which Myers asks "At what point does sexist behavior get taken seriously? At what point do people get punished in ways that suggest this kind of behavior, this kind of thinking, is unacceptable? At what point do we insist there will be consequences?"  Myers continues,

Imagine how different the reaction would be if an important aide to John McCain had been caught in similar picture featuring Michelle Obama? Or if the picture had shown a cutout of Barack Obama and, say, a white hood? Why is it when ideology and race are eliminated, so is the outrage?

I’m not sure what the appropriate punishment should be for Jon Favreau, but I know it should be more than a groveling phone call to Senator Clinton. At a minimum, President-Elect Obama should take Favreau on his first—and, hopefully, his last—very public trip to the woodshed.

I won't hold my breath waiting for Barack to do the right thing.  And where is Michelle's outrage on this?  More eerie silence. During the campaign she complained loudly of the racism she saw everywhere -- but this bigotry is OK?  I'm working on a piece now on Michelle, how she's just like my former law school colleagues who survive at competitive schools by turning a blind eye to sexism, while sublimating their anger onto other women (witness Michelle's most unflattering cut downs of Sen. Clinton during the campaign). 

Barack's opponents, including myself, warned during the campaign that his morally superior talk was just that. For all of Barack's supporters who want to believe that Barack is really the post-bigotry, morally superior person he claims to be, this is an excellent opportunity to prove us wrong and call on your new leader to walk the walk.  You can support him and admit flaws in his behavior - it's the human condition, after all.

"But How Come Other Women Are Calling the Election Historic?"

In that lynch mob, with such a desperate need to punish – what do you think the reaction would have been if Sen. Clinton said anything else but that this was an historic victory? 

I received several comments from men throughout the election, in which they quote female columnists or pundits who defend Barack as some kind of proof that I'm wrong. While I appreciate the attempt of all who post comments trying to further discussion, you have to consider the media environment women work in and ask yourself if they would have gotten to where they are if they were the type to challenge conventional wisdom.

I received a comment recently that poses a point worth discussing. The comment was: "Hillary Clinton has called the election of Barack Obama as president "an historic victory for the American people." 'Nuff said."

While I appreciate the comment, it shows a lack of understanding of the enormous pressures women in our society are under to go along and get along. I think it's pretty obvious that Sen. Clinton has no other choice but to say those words if she wants to retain her hard earned position as a senior leader in the party.  Even women who have achieved the power that Sen. Clinton has - and I can attest even women who make partner in major law firms - get there and stay there only if they go along and get along.

Her words have to be evaluated in the context of the Obama-lynch mob that practically ripped her to shreds for daring to even remain in the primary (although Ted Kennedy stayed in thru the convention and staged a convention fight and the party didn't insist he leave).

Recall that even after she left, the media parsed her every word and breath with their vulgar bigotry barking that she wasn't deferential enough to Barack, shaming her for daring to speak of her own achievements and historic race, which is standard in concession speeches. Oregon's US Sen. Gordon Smith just lost a tight race to the Democratic challenger and in his gracious concession speech he spoke of the many accomplishments he was proud of. That's standard. And Sen. Clinton was the first woman not only to win a state primary, but to win I don't know how many state primaries and millions of votes and came within an inch of winning the party's nomination. That was an enormous historic moment, but the media not only wouldn't allow her to celebrate it, they shamed her for daring to speak of it. Unless she was anything but deferential to Barack, she was selfish and calculating.

In the emotional and angry mob hysteria, Sen. Clinton's only option if she wants to retain her leadership ranking, is to go along and get along (for now). I give her points for being far more gracious about it than I think many who have been put though something like that could be. And don't misunderstand my point - she has a distinguished career of fighting for human rights issues on the state, national and international levels; I have no doubt that she wishes black Americans to be treated more equally in our country.

Recall that she tried a few times to call attention to the sexism and the media practically ate her alive. Even the apologist female columnists ate her alive.

History will have to sort out the emotional hysteria that gripped the media, but there's no denying it was there.  Months after Sen. Clinton left the race, Sen. McCain appointed a talented young Governor with comparable age and political experience to Barack and the media took their pent up Hillary-hating machine and just turned it on full blast to Gov. Palin. While the Governor had huge popularity ratings in Alaska and after her convention speech had great approval ratings across the country, it took only a few days of Barack and the media’s destruction machine for her ratings to plummet. When the country watched her for themselves , they liked what they saw. But the media took it into their own hands and in a few days of their round the clock destructive coverage, they singlehandedly caused her ratings to drop.

In that lynch mob, with such a desperate need to punish – what do you think the reaction would have been if Sen. Clinton said anything else but that this was an historic victory? 

I invite my academic readers to add in the scholarly theories that undergird this point. When oppressed people go along to get along, can those actions be considered truly of their volition? I understand enough theory to repeat it, but not to explain it.

I'm going on vacation to relax in the sun and try to put the 2008 election out of my mind for awhile. I invite readers to continue the discussion in comments and if I can access email I'll post them through.

Media Manufacturing of a President

The perfect candidate to put on display to "prove" their earnestness about diversity.

I cringe when I hear people praise what a history-making moment this is.

In research for my upcoming memoir addressing sexism and racism in law firms, I have been knee deep in up-to-date statistics and theories on how the old white-male system of entitlement is alive and well. White men occupy the corner offices of most major law firms not to mention corporate boards, medical schools, the list goes on. The progress of both women and male minorities has stalled.

For a while it was fashionable to claim that women simply weren't ambitious and wanted to be home with their babies. Since male minorities have stalled up the ladder at the same rate as women, does that mean that male minorities are similarly having urges to stay home with their babies? Or does it make more sense that law firms are hostile environments for both and that's why they're dropping out and/or not being promoted.

I laugh when I get angry, caustic emails from people telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. I'd bet my knowledge of current statistics and academic theories on race and gender relations against most newspaper columnists writing today. Here's the way I describe the problem in our culture: We teach white entitlement and we teach male entitlement, and then by the time people are at companies promoting only white men, we hold half-day "sensitivity" courses once a year to "teach" the white men that they need to be "sensitive" about not saying words that women or male minorities might find offensive. I always found that a bit insulting. Teaching young white men to preference their interests above others and call it objective - and then tell them those sensitive women and minorities out there don't have senses of humor so you have to careful around them. It would be a whole lot simpler to just stop teaching white male entitlement.

The point of this is the statistics show that positions of power in our culture are still disproportionately dominated by white men and since the 1990s any progress women and minorities were making has stalled. Every February during black history month blacks complain -- I'll say whine because that's what the black male columnists felt free to say about Hillary Clinton - whine about racism in the media, and the wholesale lack of black faces on television. And they're right - the "objective" face and content of television and media is still white and male - and every February the black scholars get together and whine (again - that's the word black men used about Sen. Clinton so it's fair game) about how the media marginalizes black interests and then trots out stories every February only to be ignored again for the next 12 months.

And then, magically, when Barack Obama came on the scene as the only credible challenger to Sen. Hillary Clinton, the liberal media became black-obsessed overnight. The cable channels added black faces to their lineups in pretty blatant pandering. Their newfound obsession with equality and making him the first black president rang hollow since they'd had no similar interest in making Sen. Clinton the first woman president.

The statistics show our culture is still very sexist and racist in its attitudes - and the system of entitlement is very entrenched. It allowed a sprinkling of women and minorities into power positions during the 1970s and 1980s, only when lawsuits made them do it. But the pervasive, and possibly more of a barrier, indirect prejudices are firmly in place.  Yes there are some women and male minorities, but most who make it to the top do so by tacitly promising not to make any waves. Worse, there are the apologist-types like the Katie Courics and Maureen Dowds who rise to positions of power by publicly scorning powerful women, or the Condoleeza Rice's who advance due to affirmative action and then curry favor with old white men at Stanford and the Bush White House by insisting there are no barriers to black advancement and they just have to work harder.  It's a deal with the devil, but collaboration is the quickest way and often only way for women and minorities to secure approval and advancement to the top.

And now who's curried favor with the white, male media but a half-white black man who talks and acts like a fat, old white guy with a southern accent and a cigar -- oops, cigarette -- in his mouth. Better yet, he is bland as can be with no record of challenging anyone on anything.  The perfect candidate to put on display to "prove" their earnestness about diversity.   But who anchors about every cable news analysis and opinion show there is? White men. 

If Rev. Jesse Jackson had been elected (whom I campaigned for in 1988), I would be joining the celebration. If former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun had been elected (whom I supported in 2004), I would be joining the celebration.  They were both true advocates and experienced leaders for civil rights. But, oddly, the media didn't take either seriously.

Blacks have shot themselves in the foot by voting in the 90th percentile for this bigoted sexist man. Bigotry sinks all ships - the only way for blacks and women to rise is together, by reducing our tolerance for bigotry. To allow Barack and the media to say the shameful things they did about Sen. Clinton and then Gov. Palin makes it okay to degrade and dehumanize. "We don't have to listen to you because you're a whiny woman" only puts the problem under the rug and doesn't allow people to talk about it. I agree with one of my commenters that that kind of dismissal is not insightful and, only postpones the discussion for everyone. 

I could go on, but this is a sad day for progressives. The media literally manufactured a president in front of our eyes with bigotry and hate. The British media has called the media's performance in the primary "gloating, unshackled sexism."

So remind me, what it is, exactly, that we're celebrating today. Our cultural tolerance for bigotry was proven during the election to be alive and well.  Our capacity for denial was already pretty hearty, but Barack's candidacy made it okay to shame anyone who didn't pretend that what was happening wasn't sexist. Barack may have single-handedly pushed our denial of bigotry so deep that the everyday lives of women and blacks may suffer because of it. 

