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July 2nd, 2008
 | 10:40 am
It ain't over till it's over. Even though Hillary has dropped back -- this Vanity Fair view of her campaign does not pull punches -- the cost of the sexism raised by that campaign still goes on. And it's not just Republican sexism, but from Democrats as well. Reclusive Leftist has a lot to say about it:
The PUMA movement is a grassroots uprising of people determined to resist the Obama takeover of the Democratic party and all that it represents. We refuse to legitimize from the left the sexism and misogyny that Obama exploited. We refuse to endorse the strong-arm, anti-democratic actions of the DNC itself, which manipulated the nominee selection process to force a predetermined result. We refuse to comply with the metastasization of the Republican cancer to the Democratic Party, which is what in our view Obama represents — in his imperialism, in his pseudo-religiosity, in his money-soaked corruption, and in his political positions. We refuse to give up our voices — our leverage — for the sake of a fraudulent “party unity” that is no more than the short-circuiting of democracy. We refuse to let the Democratic Party become “Republican lite,” abandoning its mission to represent women, workers, immigrants, gays, the poor, the disadvantaged, the elderly.
Most of us are lifelong Democrats, seasoned veterans of the political game. We know exactly what we’re doing. We’re making a high-stakes strategic bid to salvage the Democratic Party — or, failing that, to build a new coalition that will take up the mantle that the DNC seems determined to shed.
So why are we dismissed as hysterical angry women, so bitter at the defeat of Hillary that we’re ready to lash out in blind, confused rage and vote against our interests? Because of sexism. That’s how sexism works: it is the systematic devaluing of women and their actions. No matter that not all PUMAs are women; the movement is female-identified. And so we’re dismissed as hysterical old bats who can’t think straight.
I sympathize with the men in the PUMA movement who are experiencing this for the first time. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Read this fine post by myiq2xu, a mixed-chromosome PUMA. There’s a subtext in that essay, an unspoken air of frustration along the lines of, “why aren’t people taking me seriously?” Welcome to the world of women, myiq2xu. You could have the political intelligence of Bismarck and you’d still be dismissed as a hormone-addled cow on the rag.
Just as reactions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign served as a kind of giant diorama of sexism in this country, so the reaction to the PUMA movement shows how anything female-identified is automatically assumed to be irrational. Media coverage of PUMA has exploded in the last week, but I’ve yet to see an article that actually explains what we’re about. Again and again we’re described as angry, bitter women, unable to get over our burning disappointment that Hillary lost. We’re made to sound like fan girls having a crying fit because our favorite got voted down on American Idol....
What none of these folks realize is that they’re simply confirming our judgment of what the Obama movement is about and why it must be resisted. Sexism? Check! Intellectual dishonesty? Check! Smug insistence that Obama Is The One and anybody who disagrees is insane/racist/hysterical? Check!
Keep it up, possums. Keep it up. You’re making our case for us.
Tennessee Guerilla Women has more: Some uninformed and delusional "progressives" prefer to believe that PUMAS are Republicans. "Progressives" started calling me a Republican the day I came out for the woman candidate. You know the one, the woman whom "progressives" like to call "Billary" and "the Hildebeast." The presidential candidate who is so racist and loathsome that she was hoping and praying for the assassination of her noble and heroic opponent. The woman who is so evil and so unclean that my former trusted "progressive" allies traveled here to this blog just to tell me that they "despise" and "hate" the "bitch," the "cunt."
When "progressives" like that call you a Republican, well, it's hard not to flat-out laugh in their deranged unprogressive misogynistic faces. But I recoil at the thought of ever getting that close to their faces.
And more from Tennessee Guerilla Womem: Please people, do not ever again talk to me about the vileness and deceitfulness of right-wing bloggers. I and countless other Hillary supporters experienced a radical paradigm shift during our defense of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Women have no political party, we have no respectful place in the larger progressive community. In the words of Janis:
[A]s far as women are concerned, there are two parties: those that hate us, and those that don’t. And the boundary line dividing those two parties doesn’t have a damned thing to do with the line dividing Democrat from Republican, or liberal from conservative.
And another Reclusive Leftist post on the history of the Democratic Party males' reluctance to treat women as equals. There's also PumaPAC, an unconnected political action committee (People United Means Action) that calls itself the voice of the people in the Democratic Party.
If you want more journalism and less personal testimony, read 'Destroying Hillary Clinton', from the Guardian UK.
