Desperate White House Wives

I can’t say I’ve ever been a big fan of Hillary Clinton. I think her husband is basically a douchebag, and like many women I couldn’t understand why she stuck by him during his douchiest moments. I was horrified by her support of the Iraq war. I was more horrified by the idea that she only supported it for her own political career. She may not be any more cold and calculating than any other politician, but she does a worse job of hiding it. There is something about her that I just don’t trust.

However, when her presidential candidacy was announced, I tried to keep an open mind. After all, she is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights, has worked to fund access to birth control and sex education, and helped bring us Plan B (praise lady Jesus). She changed her position on the war in Iraq, she believes in global warming, and she doesn’t want to build a fence to keep out the undocumented immigrants whose labor our economy relies on. And, hello, it’s about time we had some gender diversity up in the White House.

There is no doubt that Hillary was a marked improvement from the last couple Democratic nominees (after all, what’s the point of electing a man if he doesn’t have the balls to fight for a presidency he should have won?).

But then a junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had the audacity to declare his own candidacy, and his idealism was so infectious that it captured the media, the youth, and a significant chunk of Hillary’s base.

I feel bad for Hillary, I really do. She has worked incredibly hard to get where she is today, harder indeed than most male candidates would have had to. She has been subjected to vicious sexist attacks in the media and elsewhere. She has been the subject of ongoing criticism based on her appearance and demeanor. For anyone who thought that sexism was a thing of the past, this campaign has certainly proved that blatant misogyny is still socially acceptable.

Regardless of who is running against her, Hillary faces a mountain of obstacles. It must be devastating to come this close only to be eclipsed by Obama’s grace and charisma. Hillary is like the straight-A student running for class president against the captain of the football team.

The thing is, Hillary needs to wake up and smell the reality. After all, both candidates want to put new vending machines in the cafeteria, and at this point it’s a question of what’s best for the student body.

Hillary’s performance in this election, however, has shown that she in fact has little regard for what’s best for our country, and is more than willing to exploit racial fears to further her own candidacy.

From Betsy Reed’s excellent analysis in The Nation:

Yet what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security.

As her chances of winning narrow, Hillary continues to sink to new lows in her desperate bid for power. She is now eschewing subtlety and just going straight for racist rhetoric.





Just in case you missed the point, that would be WHITE Americans who are hard-working. Presumably the black voters supporting Obama are either shiftless welfare recipients or over-educated bourgeois dilettantes without real jobs.

So Hillary’s claim to fame is that poor, uneducated white people prefer her to Obama. Not to jump to any conclusions, but might I conclude that a majority of that demographic would prefer ANY WHITE PERSON to Obama? Especially since over 80% of the West Virginian voters who said that race was a key factor supported Hillary.Yet Hillary is not at all embarrassed of her racist constituency. In fact, she is embracing them and their racism, because the last card in her deck is the white privilege card.

Is it just me or does this feel like a flashback to another historical electoral moment, when white women suffragists were like, totally cool with black men getting the vote... until it became clear that it wouldn't be possible for both black men and white women to get it, at which point they sold out their black allies, started using white supremacist logic to argue for women's suffrage, and joined forces with white male racists to oppose the 13th and 14th Amendments?

You would think we'd learn from our mistakes. But rather than help create a coalition to strengthen the Democratic party and unite its core constituency of BOTH working class whites AND people of color, Hillary's win-at-all-costs strategy is functioning to exploit racial divisions and entrench white supremacy. On second thought, sounds like she's a perfect candidate for President of the United States!