Obama's Demagoguery is Dangerous for Democracy

Because Oregon's elections are done by mail, I have my ballot in my hand right now. I've carefully examined all of the presidential candidates' names and thought carefully about who I think is the best choice to lead America right now. I looked at my son, knowing this election would help set in motion how his life will be lived. Without pause I voted for Ralph Nader. And I know I will sleep tonight.

As the media rushed to declare Barack Obama's campaign as historic, some other element of history came to my mind. In my political science studies, we learned about demagogues who drew crowds of supporters but in the end were shown to be shams. Early on I said to myself, Barack is a demagogue. Why does no one see this? Here's the Webster's definition:

Demagogue: A leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

In history, demagogues were successful precisely because they knew how to tap into deep emotional fears and anxieties. They were wizards at manipulation, but in the end, all revealed to be crass manipulators for their own gain. Most of Barack's claims have already proven false but the hypnotized crowds still march for him. Evidence of his reversal on most of his primary promises haven't made a dent in his popularity - which I see as proof his support isn't based on anything rational.

In the primary he took many prominent stands, defending each on grounds of his moral superiority - and this is why people said they supported him.

• He said he was for public financing and ridiculed Sen. Clinton for big spending;
• He said he was for a quick withdrawal in Iraq;
• He claimed he was deeply religious, talked glowingly about his spiritual advisor who had guided his life and his family;
• He claimed to be against FISA which would give Bush more authority to infringe on our constitutional rights;
• He said he was non-partisan (although his record showed he voted with his party more than 90% of the time);
• He was against drilling in our oil reserves;
• And more than anything else he wooed people with the claim that if he'd been in the Senate he would've voted against the Iraq war resolution. 

Now he's reversed each of those positions he took on such moral highground. The biggest of all was the war, the wrench he used brilliantly to take the primary from Sen. Clinton - yet he voted for every war resolution since coming to the Senate and is now talking about sending more women and men to die in Afghanistan and to bomb Pakistan.

But the crowds are running away with themselves now and no facts to the contrary will stop them. Their support of Barack was never rational and it can't be understood with appeal to reason. His supporters tell themselves they believe in him because he will be different and better, yet he's proven to be just as sleazy and hypocritical as many politicians.

The crowds are angry - they won't tolerate dissent nor any type of discussion. It's "you're with us or you're against us" and somehow our way of being depends on crushing you. Barack has them where he wants them and he can say and do anything now. This isn't good for democracy.

Thomas Jefferson warned of the dangers of direct democracy and there's a reason our founding fathers instead formed a representative democracy. They knew the dangers of the types of mobs we're seeing now. The Barack-mania on the internet is close to mob hysteria.

But make no mistake - the anger in this mob was fueled early on by deep sexist fears. Barack and his hatchet-man Axelrod brilliantly manipulated our fears of a strong woman and the mobs were only too willing to go along.

His mass manipulations are working on our darker levels. That's like "movement" fascism. He's getting away with false race baiting and rank sexism that self-proclaimed liberals and progressives are eating up. They're licking up every last morsel and hungry for more. If fascism is "nation above individual," then Barack's movement facism is "movement above individual, and common sense."

Recently I heard an NPR radio program interviewing an author who wrote about Freud. He talked about how we all have dark feelings in us and the appeal of fascist leaders is they allow us to vent those dark feelings. Barack and the media made it okay to take our frustrations and fears about changing roles of women and men by kicking Sen. Hillary Clinton to the curb. There, kick her a few more times - doesn't that feel good? This is dangerous for democracy.

As the British New Statesman has accurately called it, Barack's campaign is a new form of McCarthyism ("Hating Hillary" 5/22/08). Speaking of the media's "gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind" during the primary, Andrew Stephen wrote:

History, I suspect will look back on the last six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later....The chief victim has been Senator Hillary Clinton, but the ramifications could be hugely harmful for America and the world. ...

Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media - consciously or unconsciously - are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.

Stephen reveals how Barack, "characteristically, pronounced himself 'unhappy' with the vilification carried out so methodically by his staff". Barack's smearing and false race-baiting caused Sen. Clinton's hard earned support by blacks to plummet from above 80% to barely 7% in a matter of days. After that, the black superdelegates who supported Clinton were targeted, harassed and threatened. Stephen added:

Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.

Obama just offers a new democrat smear machine. Woo hoo. How great. We have our own Karl Rove. Is that good for the party or for our democracy? Obama's a purer, darker form of Rovism. Obama is not as clever; he doesn't have to be. Crude is working. A Barack presidency won't change the rancor in Washington - he introduced a rancor never seen in my lifetime into the democratic primaries that the party may never recover from. Characteristically, he and the media tried to blame the rancor on the Clintons - but they're long gone and the crude rancor from Barack and his campaign continue.

The primary danger of Barack is he makes people think they're progressive when they're anything but. He and the media not only annihilated Sen. Clinton, but they tainted anyone who dared defend her.

Blacks are fooling themselves if they believe the bitter young white men who patrol the internet political sites are progressive or would support real civil rights reform. They're supporting Barack simply because he saved them the emasculation of a female leader. All the reasons they claimed to support him in their angry, sexist emails to my blogs, are positions Obama's reversed himself on.

Black men have stalled in their quest up the corporate ladder along with women. Barack pitted one against the other - an age old political move - with the white men who run the media laughing all the way to the ballotbox. How many of those black faces recruited by CNN to sit up front during the campaign will linger after the election?

As Barack woos crowds by claiming other politicians were peddling the "politics of fear," he's brilliantly unleashed his own politics of hate. That's bad for democracy.

Anyone who thinks women or democrats HAVE to vote for him are fooling themselves. I won't hold my breath waiting for his landmark civil rights legislation. He'll be desperate not to be a one-termer, and will be even less likely than his record shows to do anything remotely controversial.

Besides, the election now is about the economy, as it should be. About the average American's ability to get by - have the security of health insurance; provide quality education for their children. Barack has zero experience or training on economic issues. He has shown no interest in his past in taking on big issues and taking the heat from that. There is nothing in his record that says he will do anything but take milquetoast positions and cast about for other peoples' good ideas to take credit for. I'm not willing to bank my son's future on Barack's empty promises.

The McCain/Palin ticket is very attractive.  John McCain says what he thinks - he's a refreshing straight-shooter who unlike Barack, doesn't need a fake Southern accent to sound authentic because he is authentic. McCain was tested in a way few in the country ever would be as a POW and he proved that his ethics and morals are above reproach.  McCain, like Sen. Clinton, has worked with and gained respect on both sides of the aisle and I have every reason to believe he would continue that bi-partisanship in the White House.  Sure McCain's made some mistakes, but we all have - that's the human condition. At the end of most days, I trust that McCain follows his gut to try to do the right thing. Gov. Sarah Palin is a talented leader with a record of making bi-partisan appointments and getting things done. She has a commanding knowledge and experience of energy and infrastructure issues that would serve our country well. This ticket promises real bi-partisanship and a Democratic Congress would protect the Supreme Court. 

My only concern is what McCain/Palin would do with the federal agencies. The sad thing is with my usual reliable and objective news sources completely throwing their hat in the ring for one candidate, there's no where to turn for reliable information on the kind of people McCain and Palin are consulting and would be appointed to their cabinets. I've even turned to reading the Wall Street Journal instead of the NYT because the WSJ's vaunted news staff has still managed to be the most objective.  But with a move and a new baby, I simply don't have time to do this research, and so I will go with a candidate whose background I know and trust.

I'm voting for a candidate with a proven track record of taking on corporate interests - even if that makes him unpopular. Nader tried to tell people in the 2000 race that both major parties supported corporate interests -- a fact that should be obvious now after the bailout led by Pelosi and the Democratically-controlled Congress. (As a progressive friend calls them, "the damn, dumb dems.")

Interestingly, polls show that this time Nader is drawing more votes from McCain than from Obama. People are falling for Obama's empty promises of reform.  I spent the last four years working for an elite banking consulting firm. I can tell you that the banks control the regulators, and not the other way around. We need someone who will break the hold the financial industry has on Washington.

We also need a candidate that talks about the needs of working class Americans.  Democracy Now's website has an article noting that neither major candidate talks about the working class - one-fifth of the population.  Nader pointed out earlier in the campaign that blacks would likely be disappointed in a Barack Presidency since he's shown no background or interest in changing policies that affect blacks in poverty and inner-city neighborhoods. 

In scant media coverage of his campaign, Nader was quoted as saying that Obama doesn't represent real change and warned, "This guy is the biggest con artist in our generation by far." I think Nader is right and that's why I've voted for him.  Nader's spent his life working and fighting for consumers. We need a president who appeals to our better side, not our darker side.

Why are Obama fans so angry and emotional?

A woman showed up at my door last weekend wearing an “Obama ‘08” sticker, with two small kids trailing her, also plastered with “Obama ‘08” stickers. Readers of my blog can guess this unsolicited visit did not end well.

I was enjoying a gorgeous sunny fall day with my family, feeding my baby while singing along with Raffi’s Baby Beluga. I opened the door and licked the last of the rice cereal from my baby’s spoon. I let her get so far as “hoping for your support…” before I smiled and shook my head. I had no desire to argue with her, I wanted to get back to my beautiful, hungry baby. I turned to close my door noting she wasn’t turning to walk away but instead stood rigid and fixed, working her best to shoot me a holier-than-thou flame-throwing stare with a disgusted sound of “Umph!”

Perhaps because she’d seen my lawn sign for our Democratic candidate for Congress she’d presumed I was a supporter. But the pure hatred in her distorted face stopped me. Why was she so angry? What had I done but quietly disagree with her? She interrupts my cozy family reverie to peddle her flawed messiah and then spews bad mojo into my home when I politely turn down her wares. Even the Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons usually offer a weak smile when I tell them I don’t believe in their God as they turn away.