Strictly based on the numbers, and on the political strategies I studied in grad school, if a party is to succeed it must unite behind a single candidate whose platform will cover interests as far around the spectrum as possible. I don't visualize American politics in the left-right unilateral that is commonly used, but I also don't think in terms of the Cartesian grid of libertarianism. Instead, I think in terms of irregularly shaped bowls or circles filled with something like tiny pebbles. Imagine that all the possible political positions are contained within a circle or oval, with the most popular ones (that have the most supporters) being toward the center and the least popular at various positions along the outside. The more closely aligned a candidate is with a specific set of views, the more weight the candidate has, and the more the candidate sinks into a certain section of the bowl-- and the more pebbles roll toward that direction. The pebbles are supporters. But the pebbles' movement isn't entirely governed by gravity; it's also affected by magnetism of various kinds because of various issues, and if the candidate makes mistakes one of two things will happen: the candidate's apparent weight will lessen (from lack of wisdom) and another candidate's magnetism will draw the pebbles away (thereby increasing an opponent's weight and decreasing the first candidate's actual weight.)
No matter how you look at it, it's going to be a very interesting convention.
Sen. Ted Kennedy is in Massachusetts being treated for brain cancer, but his office is working as hard as possible to lay the ground work for universal health care.
Generating power with a roller coaster.
More later. It's laundry day, and I can't type while running up and down stairs while dodging cats playing tag.
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Comments:
![[User Picture]](http://www.insanejournal.com/userpic/302654/59041) | | From: | ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ihcoyc |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 04:18 pm (UTC) |
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My reply over yonder:
Nobody I know of voted against Sen. Clinton because she’s a woman. I know I voted against her because she’s a Clinton. The only Clinton I want to see in the White House is George.
To claim that Obama is “Republican-lite” is absurd. The list of Bill Clinton’s progressive achievements as President could hide under a dime with plenty of room left - and you want a rerun of that? The unemployment “reform” we’ll all be revisiting and suffering from as the economy goes south over the next year or two was enacted under Bill Clinton.
Sen. Clinton introduced a video game censorship bill. This alone paints her as another Tipper Gore, another Southern politician using Mom-ism to pander to “values” voters rather than standing up for freedom of speech. She voted for one version of the bankruptcy “reform” that, to my mind, is the touchstone of political corruption. And as the economy goes south, we’ll be suffering from that one too. And, of course, she voted for war in Iraq.
Whatever else you can say about Obama, he is not a Clinton. This gets him my vote by default.
When Obama is supporting the FISA bill that grants amnesty from prosecution to lawbreakers, and is supporting government payments to religious organizations, he is edging far closer to Republican-lite than he really should be at this point -- or any point.
Bill Clinton is not in question here. Hillary Rodham Clinton is. They are not identical.
Obama's use of sexism in his campaign gets him no gold star from me. I resent his statement that Hillary's views were governed by her hormones. He should have been above such tactics but he was not. That alone tells me that, however attractive a candidate he may be, he is someone whose views I do not entirely share and on whom I will have to keep a close eye.
| | From: | ihcoyc |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 06:47 pm (UTC) |
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Unfortunately, under the winner take all system, you're stuck with the lesser of two evils most of the time. I don't agree with all of Sen. Obama's policies, or with Sen. Clinton's: nor do I disagree with all of Sen. McCain's. This is mostly a consequence of the math rules that US elections are subject to.
But what I find completely incomprehensible is the idea that Sen. Clinton is somehow the "real" progressive in the race. That, despite her long standing ties to the Democratic Leadership Council, the real authors of "Republican-lite", the notion that she is somehow more authentic than Sen. Obama is simply unconvincing. Her past positions make that clear. She's got "welfare reform" and "bankruptcy reform" and moral-panic pandering and Iraq in her resume.
I admire her, mostly for her past. She helped organize against the Vietnam war. She voted for war in Iraq. She went to Wellesley and Yale Law. That side of her life is more attractive than the last four or five months she spent pretending to be the champion of white union labor. Somewhere along the line, she seems to have lost her moral compass.
What I find most galling about all of this is the peevish sense of entitlement that seems to be at work here. My take on the situation is that going into the primaries, Hillary used all her connections to corner as much official support from the Democrat higher ups as she could muster. She expected to ride this to inevitability; what happened is that a substantial portion of the Democratic voters didn't like her, didn't trust her, and didn't want her.
As soon as even a semi-credible alternative arose, much of the rank and file abandoned her. She was probably genuinely surprised by this turn of events. This was supposed to be her year. I can understand how some of her supporters might find this disappointing. But to portray Obama's victory as the triumph of machine politics over the grass roots is, to be blunt, simply deranged. In fact, it seems just the opposite. Sen. Clinton was the candidate of the Democratic insiders from the beginning.
