Nothing esoteric, just a plain old look at the facts and a question

" We've all witnessed scenarios where, on the playground little girls are being taunted by little boys while both girls and boys stand idle, afraid to speak up or even cheering. Or, in the workplace males tease young and older female co-workers; make obscene gestures, inappropriate comments, laughing and expecting (often correctly) that everyone will join in. Then there was that movie where Jodie Foster portrayed the true story of woman who was ganged raped in a bar while others looked on and encouraged the realization. Still others pretended the rape didn't happen. In short, gang raping of women is commonplace in our culture both physically and metaphorically.

This past week, we witnessed just such a phenomenon involving men who are afraid of a powerful woman. Hillary Clinton, in her quest for her Presidential nomination, has in fact endured infantile taunting and wildly inappropriate commentary. Indeed we have witnessed almost comical attacks by John Edwards who in turn sided with Barak Obama as both snickered at Clinton's "breakdown," which consisted of a very short dewy-eyed moment. Now John Kerry, who should certainly know better after his own "swiftboating," has joined the playground gang."

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). "They" are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

link

The New York Times’ Roger Cohen looks at the problems Obama's facing in the Jewish community. "The attacks, mainly anonymous e-mails, have woven together various threads -- his middle name ‘Hussein;’ schooling in Muslim Indonesia; his Chicago pastor’s embrace of the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan; and his calls for dialogue with Iran -- to portray Obama as the Muslim Manchurian candidate. Leading American Jewish organizations have denounced these ‘hateful e-mails.’ Obama has condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and made clear he disagrees with his pastor, the Rev. Jerermiah A. Wright Jr., whose magazine honored Farrakhan last year. But he’s not broken with Wright, the man who ushered him to his Christian faith.”

link

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.

Hillary would not have won that battle without exaggerated support from women. Despite having campaigned vigorously as a candidate who just-so-happened to be a woman, her lifeline came from affinity voters.

How then to compete against Obama, who has -- as Al Sharpton recently complained -- run a race-neutral campaign? A man standing as a general-interest candidate despite his historic racial qualifications.

The answer, it seems, has been to inject race into the campaign by any means necessary. The effort has run the gamut from old-school racism -- Andrew Cuomo's execrable "shuck-and-jive" comment -- to tired racial paradigms -- a Clinton pollster's assertion that Hispanics don't vote for black people -- to anti-racism-as-racism -- the bizarre suggestion by a Clinton surrogate that Obama had been adopted by white America as its "imaginary hip black friend."

As distasteful as this campaign has been, it has worked. The media have segued neatly from Clinton's tears and her outpouring of support among women in the granite state to Obama's standing as a "black candidate" -- now awkwardly forced to defend the legacy of Dr. King from slights by the Clinton machine.

So much for the post-racial transcendence to which he has aspired; Obama has now even been yoked -- however tenuously -- to the discredited politics of Louis Farrakahn, thanks to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's smear job this morning.
more

Bill Clinton Accuses Obama Camp of Stirring Race IssueBy KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: January 24, 2008

KINGSTREE, S.C. — Former President Bill Clinton defended himself Wednesday against accusations that he and his wife had injected the issue of race into the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina, and he accused Senator Barack Obama of Illinois of putting out a “hit job” on him.

Scolding a reporter, Mr. Clinton said the Obama campaign was “feeding” the news media to keep issues of race alive, obscuring positive coverage of the presidential campaign here of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“They know this is what you want to cover,” Mr. Clinton told a CNN reporter in Charleston, in an apparent reference to the Obama campaign.

“Shame on you,” the former president added.

more

Now, though, some of those old patterns are reasserting themselves.

The series of comments Clinton critics’ cite began in mid-December, when the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, Bill Shaheen, speculated about whether Obama had ever dealt drugs. In the final days of the New Hampshire campaign, however, the discomfort of some black observers intensified as Bill Clinton dismissed the contrast between Obama’s judgment on the war and Clinton’s as a “fairy tale” and spoke dismissively of his short time in the Senate. And the candidate herself, in an interview with Fox News, stressed the role of President Lyndon Johnson, over Martin Luther King Jr., in the civil rights movement.

“I would point to the fact that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done,” she said, in response to a question about how her dismissive attitude toward Obama’s “false hopes” would have applied to the civil rights movement. “That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished.”

link

1/13/2008
Statement from Bob Johnson on His Comments Today in South Carolina

"My comments today were referring to Barack Obama's time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else. Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect.

"When Hillary Clinton was in her twenties she worked to provide protections for abused and battered children and helped ensure that children with disabilities could attend public school.