In my mind, she was the one who had to answer for her questionable choice. But I thought I’d give her an explanation she could take back to her pod people. I offered a simple, “I could never vote for such a sexist and unprincipled man.” She turned away to follow her children down the sidewalk as I turned to close my door, when she stopped, whirled around and shouted at me a breathless, angry, “YOU DON”T KNOW WHAT YOU”RE TALKING ABOUT! YOU ARE MISINFORMED! YOU NEED TO READ MORE ABOUT HIM!!!!!!!!!” Her kids looked up at her in awe and my mouth dropped as this woman unraveled outside my door.

Her vitriol stunned me for a few moments, before I chuckled to myself. I know few people who’ve spent as much time reading and writing about him or studying the US Presidency as I had. I started with the low-hanging fruit. “Really? What about his abandoning his religion and spiritual advisor of 20 years for political reasons? His claiming to be against the war, yet voting for every war resolution since he got to the Senate? Or his ridiculing Sen. Clinton for repudiating public financing only to turn around and do the same thing and spend record amounts of money?”

Now she became completely unhinged. “HOW DARE YOU SPREAD THIS KIND OF NEGATIVE ENERGY AROUND MY CHILDREN??!!!??” She was practically screaming.

This is what it’s come to. This is what Barack Obama’s campaign has been about all along. His supporters can’t or won’t discuss his weaknesses in any kind of rational manner. His internet supporters dog my postings on major political sites with the most negative, insulting and immature “neener, neener” kinds of retorts – rarely does an Obama supporter post a comment that doesn’t contain insults, and I’ve never seen anyone intelligently discuss or admit his weaknesses. And they’re always so angry.  Recall how nasty the primary was and Barack and his supporters tried to blame that on the Cintons. Notice that Sen. Clinton is long gone, while the vitriol from Barack supporters keeps on churning.

Lately I've been getting angry, emotional emails from friends - many who have sent rude, disrespectful emails mocking the impressive Gov. Palin, who are angry with me because I've written pieces questioning Barack Obama's record. I got an email from someone I haven't seen for 20 years who was just as unhinged as the woman who showed up at my door - simply because I wrote a piece acknowledging Gov. Palin's many great leadership qualities. I never said I was voting for the McCain/Palin ticket (although I might). All it took to bring out more vitriol from Barack fans was to speak positively about the other side.  I've yet to see that "post-partisanship" - another of Barack's long list of empty promises.

But this visit to my door in mid-October struck me odder than most. Obama had busted out a strong lead in recent weeks with the economy flailing. The tanking economy made it look like a shoo-in that the party not in power would win. Obama appeared that day and now to be the winner. The gig was up. They’d won. I’d resigned myself to that. So why did she show up at my door so angry? 

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life going door-to-door for political candidates and issues.  My mom was the local precinct committee-person for the Democratic party and she’d take us around with her to drop fliers at people’s doors.  She never argued with anyone – she offered her opinion and left the fliers with the local registered democrats and walked away.  In college I was a paid canvasser for the Democratic Party and went door to door.  I had some great conversations with people.  This was the summer of the 1984 convention when Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo had delivered those fiery speeches.  Many people wanted to have honest conversations – they were frustrated with Reaganism but tired of party politics and wanted to find a way for average families to make it.  I walked away from most doors feeling uplifted. 

I remember when Al Gore was running in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 – there was productive, collective sharing of ideas among democrats about how to defeat Bush and people in general about trying to move the country in a new direction.  I had great conversations with people in the primaries – until the 2008 primary.  Until Barack Obama.  Until now.

I was tired of all the hatred from Barack supporters claiming to support a kinder, gentler America. I quickly grew tired of this spectacle outside my door and asked the crazed woman to leave.  "Let me remind you that you’ve come to my house and I'd like you to leave.”  She finally stomped off screaming, dragging her kids in each hand, hollering over her shoulder what an unhappy person I must be.

I sat down to finish feeding my smiling baby, wondering what this country had come to. Now I’m afraid to open my emails or my door anymore, fearing more attacks by unhinged Barack fans. What’s next – a mob with pitch forks?  He’s practically won, so why are they so, so angry?  Why are they hunting down anyone who doesn't agree?  Does anyone remember the French Revolution, and how quickly the peace loving "egalite, fraternite" slogans morphed into blood-lust guillotiners who roamed the country crazed to punish anyone who disagreed? 

This politics of hate is bad for everyone.  This is not progressive politics and Barack is not a progressive candidate.  As the British New Statesman has written, Barack's campaign is a new brand of McCarthyism. It's us against them.  You're with us or we'll destroy you.  That's the precise attitude of Bushism that the democrats claim to want to change.  Yet they've fallen for the same black and white divisive political scam.  And heaven help those of us who dare to ask questions, let alone disagree.

Why are we demonizing the impressive Gov. Palin?

We need to take a collective breath and sober up from the drunken frenzy of trashing female politicians. We're stoning Gov. Palin for all we heralded in Barack.  And we stoned Sen. Clinton for all that Barack has become.

In the last several weeks I've received desperate emails from people who don't normally email about politics, purporting to warn me and/or their entire email list about the evils of Governor Sara Palin. There is an urgency, a fear in their messages - this woman must be stopped. They feel free, emboldened, to completely trash her personally and professionally.  This popular Governor is somehow to them a joke; she's not qualified to be vice-president, let alone president. I mean, really, who does she think she is?  A woman in my office who would describe herself as a feminist was cackling so loudly the other day treating this accomplished woman as if she were a piteous lowlife and how dare she think she could be vice-president.  They're amost offended by her existence, yet these are people who think Barack Obama is fully justified in thinking he could be president.  

In January 2007 I wrote an opinion piece for the London Guardian and Huffington Post entitled "Who Does Barack Obama Think He Is?" which began as follows:

Who does he think he is? We must ask this question, because it's the kind of question that would be asked if a 45-year-old female political neophyte declared, as Barack Obama did today, that she was taking the initial steps toward a presidential bid. In fact, the public wouldn't get the chance to ask it of a 45-year-old woman with barely two years of national political experience, because, unlike Obama, the media would never take her seriously...

Even before Barack declared, the media treated him as an equal contender to a woman with impressive national stature and experience.  Everyone claimed it wasn't just because they so desperately wanted a man, however naive, to beat Sen. Clinton.  They claimed it was precisely his youth, his inexperience, his unfamiliarity with Washington that made him a great candidate.  And his good looks added to his presidential sheen - in their eyes.  He had barely served two years as a US Senator, and before that only worked as a legislator and community organizer. Obama's campaign and his Obama-azi's flooded the internet insisting national experience didn't matter and noting that most of our recent presidents have been governors with no national experience. 

So why are we publicly stoning Gov. Palin for the things we heralded in Barack?  She's too young, she doesn't have national experience.  And her looks somehow work against her.  Eugene Robinson, one of several liberal black columnists who are so happy to have a black man running yet they're free to parrot his sexism, writes this about a sitting governor:

"It's not her fault that she's a former Miss Wasilla .... [with] no discernible qualifications for being vice president."

How come Barack's looks impress people but Eugene feels free to denigrate a sitting governor because she's attractive?  And has Eugene forgotten that being governor was a "discernible" qualification for four out of our last five presidents?  Not good enough for a woman, huh, Eugene?  Sexism breeds the same kind of bigotry as racism. 

And Leonard Pitts, another liberal black columnist who can't dish out the sexist slurs fast enough, first patronizes those silly women who claim the media was sexist towards Sen. Clinton, then describes Gov. Palin as "a woman who until six years ago was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population: 5,469."  What happened to her status as governor?  He completely omitted it and treated her only as a mayor.  Then he deigns to claim McCain is "objectifying" Gov. Palin because she is so obviously, hideously, laughably unqualified.  Give me a break. By Leonard's logic, then, much of the country and the media has been objectifying the youthful, inexperienced and pretty Barack  - and he seems to like it. 

David Ignatious of the Washington Post actually acknowledges that Barack and Gov. Palin are similarly young and accomplished but with low levels of experience, but claims that Barack's running for president provides him additional qualifications for being president.  (Recall that Obama claimed that Sen. Clinton's experience as First Lady for eight years and living in the White House and travelling internationally with a president didn't count because she was just a wife, but his running for president for a few years makes him qualified.) 

Recapping, David, the Washington Post columnist whose an expert in global politics, claims that Barack is more qualified than a popular sitting governor because Barack has been running for president longer. And they laugh at Palin for suggesting that being governor of a state that borders Russia is relevant? Recall that newspapers endorsed Barack over Sen. Clinton because as a seven year-old he lived in Indonesia and that somehow counted as foreign policy experience.

When will people say enough?  When will women say enough?

We need to take a collective breath and sober up from the drunken frenzy of trashing female politicians.  Or one day all of you finger waggers will wake up like the pious Count in the movie Chocolat with chocolate smeared over all over your faces as you finally, humblely accept that your rage was really directed at your deep fears. Look in your mirror now and ask what you're afraid of?  What is it about women stepping outside their traditional roles that scares you so much?

People say it's not because she's a woman, but because her stand on some issues may be outside the mainstream.  Really?  Yet John, at the top of the ticket, shares most of the views they claim to despair in Gov. Palin, but not one of them sent email warnings about the dangers of John.  And Barack's got plenty of bizarre skeletons in his closet.  Worshipping at the heels of a black supremacist isn't usually viewed as mainstream.  And for those liberals who claim she endangers our constitutional rights, your candidate Barack reversed himself last summer and voted for FISA - President Bush's nefarious trampling of our constitutional rights in the trumped up war on terror.   