No, we're not going to elect the first woman President this year. We hopefully will elect the first Black president. Maybe next year, the Democrats will have a woman candidate whose name is not Clinton. Yes, it's time to get over it and come together.
![[User Picture]](http://www.insanejournal.com/userpic/396532/68486) | | From: | fidhle |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 04:57 pm (UTC) |
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Hillary Clinton started out the contest with a large percentage of the population against her because of her history. She had very high negatives even before the primaries started. Certainly some of that was sexism. I imagine that there are as many people who would not vote for her because of gender as there are who will not vote for Obama because of his racial makeup.
Certainly Obama is going to move to the center to try to win the election. I'm very much afraid that history is repeating itself. There was a time when the various components of the left so wanted their own agendas to be first and foremost, that the left split, and we got Nixon instead. I certainly would not like that to happen again.
It should be remembered that Hillary used race in her arguments, that she appealed to WHITE people, for example. She also said, IIRC, that while she and McCain satisfied the Commander In Chief test, Obama didn't, certainly a very low blow to claim for a fellow democrat. Whatever the Commander In Chief test was anyway. Frankly, being a successful Senator and the wife of a President no more qualifies a person to be President than does being shot down by a missile and kept prisoner for 5 years.
As to the Telecom immunity issue, I'm very torn about that, especially since it is being used as a kind of litmus test. A government asked private corporations to engage in an activity which, apparently they were assured was legal, but which was in fact illegal, but without any way for the corporations to tell that they were illegal. It seems to me that it is the government officials who asked for the cooperation who are at fault, much more than the telecoms. It is also much more important to get such spying under court control than it is to punish the telecoms at this stage. I also have great doubts as to any plaintiff showing any damage as a result of that activity, and without damages there is no basis for a lawsuit. So I'm not really sure that Telecom Immunity should be that big of an issue.
Just remember whilst Obama bashing seems to be popular in certain circles these days, a President McCain would be far worse, even if Obama was as some people fear he may be. We can't afford to forget the prize in our zeal to be correct in all details.
BTW, the nomination was Hillary's to lose, and she did because she felt that she was entitled to the nomination and really made no plans past Super Tuesday, when she assumed she would lock it up. Obama's campaign was much more focused on what he needed to do to win, that is, to get delegates. Hillary really disgraced herself and her cause by agreeing to not count Florida and Michigan, and then trying to count them in the end. I believe that is a little like CalvinBall, where the rules change to suit the player. The way they ran their campaigns indicate that Obama is far better prepared to be President and to be an effective administrator than was Clinton.
A final point. I am very worried when just two families, the Bush and Clinton families seem to want to trade the Presidency between them. We are not a banana republic and have a much larger base of qualified people that that found in those two families.
| | From: | fidhle |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 05:05 pm (UTC) |
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An addendum, had she won the nomination, I would happily support her. I simply believe that Obama is the better candidate. I am very happy that this nomination battle was between a person of mixed race and a woman. That is a sure sign of progress in this country.
A government asked private corporations to engage in an activity which, apparently they were assured was legal, but which was in fact illegal, but without any way for the corporations to tell that they were illegal.
That dog won't hunt. Corporations do indeed have a way to tell what's legal or not, it's a process called "checking with your lawyer," whose very well paid job is to tell them if the latest request from the government is legal or not. The government officials who asked for cooperation should also be facing civil and criminal penalties, but that's no excuse for letting corporations off the hook for failing to exercise due care.
Nor is difficulty showing damages going to be a problem: violation of civil rights is in and of itself damage.
| | From: | fidhle |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 08:33 pm (UTC) |
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The problem with "checking with your lawyer" is just how is the lawyer going to be able to tell. FISA court rulings are not the easiest thing to discover, and it is whether the government applied to that court which makes the difference between legal and not. Don't think you can just go to the FISA court to see what surviellence requests they have approved.
As to the second part, it might be very difficult to prove that any given person's communications had, in fact, been monitored. Without such proof, there is no case.
The main purpose, as I understand it, for the suits was to try to force whatever discovery might be available. Alas, that, by an of itself, is not really a valid reason for a lawsuit, IMHO.
I still think the proper remedy is to prosecute the government officials breaking the law. But, as a practical matter, that won't happen.