That results oriented leadership -- even as a young person -- is the reason I am supporting Hillary Clinton."

link

The former president said Johnson needs to be "taken at his word," adding that "nobody knew" what he would say and "it wasn't part of any planned strategy."

link

"As an African American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues, when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book... When they have been involved, to say that these two people would denigrate the accomplishment of civil rights marchers, men and women who were hosed, beaten and bled, and some died... To say and to expect us now all of a sudden to say we are attacking a black man. That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me or a guy that says I want to be a reasonable, likeable Sidney Poitier 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And I'm thinking to myself, this ain't a movie, Sidney."

link

So Russert asked Clinton, Does that mean that you'll bar Bob Johnson from future campaign events for making what sure seemed to be a reference to Obama's past drug use?

"Well," Clinton said, "Bob has put out a statement saying what he was trying to say and what he thought he had said. We accept him on his word on that. But, clearly, we want to send a very clear message to everybody that this campaign is too important for us to either get diverted or, frankly, get the message of what we want to do for our country subverted by any kind of statements or claims that are just not part of who I am or who Barack or John are."

Fair enough. Johnson did in fact put out a statement -- he said that when he referred derogatively to Obama "doing something in the neighborhood," he was referring to Obama's work as a community organizer. And in saying she'd "accept" Johnson's "word on that," Clinton tracked the line that her husband had used -- for better or for worse -- in defending Johnson Monday.

But when Russert pressed, asking Clinton whether Johnson's comments had been "out of bounds," she responded by saying, "Yes, they were. And he has said that."

Help us out here. If Clinton really takes Johnson at his word -- that is, if she believes that he was simply comparing the Clintons' commitment to civil rights with Obama's early work as a community organizer -- then how can she also believe that Johnson's comments were "out of bounds"? And if Johnson's comments were "out of bounds," why won't she bar him from future campaign events, as her Sunday pledge might suggest?

link

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it…

“I do not begrudge Bill Clinton’s working for his wife, but the one thing I would say is really important to President Clinton to think about right now, because of the larger megaphone he has as a former president, he really needs to be careful with the truth.”

McCaskill went on to say that Clinton “tried to manipulate the facts in a way that is patently unfair,” “flat wrong,” and “demeaning.” She did not elaborate.

Gov. Janet Napolitano (D-AZ) urged Clinton to remember that the Democrats would have to unify around a candidate “before Denver,” she said, referring to the party’s nomination convention, and to choose his words carefully.

“That’s beneath the dignity of a former president,” Leahy told reporters, adding: “He is not helping anyone, and certainly not helping the Democratic Party.”

As strongly as we back her candidacy, we urge Mrs. Clinton to take the lead in changing the tone of the campaign. It is not good for the country, the Democratic Party or for Mrs. Clinton, who is often tagged as divisive, in part because of bitter feeling about her husband’s administration and the so-called permanent campaign. (Indeed, Bill Clinton’s overheated comments are feeding those resentments, and could do long-term damage to her candidacy if he continues this way.)

link

All the Spouses Do It

01.29.08

By David Kurtz

Her apology was hedged and conditioned, but Hillary seemed to go out of her way tonight in an interview on CNN to try to address the damage done by her South Carolina campaign:

Video

The distortion of Obama's position on abortion echoes Hillary's audacious argument that Obama really wasn't against the Iraq war and betrayed his promises by failing to vote against war appropriation bills after the Democrats couldn't override Bush's veto. I wish Obama had bucked the Democratic leadership and taken a stronger stand. But it's a gross distortion of history to equate his positions with Clinton's overt support for the war authorization, refusal to apologize for her vote, and claim that she was really doing it all to promote more diplomatic solutions.

We can find further distortions in a mailing sent out before the Iowa caucuses by the independent expenditure committee of a key Clinton ally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The AFSCME mailing attacked Obama on his health care plan by using a John Edwards quote that was featured so prominently that recipients could assume that his campaign was the source of the attack piece. This and other actions so disturbed a group of seven AFSCME International Vice Presidents wrote a public letter to their union president, saying that although the union had endorsed Clinton on a split vote, the political committee had no mandate to attack Obama. They demanded the committee stop what they called "fundamentally dishonest" attacks.

more

Bill Clinton Asks for a Second Chance

By Liz Halloran
Posted February 11, 2008


The morning after his wife, Hillary, was routed in three state contests by Sen. Barack Obama in their dead-heat battle for the Democratic nomination, former President Bill Clinton made his case for her before a packed Sunday service at one of the largest black churches in Washington, D.C.

But first he offered an apology of sorts for racially tinged comments he made about Obama and his candidacy that have triggered a backlash in the black community and among many other Democrats.

Clinton invoked his "worship of a God of second chances" in pronouncing himself glad to be at the House of Praise, which claims nearly 15,000 members. His invocation of second chances echoed comments he made early last week at black churches in California, where he campaigned for his wife before that state's Super Tuesday primary, which she won.

more