We're stoning Gov. Palin for all we heralded in Barack.  And we stoned Sen. Clinton for all that Barack has become.

We reviled Sen. Clinton for moving to the center in a calculated way - we didn't want politicians like that, Barack's fans said.  Yet Barack's FISA reversal was just a small part of his very calculated move to win votes in the center. Sen. Clinton knew you have to appeal to the center to win and had already positioned herself there - we ridiculed her for being coldly calculating. Now Barack's done the same thing and he's admired as a brilliant strategist.  He's followed Sen. Clinton on repudiating public financing and on cozying up to Washington insider's - he's completely adopted her playbook and yet we don't stone him.

So many people who wrote such bigoted disrespectful comments about Sen. Clinton insisted it wasn't because she's a woman, it was because of her. Now those same people insist women shouldn't vote for Gov. Palin because she's no Sen. Clinton.  If Palin is indeed so different than Clinton, then why are we treating her the same?

This unbridled freedom to trash women politicians was unleashed cleverly in the primary as the sinister strategy of Barack Obama and David Axelrod, the democrats' answer to Karl Rove.  The British New Statesmen published an excellent piece in May detailing how Obama's campaign used 1950's-style  McCarthyism politics to foment what turned into "gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind":

Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media - consciously or unconsciously - are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.

They did it to Sen. Clinton and now they're doing it to Gov. Palin.  She has high popularity ratings now in Alaska - where will she stand after Barack and the media get done with her?

As with Sen. Clinton, none of the attacks on Palin are at all nuanced.  No one acknowledges her many accomplishments. Her impressive rise to become such a popular governor by her mid-forties.  Who among her finger-waggers could stand before the Republican National Convention and deliver such a dynamic speech with the nation watching?

DIsagree with her on the issues all you want, but afford her the same respect we give to male politicians similarly situated. Take a breath and step away from the witch hunt, put down the stones and notice she's an impressive human being who's accomplished much in her life. 

The playwright Wendy Wasserstein brilliantly depicted this dark side of our culture in her work An American Daughter.  In that play, the nomination of a doctor with impressive credentials and all the right Ivy League degrees for Surgeon General unleashes a public lynching wherein every tiny thought of hers is scrutinized and every action of hers ridiculed and by the end this impressive doctor is reduced to tatters.  Wasserstein's words in the play are something to the effect of, "Nothing brings more delight to the American public than challenging the competence of a professional women."   

"Barack, boy - you best stop callin' women 'sweetie' and 'pig'"

Trivializing women has become Barack’s specialty. That’s regressive, not progressive. Here’s a message to Barack, delivered in his fake Southern accent:

“Sweetie – you better lay off callin' women sweetie and pig or we wimmin’ are goin’ to start callin’ you ‘boy’."

Thing is - blacks in this country worked for decades to be treated with respect and for black men not to be denigrated as 'boy." But then blacks turned out in the 90th percentiles to vote for a man who calls women "sweetie." Barack had blacks believing that Bill and Hillary Clinton - two people who actually had a record of acting for civil rights for men and women - were racists, freeing up the path for his bigoted sexism to march on.  (And if Barack has ever actually done anything in his life for civil rights, I'd love to hear about it. And that doesn't include signing on to other people's bills - it means authoring bills and taking the lead in harnessing their passage.  It means taking a stand, not voting "present.")

Barack is a very negative, polarizing figure who nearly wrecked the democratic party. Will we allow him to similarly wreck the nation?

Note:  If you Google "Obama sexism" my piece "Obama's Sexism Strategy Rivals Nixon's Southern Strategy" ranks first. I receive hits to that article from all over the world daily and it's even been You-Tubed. 

Experience Does Matter

Presidents in the last 100 years who have been popular Governors:

Current President George W. Bush

Bill Clinton

Ronald Reagan

Jimmy Carter

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Calvin Coolidge

Woodrow Wilson

Teddy Roosevelt

Presidents in the last 100 years who have been community organizers, and state legislators:

???????

Recall that during the primary Barack’s campaign churned out endless negative missives claiming that none of Sen. Clinton’s experience mattered. None of her decades of political experience at the state, national and international levels, in addition to being a 2-term US Senator, mattered because none of it was executive experience. His campaign pushed that onto the internet and it showed up in countless responses to the blogs I posted on national political sites like the Huffington Post. The Obama-maniacs cut and pasted that statement and it showed up in anonymous comments over and over and over “her experience doesn’t matter because none of it was executive experience.”

Now comes a VP candidate who was a mayor and is a governor yet Barack says a Governorship doesn't qualify her for president because she has no foreign policy experience.

Let’s review. Barack claims Sen. Clinton’s background is inferior to his because she had no executive experience. Barack claims Gov. Palin’s background is inferior to his because she has no foreign policy experience. Meanwhile, Barack has neither. To borrow Oprah’s style of repeating phrases: Barack has neither. Neither executive nor national and foreign policy experience.

The Democrats’ boy has reaped our double standards for women all the way to the presidential nomination; now he’s hoping to ride it into the White House. Will women really let him do that?

The New Yorker and Barack's TruthSpeak

I don't know where to start.  Words fail me.  I haven't posted lately because there's just so much wrong with Obama's campaign.  His refusal to take public financing and his move to the center, after he said he was more ethical than Hillary because she refused public financing and moved to the center.  And now he's chasing her big donors and her D.C. contacts like a dog drooling after a fat steak.  I'm embarrassed for him - someone needs to be. Oh - wait - was that racist?  Are Barack's feelings hurt?  See, ...it makes my neck clench up just thinking about it. 

I apologize to readers for the delay but I am in the process of moving back to my home state of Oregon and starting a new job, so any extra time or energy I have left is devoted to figuring out the best teething toys for my baby and having long babbling conversations with him.  I find his baby talk more interesting than anything television news has to offer these days.  But this New Yorker business I can't let lie.

Again, where to start.  He can dish it out but can't take it?  People in glass houses....  You reap what you sow?  Barack based his entire campaign on taking cheap shots at Sen. Clinton, slewing character attacks at her right and left, smearing every tiny thing she said to appear racist, making fun of her constantly. The media was on board, with the male cartoonists vilifying Sen. Clinton with crude cartoons that made her look like a scary power monger because she was a woman with the same ambition Barack has.  Barack and the media were feasting on making fun of her, in almost archaic fashion like a fat king and his court gorging on pheasant and drunk on wine. 

Some said Barack couldn't be held responsible for how the media treated Sen. Clinton, but did you ever hear Barack denounce it?

And now the shoe's on the other foot.  A popular media outlet with some liberal tendencies turned its pen on Barack.  And Barack doesn't like it; his campaign called it "tasteless and offensive".  His zealous blogger maniacs who police everything said about their messiah-who-delivered-them-from-the-strong-woman, are hysterical.

A guy in my coffee shop whose pretty savvy on political issues, told me he thought the New Yorker cartoon was a little racist - that he's the "Jackie Robinson of politics" and having to take those hits as the first black in this position.  I told him I was having a hard time working up sympathy after all the hits on Sen. Clinton.  This guy's pretty fair minded, but just looked puzzled and said confidently, "That's different."

That's different.  That's what men always say.  Making fun of women isn't sexist - it's just humor.  Making fun of men - well, that's different. 

Come on, people.  The New Yorker cover isn't nearly as bad as what they threw at Sen. Clinton.  It's satire.  Unlike the crude cartoons distorting Sen. Clinton's physical appearance, this cartoon is smart.  Look at the portrait over the fireplace, the flag in the fire as they stand in the Oval Office. It's hilarious, over the top - that's what good satire is.  Barack takes himself way too seriously if he can't laugh at this.  He walks around in a solumn rectitude of certainty that he is somehow holier than everyone else.  This is dangerous.  One of the first blogs I wrote over a year ago was about how politics is riddled with foolish men like Barack who think they're above everyone else.  That kind of self-denial leads to large falls.  Those kind of men start wars and do other crazy things.  One of the many things I like about Sen. Clinton is her wonderful ability to take a joke, and even offer a few at her own expense.  Women in our culture have had to learn how to do that - to go along, to let it go.  Men like Barack have never had to learn to let it go.

But there are real dangers here.  One of the great harms Barack's campaign has done is to lower our level of public discourse to juvenile pot shots.  I admit to falling to his level in my last post (which I've deleted).  It did take on a snide tone - but I was just mimicking Barack and Michelle.  I couldn't wait to stick it back to them as they'd stuck it good to Sen. Clinton.  And then where are we?  I'm embarrassed I stooped to his level and the level that now permeates the political blogosphere. 

So I want to get back to what really matters: our country has real problems to solve.  People - my people, the lower and lower middle class people - have trouble living their lives with any financial certainty these days. 

Barack's behaviors are dangerous for two reasons. First, instead of talking about how he would solve any real problems, Barack's campaign just keeps whining about how his feelings are hurt.  Even the Obama-loving San Francisco Chronicle did a piece recently on how his campaign, and now McCain's, are taking umbrage at everything ("Both campaigns making a habit of taking offense" 7/24/08).  This is not presidential, and it does a disservice to our country.  It's embarrasing that this is what the Democratic Party has to offer.

Second, there's real danger in the level of truth control that Obama-maniacs and the media have allowed him.  All along Barack just denies and lies about what he does.  He said he didn't take money from oil companies when his campaign records reported contributions from oil companies; he said he didn't take money from pharmaceutical companies when his campaign records reported contributions from CEOs of pharmaceutical companies.  Now he's changed his position on troop withdrawal but calls another press conference to insist he didn't change his position on troop withdrawal.  He vowed to engage in public financing, and now changes his mind.  But -and this is really the Orwellian part - his campaign sends out an email stating that because he has a lot of small money donors, that is really "like public financing anyway."  Really?  Even the Obama-loving New York Times news desk called him on that - pointing out he'd far exceeded Sen. Clinton in big money donors.  Two of Barack's biggest proselytizers, Bob Scheer of the SF Chronicle and EJ Dionne of the Washington Post Writers Group, wrote opinions this month about Barack's move to the center and yet, as the New York Times reports "Obama rejects assertions that he has moved to the center."