My main concern is to get back to a system of laws, however imperfect, rather than extra-legal actions by the executive, and that, IMHO, outweighs any benefit from private suits against the telecoms.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | July 3rd, 2008 06:13 am (UTC) |
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The FISA court issues search warrants. If the government doesn't show you a search warrant when they ask you to let them look at your private things, the Constitution says you don't have to let them. Secret warrants that they don't have to show anyone let them do their own wiretapping, they don't permit or compel anyone to hand the information over to them. Any lawyer able to pass the bar knows this.
The way to get back to a system of laws is to hold people accountable to those laws. Granting immunity to people who clearly violated those laws is not getting back to a system of laws, it is the opposite of getting back to a system of laws. It creates a system wherein people and corporations can expect to be permitted to break the law with special impunity granted by the lawmaking body.
Unfortunately, the current regime does not seem too interested in enforcing the provisions of the Constitution.
THat was me who wrote this.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 07:19 pm (UTC) |
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| | from holzman @ livejournal | (Link) |
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If people are thinking PUMAs are Republicans, it probably has to do with the fact that PUMA PAC was created by McCain supporter Darragh Murphy, as Pandagon (http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/pumas_are_swiftboats_darragh_murphy/) documents and Rumproast (http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/puma_pacs_founder_darragh_murphy_proudly_presents_party_unity_my_ass_redux/) confirms.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | July 2nd, 2008 10:32 pm (UTC) |
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Thank you. I've been meaning to ask you if you're reading Anglachel?
http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/
If you are so inclined it would be very interesting to know what you think of her analysis.
/B
Excellent analysis of the situation. Some quotes:
...What was Hillary offering that rallied this constituency behind her and which has remained an amazingly strong identification? She offered material improvements to ordinary lives, and an explicit commitment to use the power of the state to achieve those ends. The two most prominent examples are her lifelong commitment to health care and her current response to the mortgage crisis. It is a difference of political style, but also of political philosophy.... It is also a way of diffusing social grievances by substituting festering resentment which can be channeled into resentment-fueled backlash... with amelioration of socio-economic threat through practical policy to stabilize conditions for the working class. In contrast, Obama has run as a conversion experience (You are not Democrat or Republican, you are an Obamacan.), calling people to their better selves, which inherently presupposes that what they currently are doing is wrong, corrupt, and unworthy. It substitutes morality for interests, focuses on the inner-life of the voter rather than on the material needs of the population, and individualizes broad social concerns. If only you racist hicks would improve yourselves we would have a wonderful nation...
There are times when a nation does need to be called to something higher and to set aside particularity in service of a cause. With Obama, however, these are sacrifices with no specificity. It is not a bad message to whack complacent well-off liberals over the head with... but even for the privileged in this country, you have to ask – Sacrifice on behalf of what? What is being relinquished and for what reason?
The historic answer for the modern Democratic Party is for the economic interests of the working class. High-income earners give up money for the cause of economic equity. Workers agree to collective bargaining and forswear revolution. The government acts in deliberate ways to socialize the risks of mere living through measures like education, insurance, public health and safety, regulation of industry and so forth. If the average Joe is secure, the party has done its job.
Symptomatic of the deep problem of the party as a whole is the turn by the leadership towards privatization of social risk. Health insurance is not a mandate, and thus a right, but a choice to be exercised if desired. This ignores power, especially the power of the state to defend the citizen against the encroachment of moneyed interests. The well-off Stevensonians are no longer interested in defending the material needs of those who are not a part of Whole Foods Nation, and they hide their abandonment under the guise of rejecting racism. If the problem is the state of your soul and not the condition of your medical care, then you must heal yourself...
The party may be unified on paper...but the difference can be seen in the philosophical commitments of the final two contenders. One looks at Obama and there is no political substance. Nothing. There is no issue, no cause, no certain pledge that says he and his faction intend to do anything for the working class or any interest that might involve true political contestation.... Everything is on the table to be negotiated away for the sake of “unifying the nation.” When pushed, there will be no shove back. He has nowhere he wants to go.
Bill Clinton, for all his faults, had a cause when he entered the White House, which was utterly political – it was to undo the self-inflicted damage of the party since Johnson and make liberalism credible again to the millions of ordinary citizens who had given up on it. He meant to be, and be seen to be, on the side of people who “worked hard and played by the rules.” He organized his administrations around this cause, which could succeed only by improving the material conditions of people who felt themselves abandoned by the post-Watergate Democrats yet no longer trusted the bluster and bullying of the Republicans. Debate its worth or whether it did enough, but he was effective in this cause. The foundations of the current Democratic revival were laid in the mid-90s, and Obama is running as the ghost of Clinton past, right down to the message of hope and “can do” optimism....
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