Donna Darko

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How you can tell when anti-Hillaryism is sexism

March 12, 2008 · 7 Comments

You can tell anti-Hillaryism is sexism if you use a man as the control. Where is the blogosphere’s feeding frenzy/fever swamp against John McCain, a man who wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years? If the race were now between Obama and Edwards, would the blogosphere demand Edwards to concede? (No.) Would there be the same feeding frenzy/fever swamp right now against Edwards? (No.) In any situation between Obama and Clinton, would he behave the same way towards Edwards? If he were running against Bill Clinton instead of Hillary Clinton, would he treat him the same way?

Kevin Drum describes the insanity that has taken over the blogosphere:

The Hillary feeding frenzy…The online feeding frenzy against Hillary Clinton is driving me crazy.

The current attempts to tar Hillary as a racist have gone way, way over the top. They’re revolting. Back before the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign and its surrogates really did seem to be making a few too many racially charged comments for it to be just a coincidence (though even then some of the accusations were bogus), but after South Carolina it pretty much stopped.

But the accusations of racism haven’t. They’ve just gotten more ridiculous. Last week a commenter at Daily Kos claimed that the Clinton campaign had concocted an ad that deliberately darkened Obama’s face (to make him scarier) and changed the image’s aspect ratio (to make his nose broader). They hadn’t. After a 60 Minutes appearance, Hillary got slammed for supposedly implying the Obama might be a Muslim. As Eric Boehlert points out, this is patently absurd. Then, a couple of days ago, a legion of bloggers started locking onto the inane meme that talk of Obama as Hillary’s VP was like asking him to “ride in the back of the bus.” Finally, today, Orlando Patterson, in an apparent attempt to make parody obsolete, writes that when he saw Hillary’s “3 am” ad, “I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation,’ the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society.” Hell, even I fell for the racism meme a couple of weeks ago, getting suckered into passing along a Drudge slander about Hillary’s campaign supposedly circulating a photo of Obama in “Muslim” garb.

Paul Krugman is right: a large part of the progressive movement seems to have lost its sanity. She’s not the devil and the fever swamp should be left back in the swamp where it belongs. Can we please bring some sanity back to the blogosphere?

Categories: Race · gender · politics · racism · sexism

7 responses so far ↓

  • Nick // March 12, 2008 at 7:28 am

    You are awesome! This is exactly something I was trying to express, but I have not been able to find the correct words.

  • prohillary // March 12, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    Right-leaning pundits for months now have very openly not just called for Hillary Clinton’s head, but also coddled and promoted Barack Obama, salivating over the prospect of facing him in November.
    Meanwhile, voters have been echoing that program: Barack Obama has been beating Hillary Clinton in part because Republicans are helping him.

    Sixteen of the 45 Democratic primaries and caucuses held before this week were open affairs, allowing Republicans and independents to take part, and Barack Obama has won 11 of those contests. He almost invariably carried the Republican vote, which accounted for as much as 9 percent of the total in Wisconsin and Texas, and frequently ran even stronger among independents, who represented a fifth or more of Democratic primary voters in state after state. The 75 percent of the Republican vote that he won in Missouri, for example, may have pushed him over the top, and certainly, when combined with his 67 percent of the state’s much larger independent vote, it delivered many of the district-apportioned delegates to him.

    Republicans in Obama states like Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia were even freer to cross the aisle, since by the time they voted, John McCain had already sewn up the GOP nomination. While Obama often won some of these states so handily that Republicans and independents could not have provided his margin of victory, there is no way to know how many delegates in close congressional-district contests will wind up in Denver because of the impact of Republican or independent voters. And there is no exit-poll data to measure their impact on the caucuses.
    http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php

  • donnadarko // March 12, 2008 at 8:43 pm

    Thank you. That’s what I’ve been saying. About 30% of the voters in open and semi-open contests were Republicans and Independents. Let’s say he wins an average of 60-75% of these. Add to this he wins Republican states.

    Obamabots cried foul when Limbaugh got Republicans to vote Clinton in TX and OH but it was a ruse to hide what went on everywhere else.

    Your link doesn’t work.

  • prohillary // March 13, 2008 at 12:32 am

    http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,374100,374100,2.html

    Sorry!

  • donnadarko // March 18, 2008 at 11:52 am

    Here it is (Boston Globe):

    Until Texas and Ohio voted on March 4, Obama was receiving far more support than Clinton from GOP voters, many of whom have said in interviews that they were willing to buck their party because they like the Illinois senator. In eight Democratic contests in January and February where detailed exit polling data were available on Republicans, Obama received, on average, about 57 percent of voters who identified themselves as Republicans. Clinton received, on average, a quarter of the Republican votes cast in those races.

    But as February gave way to March, the dynamics shifted in both parties’ contests: McCain ran away with the Republican race, and Obama, after posting 10 straight victories following Super Tuesday, was poised to run away with the Democratic race. That is when Republicans swung into action. Conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh said on Fox News on Feb. 29 that he was urging conservatives to cross over and vote for Clinton, their bête noire nonpareil, “if they can stomach it.” He added, “I know it’s a difficult thing to do to vote for a Clinton, but it will sustain this soap opera, and it’s something I think we need.”

    Independents and Republicans won’t vote for Obama because he’s no longer post-racial.

  • mimc // March 18, 2008 at 11:17 pm

    The thing of it is, Hillary IS too DLC, too corporate, all their complaints have validity. Only thing is, a) so the hell is Obama, there isn’t a whole lot to separate the two on substance and b) there have been plenty of DLC men in the past who are too DLC, too corporate, and they’ve received reactions ranging from mild scorn to grudging support. This level of ZOMG! she is the worst thing ever to come from the pit of hell, she is Lady macbeth, Medusa and Satan all rolled in to one, stuff doesn’t seem to be justified on substance. The level of adulation her opponant recieves as Progressive Champion doesn’t seem to be justfied on substance. So I can only assume that the really outsized reaction she receives compared to all these other people has to do with the way in which she differs from them. And the only way she seems to differ from them would be her gender.

    And frankly, I don’t think many of those Republicans were ever going to really vote for him. Some independents, sure, but I know a fair number of Independents who lean Republican but like to vote in the Dem primaries to screw around.

  • Being Amber Rhea » Blog Archive » links for 2008-03-21 // March 21, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    [...] How you can tell when anti-Hillaryism is sexism « Donna Darko “You can tell anti-Hillaryism is sexism if you use a man as the control. Where is the blogosphere’s feeding frenzy/fever swamp against John McCain, a man who wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years?” (tags: election sexism politics blogs) [...]

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