This is George Orwell's 1984 Truth Ministry come to life. Barack seems to feel that the truth is whatever he says it is, damn all evidence, records and his own quotes to the contrary. We're allowing this to happen, people.  Anyone who doesn't complain about this is allowing it to happen.  We're at the point now, with something like the New Yorker magazine cover, that we're subjects who hold back our laughter waiting for the king's reaction.  If he laughs, we guffaw heartily.  If he doesn't laugh, we get angry on his behalf and off with the head of the perpetrators.

Several male commenters have written to say that I am irresponsible because by continuing to criticize Barack, I might be helping to elect McCain. To borrow one of Barack's favorite patronizing phrases, let me be perfectly clear.  I did not vote for Barack Obama.  If the party is actually going to officially nominate such a faulty candidate, that is not on my shoulders. If McCain wins the election over Obama, that will sit squarely on the shoulders of those who voted for Barack.  I've been a lifelong democrat but I've crossed party lines on several occasions.  I'm interested in what's best for our country.  I continue to believe that Barack's immaturity and self-righteousness pose real dangers, and nothing about his behavior after Hillary's withdrawal has changed my belief. I'm not yet convinced McCain would be worse, but will explore McCain more in coming blogs. 

A final note to the male readers who send comments about how I'm only unhappy with Obama because I'm angry and emotional about Sen. Clinton's loss.  First, I do appreciate your interest and your attempts to interact, which I believe are genuine.  However, recall that Obama dismissed Sen. Clinton's legitimate claims by calling her emotional.  Okay, so it worked to get him the nomination, but it doesn't work on my blog.  I would be happy to post and respond to comments that offer logical arguments to counter mine.  But I don't want to use my blog space or energy to perpetuate the negative name-calling stuff that permeates most political blogs. I'm making a concerted effort to rise above Barack's whiny-ness and get back to talking about what really matters.  And, by the way, the only people I've heard who are talking about what really matters are Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party.  Oh, and my five month old - I'm sure he's offering thoughts on the energy problems and the banking crisis, but it's coming out like whale sounds now - I can't decipher it yet.

Why are we debating a woman's right to run for president?

I’ve been disturbed by two male cartoonists depicting Sen. Hillary Clinton taking her campaign to Mars.  On one, the tagline is “The woman never quits.”

 

Why is this funny?  It’s only funny if you think her campaigning in primary elections is wrong.  Why would it be wrong for a person winning millions of votes and winning big victories in key states to continue campaigning?  Why would a fierce competitor with impressive credentials who is running a close second quit?

 

In 1980 Ted Kennedy challenged an incumbent president for his own party’s nomination, creating friction within the party.  Ted refused to withdraw and went into the convention with 1,225 delegates to Carter's 1,981, with only 122 uncommitted. There was nowhere near the outcry and outrage in the media for Ted to get out of the way that there is now for Sen. Clinton, and the stakes aren’t any higher now for the D’s than they were in 1980, where we saw the tide turned to the Reagan revolution.

 

There’s no doubt that viewing Sen. Clinton’s daring to stay in the race and be taken seriously as laughable is sexism.  It simply hasn’t – and wouldn’t – happen to a man of her stature.  If we treat women differently than men in the same situation, that’s a double standard.  That’s sexism.  Acknowledging sexism doesn’t make you a feminist – it makes you fair.

 

Last I checked, the U.S. Constitution sets certain minimum qualifications for the presidency, but being a man isn’t one of them. So why is it, then, that much of the cultural and media debate during this campaign since early on in the primary has been over whether Sen. Clinton is entitled to run at all?

The Constitution is not a barrier – it’s people’s attitudes, both of women and men.

 

A male commenter to my blog quoted a woman who thinks Sen. Clinton should get out as some kind of proof that it’s not a sexism thing.  It’s true women are joining the call – I’ve seen women columnists refer to Sen. Clinton’s staying in the race with the same disdain as the male cartoonists, calling her “embarrassing,” “shameful,” "shameless," “full of hubris,” and my favorite from the ever reliable mean girl Maureen Dowd, “unseemly.”

 

The question is not whether it’s sexism because it is.  Some of my commenters have written better descriptions than I have about why this is sexism.  See Ann Drist's blog for some thoughtful writing on this topic, from someone who isn't personally a fan of Sen. Clinton.  The question is what does it say about women and men that they want to view a competitive woman as somehow unseemly and embarrassing. 

 

The supposedly progressive columnist Bob Scheer has written several pieces in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that because he believes women are by nature more peaceful than men and because Sen. Clinton may have some hawkish tendencies, that she somehow isn't advancing the cause of women and so women shouldn't vote for her.  I can't make sense of his claim and don’t know what kind of mother issues Bob may have, but I’m no more peaceful than my male friends.  The question for men like Bob is – what is it in their construct of their own identity that requires them to pigeonhole women into traits they see desirable?

 

As for women who call out other ambitious and competitive women as "shameless," I've written before about internalized sexism.  I could quote volumes of scholarly work on this problem, and I also know it when I see it.  (See good description in comment from Lexia below.)  Maureen Dowd, with her pen as an opinion writer for the New York Times, holds one of the most powerful journalistic positions in our country.  Yet she repeatedly writes pieces ridiculing powerful women as "manly".  During Howard Dean's campaign, Dowd wrote a piece cutting apart Dean's wife, a busy and successful doctor, for not wearing makeup and styling her hair to help out her husband's campaign. 

 

Dowd is an ambitious, powerful woman who writes pieces suggesting it's unseemly for women to desire power. I leave it for the psychologists to unravel that. 

 

A year ago I didn't believe we were living in a country not ready to elect a woman president, as predicted by an African cabbie in Manhattan.  Now I see he didn't go far enough.  We're not even ready to allow a woman to run for president.

Krugman: Obama must stop demonizing Clinton

I've always respected NYT columnist Paul Krugman. He's an Economics Professor and policy wonk at heart. I saw him speak in San Francisco and he comes across as a guy who really cares about doing the right thing and setting this country back on course.  Here are his latest words on Barack Obama and his campaign:

"Most immediately, they should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain. One more trumped-up scandal won’t persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along. But it might incline a few more of them to stay home in November."

Krugman appears to view Obama's race-baiting attacks on Sen. Clinton as disingenuous as I see them:

"It wasn’t the best example to use, but it’s absurd to suggest, as some Obama supporters immediately did, that Mrs. Clinton was making some kind of dark hint about Barack Obama’s future [with the mention of RFK'S campaign].'

"But then, it was equally absurd to portray Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that it took L.B.J.’s political skills to turn Martin Luther King’s vision into legislation as an example of politicizing race. Yet the claim that Mrs. Clinton was playing the race card, which was promoted by some Obama supporters as well as in a memo by a member of Mr. Obama’s staff, achieved wide currency."

Krugman says now its "mainly it’s up to Mr. Obama to deliver the unity he has always promised — starting with his own party." 

And yet Barack continues with the kind of petty hollerin' he accuses Sen. Clinton of .  Krugman imagines that Barack might win back Sen. Clinton's supporters, but no actions of Mr. Obama can persuade me to vote for him now.

Oh, please! When will Obama stop playing the victim?

Now, it appears, that no one can mention the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., or they are obviously being racist.  This one was hard for me to follow, with the leaps and bounds you have to take to convert a factual mention that RFK's presidential campaign continued through June into an evil racist suggestion that Obama would somehow be assassinated because he's half-black.

What baffles me is that Obama and his campaign have sent out missives like this throughout the campaign, portraying him as a victim of this evil woman.  His endless ramming of the race card down the throat of a woman with such an impressive career record of fighting for civil rights is sickening. Barack Obama single-handily has soured me ever on standing up against racism again.

There is no "change" or integrity in Barack playing the victim. He'll say and do anything to get elected and appears drunk now on his power to cast anything Sen. Clinton says as tinged with evil. I am disappointed that on a visit to my hometown, the Oregonian newspaper made Barack's frivolous and disingenous claim front page news.  Barack apparently is being given the power now to censor all political dialogue. Can no one else see what a dangerous man this is?  This is demagogery in textbook fashion.

The Sexism of Obama's Campaign Is About Entitlement

Put a cigar in his mouth and he'd fit right in with a group of fat, old Republicans. Only - wait a minute. He's a slim, young, Democrat.

Last year, a cabbie in Manhattan with a thick accent told me, "This country isn't ready to elect a woman." I was taken aback. Sen. Hillary Clinton was riding high on her well-earned reputation as a 2-term US Senator who reached across the partisan divide for real progress. She had a double digit lead in the national polls and was raising enough money to compete as a frontrunner - things no woman has accomplished before. I thought that was all proof things had changed. She never raised the issue of her being a woman on the campaign trail - she focused on the issues so much that she was criticized as a policy wonk. That all changed when Barack won Iowa. Here was a man to put her in her place.

News analysts I previously respected - like Chris Matthews on MSNBC, editorial writers I devoured, like Bob Scheer and EJ Dionne, starting writing the most base, disrespectful language about Sen. Clinton. Words that had vanished from the media since the 1990s when the right wing talk radio nuts called her a femi-nazi.

Something about Barack's campaign has fueled this toxic stream of sexist slurs that spew from so many corners, I feel singed from their heat. It's not garden variety sexism  -- it's highly emotional, reactionary attempts to cut down a strong woman.  So many otherwise rational people have been swept into it. The nasty vulgarity on the internet, sent under cover of anonymity, is probably the most revealing. Young, liberal, college educated white men - some of Barack's key supporters - filled with such pent up rage which can only be seen as fear. Anger, psychologists say, is just a symptom of other underlying feelings. I see fear in these young men - fear of losing the power they know they still get as men in this country. This may be the younger generation's way of protesting the demise of old male privilege, which still lingers. It's more subtle now, but they're still promoted past lesser qualified women, paid more than equally qualified women... the statistics are all there. Some men object to my conflating the rest of the country's sexism with Obama's personal bigotry. I say - have you ever heard him denounce the damaging sexism put forth in his name?  It's all part and parcel of the primary fuel behind his campaign.

I met a man from Argentina last week who told me, "It would be a real injustice for this country to nominate that young man over this great woman." He went on about how this country is in denial about so many things - the fact it's a world empire, and the fact that it's afraid of a strong woman president. Why is it men from foreign countries can see what's going on here so clearly, yet so many men here are so blinded?

One of our great cultural thinkers, Professor Bell Hooks, posits that most men are disturbed by the darker sides of our culture's treatment of women,

"[b]ut they fear of letting go of the benefits. ... So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong."

When I was first pregnant, I wondered how I'd protect a daughter from the many stereotypes that diminish girls today. Now I have a beautiful son, and I wonder about something that may be much harder. How to protect him from the entitlements we bestow on boys - teaching them every day in so many little and big ways that what they say and do is more important than what girls say and do.

And so about that "sweetie" comment. It's simple -- Barack feels entitled. Entitled to belittle an accomplished news reporter. Entitled to call his wife "the boss," to laugh at how she "has to" pick up his socks. Entitled to abandon his commitment to his state as a 1st term senator and instead run all over the country running for president. Entitled to abandon his care of his two young children completely to his wife, laughing about how he never sees them. And then entitled to lecture others on the importance of families.

Put a cigar in his mouth and he'd fit right in with a group of fat, old Republicans. Only - wait a minute. He's a slim, young, Democrat. Getting away with condescending to women. Getting away with bigotry. Not only getting away with it - millions of people are eating it up. He's so caught up with himself now he didn't even congratulate Sen. Clinton on her huge West Virginia victory. Recall that the pundits excoriated Sen. Clinton for lacking humility after her South Carolina loss. Yet they praised Barack for the same behavior after his New Hampshire loss. He didn't back down to "that woman" and was praised for it. She didn't back down to a man and was punished for it. Now Barack feels entitled not to even treat her as a respected competitor. All along he's felt entitled to attack her for the very actions he takes himself - he attacks her character and yet accuses her of being "negative;" he constantly finds racism in every tiny comment she makes yet vilifies her for "playing the gender card" -- these double standards stick to strong, ambitious women and he's smug with confidence he can get away with it. 

The male media (that same group of young, liberal college-educated white men) feel entitled to tell Sen. Clinton she doesn't even have a right to run anymore and should get out of the race, even while West Virginian's gave her an overwhelming victory and told exit pollers they found Obama "untrustworthy."

And of course it's not just men. What saddens me more is the women who pile on. Debra Saunders, a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, called Sen. Clinton a "crybaby" for calling attention to the sexism. I saw this dynamic at law school. Everywhere the male professors favored the male students and dismissed the women students as emotional. The young men like Barack swaggered more and more as they swelled under their entitlement. Worse, women would go along with it and rush to criticize other women to gain favor with the alpha males. Only the women who went along would never look you in the eye.

A major tenet of my writing has been that we can't blame men anymore. Women choose to allow this to unfold. Women make up at least 50% of Democratic voters. Even if you have some legitimate reason not to like such a qualified leader like Sen. Clinton, you can at least acknowledge the bigoted hostility. You could address it rationally - but to call her a crybaby says women have a lot of internal work to do.

Professor Hooks warns that this internalized sexism remains an obstacle for women. She reminds us that in the 1970s, women used the old consciousness-raising groups to change their own inner sexist beliefs -- to confront their own sexism against other women. Somehow that crucial step has been lost, but as Hooks says, is still badly needed:

The enemy within [internalized sexism] must be transformed before we can confront the enemy outside. The threat, the enemy, is sexist thought and behavior.

For more on Obama's sexism, see my earlier blog "Obama's sexism strategy rivals Nixon's southern strategy," I've received a record number of hits for this piece in the last week.

Obama Sullies the Democratic Party With Pages From the Republican Playbook

The more Barack Obama continues his old-style negative politics, right out of the Republican playbook, and the more people support him, the more damage they do to the Democratic party. I read an article recently about how the Republican party is struggling to re-define itself. I wondered about the Democratic party, supposedly the party for equality but not anymore. Out and out bigotry spouted daily by Barack and his supporters in the form of vulgar and base sexism, making false charges of racism, and disenfranchising voters are shameful tactics and a dark turn in the party's history.

Swindling Floridians Out of Their Vote
How can you get more Republican than that? Millions of Floridians turned out to vote. Candidates weren't supposed to campaign but Barack broke the rules and ran national ads knowing they'd run in Florida. That's the kind of snarky politics as usual tactics that have marked his campaign. Then voters by the hundreds of thousands chose Sen. Hillary Clinton over Barack. And now he doesn't want their votes to count. Nor votes in Michigan. Both states overwhelmingly favor Clinton and he knows it. So the solution for someone who cheats like Barack is, steal their votes away. He opposed the fairest solution, which was to have a re-vote. If he really did stand for a new kind of politics, a new kind of integrity in the process, he'd want to count every vote. And this from a black American, whom the Republicans have notoriously tried to keep away from the polls. Now Barack works to take votes from Sen. Clinton supporters. If he really had any integrity, he'd want to win the race on his own merits. Different politics? No.

Negative Character Attacks
Barack's sexist slurs against Sen. Clinton are legion and I've detailed them before. He refuses to answer her challenges on the issues, and instead once famously accused her of being moody ("periodically down") and casts her legitimate challenges on the issues as some kind of negative politics. Nothing sticks to this guy! I'm saddened that my home state of Oregon seems to be favoring Barack. The Oregonian endorsed him in an editorial that listed no accomplishments of Barack. Not one. Because there are none. No experience, no accomplishments. They endorsed him because he has "integrity" and "authenticity,"with no examples of those traits, because, again, there are none. Certainly not in the way he's run his campaign.

Barack's character assassinations are right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Someone else wrote last year how uncanny it was that Sen. Clinton moved past all of the 1990s right-wing Republican attacks on her character by working hard to earn a stellar reputation in the US Senate as a bipartisan can-do leader. Then, in 2008, it's the Democrats - lead by Barack Obama and his old party cronies behind the scenes - who have revived the same slandering words used by the right wing talk radio crowd. That she's polarizing, devisive, etc., etc. There's no example that she's any of those things. But that's how character slander works. Exploit people's fears of strong women by throwing out the old stereotypes and sadly, they stick even without a shred of reality behind them. But if Hillary looks at Barack the wrong way, his campaign churns out emails shrilling that she's being racist to poor Barack.

Barack never engages on the issues because he doesn't have the chops. I heard Sen. Clinton speak in California last Fall and she focused so much on the issues the media were calling her a "policy wonk." Barack is the one who dragged this race into the vituperative place that it is. His supporters pollute the online political sites with nasty, vulgar comments about Sen. Clinton. James Wolcott wrote a piece in Vanity Fair about a blogger from Daily Kos who quit posting because, in her words,

...things have become progressively more abusive toward my candidate [Clinton] and her supporters.

She went to to say the bloggers on the site ""trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record with "horrid" and "sexist" comments. This was also my experience writing for the Huffington Post. The bloggers supporting Barack posted character attacks against Clinton and the commenters barrage any site that said anything positive about Clinton, like mine, with vulgar stuff about her weight. Here's a recent comment I deleted from my website that's every day stuff on the political internet blogs:

Hillary has finally gotten the ass-whippin' she so richly deserves. How could a fat, plain, bossy, husband-beater of a girl, who couldn't even pass her bar exams, and who, to this day, has never run any organization bigger than a Senate office, feel entitled to be President of the United States? Insane!

This is every day fare on the internet; every day fare from Barack supporters. Has anyone ever heard him denounce this bigotry? Funny, he was quick to denounce his own spiritual advisor of 20 years when he thought it would get him votes. But he can't denounce the sexism because it's what his campaign is based on.

Reverse Race-Baiting
For a while, it was clear the superdelegates favored Clinton. But Barack do-anything-to-get-elected-Obama, started floating this claim that if the superdelegates "stole" the election from Barack, blacks would boycott and not vote in the general election. That's gutter stuff even by Karl Rove standards. That's like the old Willie Horton ad, in the days of Republican spin-meister Lee Atwater. CNN pundits are still making that argument, that if superdelegates nominate Sen. Clinton it will cause an uproar and alienate blacks, who are 25% of the party. Now, I don't have the numbers with me but I'd wager women constituted close to half of the party, if not more. But no one's worried or even talking about alienating women by consistently undermining the candidate with the most experience and who led the national polls until sexist attacks ran amok.

As Geraldine Ferraro and others have pointed out, the superdelegates were put in place to do precisely what Barack doesn't want them to do - what's best for the party. At this point the superdelegates could salvage the party from the damage done by Barack and his supporters and nominate the only remaining candidate who continues to try to talk about the issues and why and how she'll take the country in a better direction than George Bush did in the last eight years.

The Mother of all Flip Flops: Obama Denounces His Spiritual Leader Rev. Wright

After Barack Obama's 10-point loss to Sen. Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, he sniped in his faux Southern accent that "we all are tired of politicians sayin' and doin' anything to get elected."

Aw shucks. This from the man who desperately threw untold millions at the state, outspending Sen. Clinton 3 to 1.

But Barack has just taken his hypocrisy to new, shameless heights. He's denouncing the Rev. Wright, the man who Barack has claimed as his spiritual leader for 20 years. That's almost the sum total of Barack's adult life. Barack chose Rev. Wright to preside over his marriage and to baptize his daughters.

Where's the outcry from the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times Op-Ed columnists who crucify Sen. Clinton if she takes a position remotely varied from one she took before? I keep opening the Op-Ed pages looking for those columnists heretofore concerned with consistency and integrity -- I'm talking about the Robert Scheer, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd crowd, and most of the internet bloggers. But, again, it's only the very conservative columnists willing to take on this mother of all flip-flops.

As someone else wrote, are we supposed to believe that Barack followed this man's worship for 20 years and was unaware that he's a "nutbag?" Of course he knew. If anyone's been listening to Michelle Obama talk, her words come straight from Rev. Wright's paranoia. She said early on that the only reason a black American would vote for anyone but Obama was if they feared a black man would be assassinated. This was late fall or early winter when Sen. Clinton still enjoyed a double digit lead in the national polls, yet Michelle felt free to claim that no black Americans could find any legitimate reason to support an experienced white candidate.

Of course Barack knew what Rev. Wright stood for. What's apparent now is that Barack will say and do anything to get elected. Now he's publicly denouncing the man who provided his family with spiritual nourishing all of those years. The arrogant Obama says he is "outraged over the spectacle" of Rev. Wright. What gall. It is a sad spectacle, but it's Barack who’s created it. As the conservative columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, Barack is "a man who feels relaxed about sending his daughters on Sunday to hear the racist rants of an anti-American berserker." Buchanan also pointed out that Michelle Obama's Rev. Wright-like comments about not being proud of America ring hollow from a woman who is a "beneficiary of a Princeton-Harvard Law education denied to 99.9% of the people."

I've been writing for over a year now about the Obamas' collective elitism and arrogance, and it got me kicked off the Huffington Post and possibly another publication. Yet for almost every one of those pieces I write, I receive thoughtful emails from readers across the country thanking me for writing what they've been thinking, but no one else has been saying.

The Obamas' willingness to kick Rev. Wright to the curb after relying on him for guidance for most of their adult life is, frankly, sickening. It shouldn't surprise anyone who can see the raw, cold ambition in both of them (he hides it a little better than she does). Yes, the Rev. Wright apparently has some paranoia issues, but the Obamas should have stood by him and helped us see whatever it was they saw in him. Or at least owned up to it - but that would require losing a whole lot of votes. So instead they drop him in their increasingly desperate grab for power.

Barack has held himself out as a man of great ethical strength and he repeatedly exploits his "religious devotion" wherever he thinks it will win him votes from those "bitter" voters who "cling to religion." Now Barack's own spiritual leader says he will say and do anything to get elected.

Barack’s religious devotion has been exposed as another one of his shams. What, if anything, does Barack Obama stand for or believe in, except his own infallibility?

Baby's Birth Heralded by HC's TX & OH Wins

My baby arrived just about on time, after a dramatic water breaking right out of a Hollywood movie. Haven't had much time for newspapers or TV but I sure enjoyed the headlines announcing Hillary Clinton's wins in Texas and Ohio.

I hope to begin blogging again soon. I made an amazing discovery - that a few days without the news coverage of the Presidential campaign and the obsessive "he said/she said" minutiae was kind of relaxing. I missed almost a week of news and didn't really miss a thing.

William Kristol on Barack's "Preening Self Regard"

Who'd ever have thought I'd be quoting the conservative William Kristol, but since the liberal columnists have mostly abandoned any kind of critique of Barack (with the exception of Paul Krugman), the good stuff is coming from the conservatives. I know they fear Hillary Clinton the most as a general election candidate, but it's almost like they sit idle and watch the Obama-hysteria go unchallenged. It's too painful to leave lying there.

In a recent piece, "It's All About Him," Kristol makes a variation on a point that Hillary Clinton made in one of the debates. Barack was asked a simple question, why he stopped wearing the flag pin he used to sport after 9/11, to which he gave a long, self-serving answer. Kristol writes it this way:

What's striking is that Obama couldn't resist a grandiose explanation. Obama's unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good - too patriotic! - to wear a flag pin on his chest.

All I can say to Kristol, is thanks for making my day. Sen. Clinton was vilified by the liberal press for pointing out in one of the debates that it's hard to get a straight answer from Barack. I couldn't agree more - he denies everything, lately denied the plagiarism that's in black and white for all to see, and then he goes on to presume to hector anyone who dared question him. Creepy.

I can't resist pointing out the suggestion that Barack tends toward "preening self-regard," "patronizing elitism" and "haughty liberalism" of previous Democratic contenders. I have to agree. If we're going to look at the candidates' good qualities and flaws, let's get Barack's flaws out in the open. So far it's taken the conservative pundits to do that. Barack offers the same-old patronizing arrogance that we've suffered from Bush over the last eight years. Why anyone finds that appealing is beyond my understanding, but it worked for Bush twice - and look where it got us. The voters need a sit-down with Dr. Phil, as he asks those who keep repeating the same mistakes in life: "How's that workin' for ya'?"

And then all Kristol has to do is contrast Barack's haughty self-regard with the humble John McCain, whose "more proud of his country than of himself," and you get a preview of why the Democrats should stick with Hillary. Her message - from the first speech I saw her give in Oakland last Fall - has always been "let's work together to make America stand for something again, let me help lead us there." Contrast that humility to Barack's nattering and grandiose justification of his plagiarism, that "I've written two books and I write most of my own speeches. And some of my speeches are really good."

Who thinks that vainglory will stand up to a war hero?

Note: I have to add in my other favorite conservative comments, from none other than Karl Rove. Rove masterminded President Bush's rise from Texas Governor to President and knows a thing or two about politics. Yes, he's nefarious. But I had the chance to meet his predecessor in nefariousness, the late Lee Atwater, who engineered the first George Bush's successful run for the presidency. (Unlike most of the male pundits who presume to declare how that silly woman Hillary doesn't know how to run a campaign, I've actually worked on a national politcal campaign.) Guys like Rove and Atwater live for politics and the game. Rove also knows that Sen. Clinton is the more formidable opponent for the Republicans in November, but in a January 10 Wall Street Journal piece he couldn't resist pointing out the obvious Obama failings that the rest of the media just takes a pass on.

Rove's most cogent point is that Bill Clinton's pointing out the "fairy tale" that Barack's beliefs as a state legislator can be compared with a vote of a U.S. Senator...

"...hit a nerve by drawing attention to Mr. Obama's conflicting statements on Iraq. There's more - and more powerful - material available. Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois Legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting "present" on issues important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations, and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through."

I hate to admit I think like Karl Rove, but I do come from the trenches of politics and this is pretty much verbatim what I've been saying for over a year. The question is why some Democrats and the liberal pundits not only ignore this obvious downside to the Barack story, but attack Sen. Clinton for doing what any political candidate would do and point these things out?? Even John Edwards, during one of the debates, stopped mid-sentence to turn to Barack and say, "Why did you vote present on all of those issues?" Barack gave one of his self-important and patronizing dodges, to which Edwards turned to him and said, "In the US Senate we've had to make some hard up or down decisions. That's part of being a leader." [I'm paraphrasing]

Rove knows that politics is a game, and points out that Obama plays it as good as anyone has:

"For someone who talks about a new, positive style of politics and pledges to be true to his word, Mr. Obama too often practices the old style of politics, saying one thing and doing another. He won't escape criticism on all this easily."

You can just feel Rove, and Kristol and Atwater (were he alive) almost drooling at being handed this untested mouse to bat around, yet also feeling insulted that the democrats would make it so easy. Too easy. By protecting Obama from any of the normal vetting that primary candidates and the media usually provide, the media and the power brokers behind Obama are setting up the democrats for a big fall. They've propped up their fledgling by, bizarrely, elevating him precisely because Sen. Clinton dares to hold him to the standard any presidential candidate has been held to. Somehow, the argument goes, you should vote for Obama because Hillary picks on him. If this fairy tale works and Barack wins the nomination, they won't have Hillary to prop up Barack against anymore. And then where will the Obama supporters be? Where will the democrats be? In the hands of the next Karl Rove or Lee Atwater.

Dee Dee Myers on the "Free-Pass Sexism" Against Hillary

So I vowed not to write anymore until my baby is born, as my midwives cautioned he hasn't "dropped" yet and the new-agey San Francisco theory would be that I need to make the baby feel like his mother is ready for him (as opposed to completely absorbed with this campaign). Taking steps in that direction, I have CNN on but it's muted while I play the baby calming Vivaldi. But then I saw Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton press secretary who I have followed since and know her to be about the most objective commentator I can find along the lines of Donna Brazille, and I turned up the volume.

Turns out she's blogging over at Vanity Fair and I recommend anything by her. In this piece, "The Free-Pass Sexism of the Hillary Hate Brigade," she echoes a frequent point of mine -- that the sexism by the media and Barack and his supporters is so rampant that people seem to have forgotten it's not okay. The media and Barack and his supporters strain to defend Barack from the tiniest imagined insults while they can and do fling anything they want at Hillary.
Myers writes:

But what keeps me awake at night is the fact that in 2008, the press, the pundits, and her political opponents can still say almost anything about Hillary Clinton without penalty.

And the fact that no one ever raises this issue - leading even someone like Myers to wonder, like I have, if we're the only ones seeing this. I can only add that Barack's constant sexist attacks and crying racism while he's benefitting from sexism shows that he not only lacks integrity or character, but he's become a dangerous, divisive persona. He wields his weapon of demagoguery so recklessly now, knowing that dark, rank prejudices against powerful women are putting such an unqualified male candidate so close to the presidency. Myers made a point tonight that I made on one of my earliest Obama pieces (Who Does Barack Obama Think He Is?), that "a woman with Barack's resume would have difficulty being taken seriously."

And anytime a woman says any of this, the columnists line up to excoriate the "victim feminists." All I ask for, and I would venture all Myers asks for, is a fair fight. Let's take racism AND sexism BOTH off the table. But then where would Barack be?

Even the feminist apologist Maureen Dowd, who like the alpha females at my law school polices feminism with harsher tones (dare I say brittle) than the alpha males, pointed out in a recent column that yes, maybe, there is some sexism afoot in our media culture. (For Dowd, a major concession.) But, she went on to write, that's not Hillary's problem - Hillary's problems are unique to Hillary and brought on my herself. I have six books within reach on my bookshelf documenting that the treatment Hillary is getting is identical to the treatment every woman politician for the last century has received. But our major so-called liberal media outlets - CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times - continue to ignore this academic evidence and history in their so-called news reports, let alone in their opinion pieces.

Note:

If anyone doubts how personally Chris Matthews' animosity is against Hillary Clinton, see this video of him shouting at Dee Dee Myers because she wouldn't agree with one of Chris' opinions about Hillary. Beyond unethical journalism, it shows Chris is highly emotional about Hillary Clinton, which I've long pointed out by his sexist remarks like mocking her daring to wear pantsuits in the US Senate - which, by the way, is pretty much the uniform of the US Senate. If he gets apopletic about a woman "daring" to wear pants in the 21st Century, then how must he feel about a woman "daring" to run for president? Chris is so emotional about protecting the all boys' clubhouse that I can't watch him anymore and continue to be astounded that MSNBC won't take him off the air. I say ship him over to Fox and let him double team with the likes of O'Reilly.

Posted February 25, 2008

Paul Krugman: "Most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama"

More actual objective analysis from the New York Times Paul Krugman, on the topic of the nastiness emerging in the Democratic campaign, from his Feb. 11 column "Hate Springs Eternal." I believe Krugman's drawing a parallel between Obama's and Nixon's tactics supports my piece below, Obama's Sexism Strategy Rivals Nixon's Southern Strategy." Here's Krugman:

"Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

...

During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.

And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.

...

But most of all, progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable."

Krugman warns that this venom (mostly slander from Barack supporters aimed at Hillary's character) threatens to turn the Democratic Party to "Nixonland." Krugman refers to Adlai Stevenson who warned that Nixon's politics were turning the nation into the land of "slander and scare."

Indeed, today, the pundits spent most of the day slandering Sen. Clinton for daring to point out Barack's uncredited plagiarism - the almost wholesale lifting of another man's speech. Amidst the pundit mob-lynching of Sen. Clinton (Howard Fineman said "Hillary's the one whose inauthentic, calculating and a ventriloquist for her husband)," one lone female commenter on MSNBC, a professor from I don't know where, managed to get in a quick statement that the type of verbatim plagiarizing Barack engaged in is universally considered unethical, before they quickly cut her off.

What's most shameful of all, is that after all the media's role in the venom against Hillary (that Krugman partially identifies above) has boosted Barack's momentum, they have the nerve then to turn around and slander her more for not knowing how to run a campaign. Well, gosh, how could Sen. Clinton, who handily won over conservative up-state New Yorkers and proved her bipartisan political chops and know-how to get things done in Congress, have predicted that the national media and prominent members of the party (you know who you are Ted and John) would sink to a sexism and slandering as low as Nixon's race baiting. After the attacks Sen. Clinton endured from the right wing Newt Gingrich's for so long she thought - and I thought - she'd been through it all. But some of her own party leaders and the media now have about trumped anything the neocons could come up with. As Krugman notes below, when their personal attacks on Hillary couldn't stop her from continuing to win states, the media invented a race war.

And there's more:

After Paul Krugman wrote this piece, he was deluged with angry email from the Obama supporters/Hillary haters (there's nothing "uniting" in their vituperative emails) ranting about the Clintons' playing the race card. Krugman quotes the Atlantic's Clive Crook, who is an Obama supporter, as saying the media played the race card and the Clintons' never did:
Here's the excerpt from Clive's post on Atlantic.Com, "How the Press Played the Race Card:"

Some commentators accused Bill of playing the race card when he called Obama’s account of his position on the Iraq war a “fairy tale”. How so? What did that have to do with race? And does Hillary’s comment about King, the only instance Morris bothers to offer, even qualify? She merely said that getting the job done required a can-do president as well as an inspiring and visionary champion. And so it did. I cannot see that this subtracts anything from King’s stature, or that it was intended to. Whatever its merits, this is the Clintons’ old theme, not a sinister new one: if elected, she would hit the ground running, whereas the inexperienced Obama would be out of his depth. It took a hyper-sensitive press to turn that comment into a racial slur.

….

I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.

And this is Krugman's response:

It really makes me sad to see so many people get played by the media on this. If you prefer Obama, fine — but the evil, race-card-playing Clinton campaign is no more real than Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet.

And to Obama supporters, just remember: these people are not your friends. After they take down Hillary Clinton, if they can, your man will be next.

Add: If you want to see what playing the race card looks like, watch the Willie Horton ad. What do we have here? MLK/LBJ — but that was totally innocent. Jesse Jackson — a stupid way to spin a big loss, but hardly part of a coordinated campaign. Cocaine — stupid and crass, but only race-based if you want to see it that way. Pretty thin gruel.

Folks, you’ve been played like a fiddle by people in the media who just plain hate the Clintons. They tried to take Hillary down over her clothes, her voice, her tears. When none of that worked, they invented a race war.

There are some perfectly good arguments against Hillary — Iraq, the presence of people like Mark Penn, the big-money Dems in her circle. But this really is Al-Gore-says-he-invented-the-Internet stuff. And it’s deeply depressing to see so many progressives fall for it.

And I'll just add, in response to Clive's astute comment that "it took a hyper-sensitive press" to turn that comment into a racial slur, since when has the mainstream media ever been "hyper-sensitive" to racism? What would be different in this election to cause the media, always vilified by black leaders during February, Black History Month, for ignoring blacks, to suddenly take an interest in policing racism? Could it have anything to do with the fact that for the first time in our country's history we have a woman inching very near the presidency? But we're not allowed to even ask that question, or we're playing the "gender card."

The Obama Delusion; Samuelson Says Barack Has Few Independent Ideas

Wow. A journalist alive willing to say the Obama-messiah has no clothes. I quoted the Economist (British magazine) last year as saying Barack may be "all hat and no cattle" and that's when the Huffington Post stopped running my blogs. I thought the phrase was funny and come on, even the crazed pro-Obama pundits will on occasion admit he needs to come up with some substance. But the American press has never had a sense of humor about their messiah Obama - the one who will deliver them from the evil powerful woman.

People all over the country email me telling me they thought they were going crazy watching the media's complete lack of critical analysis of Barack, until they saw my blogs and realized at least there were two of us. Now there's one more:

Robert Samuelson, contributing editor to Newsweek and the Washington Post, nails the emptiness behind Obama's promise. Samuelson says Obama's message is that his life story, his rise as a Black American can be a metaphor for believing that "Great impasses can be broken with sufficient good will..." But here's the problem:

But on inspection, the metaphor is a mirage. Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation's ills. It requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.

By Obama's own moral standards, Obama fails. Americans "are tired of hearing promises made and 10-point plans proposed in the heat of a campaign only to have nothing change," he recently said. Shortly thereafter, he outlined an economic plan of at least 12 points...

Samuelson goes on:

A favorite Obama line is that he will tell "the American people not just what they want to hear, but what we need to know." Well, he hasn't so far.

Consider the retiring baby boomers. A truth-telling Obama might say: "Spending for retirees -- mainly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- is already nearly half the federal budget. Unless we curb these rising costs, we will crush our children with higher taxes. Reflecting longer life expectancies, we should gradually raise the eligibility ages for these programs and trim benefits for wealthier retirees. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for inaction. Waiting longer will only worsen the problem."

Instead, Obama pledges not to raise the retirement age and to "protect Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiaries." This isn't "change"; it's sanctification of the status quo.

Then Samuelson gets to the heart of Obama's hypocrisy. Continuing to claim he's above the fray when he's knee deep in the muck just like everyone else:

Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscurity. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it's his standard and also his campaign's central theme. He has run on the vague promise of "change," but on issue after issue -- immigration, the economy, global warming -- he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates.

And finally Samuelson takes on the press for its part in fomenting this delusion:

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the press corps -- preoccupied with the political "horse race" -- has treated his invocation of "change" as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's major problems when, so far, he isn't.

Actually, there is another journalist who doesn't speak Obama-messiah talk. I've often quoted Economist Paul Krugman's pieces that challenge Barack's promises and cautions us to analyze his real ability to solve our country's pressing problems. Krugman has also pointed out the obvious, that Barack's simplistic call for bi-partisanship isn't likely to move us past our country's intractable problems.

Interesting that voters who value experience still vote for Clinton - in Wisconsin at the rate of 95% to 5%, whereas those who want change vote for Obama 77% to 20%. What I keep asking people is, if you vote for someone you acknowledge has no experience, whose he going to hire to advise him? Remember the last time we elected the charming guy with no experience we got eight years of Dick Cheney and the neocons he brought in to make the decisions.