season of the bitch

So after getting my first official troll (and I’m assuming that this isn’t another incarnation of that girl from SC who still hates me for reasons I just don’t get), I have to think about my own reaction to this primary process.

All of us Obama people have been accused of being “sheep” and just in love with the way the man speaks. Being a white feminist, I’ve also been told that I’m disloyal to women and that I cannot be a feminist if I don’t vote for Hillary Clinton on top of that.

Even one of my friends was arguing with me last weekend that many people voting for Obama are voting for him for stupid reasons (as if millions of people in every election don’t vote for “stupid” reasons like which candidate they’d rather have a beer with). This of course insulted the hell out of me, since I like to think that I’m smarter than that and that my friends know me better than that.

At the beginning of the primary season, I made this chart for one of my other gigs. Did the research on almost every single candidate from each party running for president, and lined them all up next to each other and looked at it. While doing that research, I read the issue positions on each candidate’s website and looked at their voting records.

I was tempted by Bill Richardson, really, I was. But in the end he was an ineffective campaigner and money-raiser, and I’d like a Democrat to win in November, thanks. So I stuck with Barack, whose Dreams From My Father I read and loved and identified with. Whose policy proposals, particularly on foreign policy, were closest to what I myself felt. I don’t want any more saber-rattling. I want negotiation. I want understanding that other countries are not just “with us or against us.” (I want single-payer health care too, but only Kucinich was talking about that, and again, I’d like to win in November.)

But ANY of those Democratic candidates would get my whole support–which doesn’t mean just blogging, it means putting my money and my free time where my big mouth is and donating and volunteering and harassing those nice people who aren’t nearly as partisan as me–in November, because the shit we’re up against is scary. (See last post for reference.)

Hell, I love the idea of a woman president. But the nastiness of this campaign wore on me like it did everyone, and even though I am a white feminist who recoils at sexism like it’s a personal slap in my face, I just didn’t see the sexism as coming from the Obama campaign. Most of the people on the ground for Obama were women, young women of all ethnic backgrounds (and men, too, but I’d have to say that in my personal experience with several different offices, all but one has had a woman in charge).

By contrast, I did see race-baiting coming from the Clinton campaign, so much so that yes, at several points I joined the crowds of people saying they’d vote third party rather than for Clinton.

I think that by November I’d be over it, though.

I was pissed in 2004 when Howard Dean lost in the primaries. Pissed at John Kerry because of stories of push-polls that implied that Dean beat his wife or reminded people that Dean’s wife was Jewish.

But come November, I was on the ground a 12-hour drive from my home, helping Kerry win Pennsylvania (only for him to lose Ohio, and the race, but whatevs).

Because what we were up against was scary. I don’t like voting against things, really, I don’t. I’d much rather vote FOR someone that I believe in. But when it comes down to it, I’d like to keep my reproductive rights and maybe get some help with health care because as a freelance writer, my ass is screwed as soon as I leave my cushy (ha!) grad school.  I’d like to get out of Iraq and have my friends home. I’d like to not see any more tax cuts for the rich that screw over broke people like me, and I’d like to go to the wedding of my gay friends.

So I know that some of y’all think us Obama people are sexist and sheep and stupid and mean and taking away the election from Hillary Clinton. I admit to some of the same feelings at times myself.

But I’d vote for her if she won. And I’d campaign for her and work my ass off to get her in office. Because it’s much more important now than it seemed back in 2000 when I voted for Nader, when I could barely see a difference between what George Bush was pretending to be and what Al Gore was pretending to be.

I want a woman president. I’m really hoping that Obama chooses a woman as his VP candidate. I think that could be truly revolutionary for this country. I think it’s amazing that the Democratic primary came down to a woman and a black man, and it surpassed all my hopes (frankly, I thought we’d end up with Edwards as soon as Iowa voted, and they proved me wrong and made me happy).

But we need to turn this country back in the right direction, and I hope that if Obama lost, I’d be able to look past my distaste for the race-baiting I saw and realize that we needed a candidate who believed in my reproductive rights, the rights of the GLBT community, who wants to get us out of Iraq and hopefully prevent future wars, who wants to give immigrants more rights (and maybe some fair pay too?) rather than throwing them out and bolstering xenophobia, who knows the difference between Sunni and Shiite, who wants to fix our broken health care system and invest in our schools.  And that I would vote for and work for that candidate. Whomever he or she may be.

US Casualties in Iraq: 4082.

Total US Wounded: 29,978.

Total suffering PTSD and other mental health problems: Unknowable, probably everyone who’s been there.

Iraqi Civilian Deaths: Unknown, documented estimates between 84,050 and 91,713.

It’s time to stop fighting within the Democratic Party or more broadly, the American Left and come together to elect a president opposed to this war, as well as senators, representatives, governors and the rest who are opposed to this war. This is bigger than whether or not the media likes one candidate better. Real people are dying.

And just to note: John McCain was one of three senators not there to vote for the Webb GI Bill. One of the other two was Ted Kennedy, and we know where he was. I don’t know where McCain was, but considering that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still actively campaigning and McCain’s got his primary in the bag, his ass should’ve been there. Even if it was to vote against it, he’d at least be on the record. This is what’s at stake, people. Look at it.

While we’re waiting with bated breath for the returns in Indiana to come in, I thought I’d write a little about sexism in the campaign.

Not the usual bit about sexism in the campaign, of course. That’s been done. Yes, Hillary Clinton has faced sexism. (And Racialicious has a great post about sexism and racism in the campaign that you should read.)

Now her supporters are using it against her opponent.

And that, along with the “obliterate Iran” comment, has made me lose any last bit of positive feeling that I had about her possibly being the first woman president.

I blogged before about why my feminism leads me to be critical of Clinton’s tactics and to support Obama.

Words have power. And the way they are used tells you something about the person using them. Hillary Clinton is not stupid. When she says “obliterate,” she knows the message that she’s sending and the person that she’s appealing to at least as well as Obama knows what he implies by saying “the claws come out.”

And Carville straight-up saying that Clinton has balls is just doing overtly what her campaign has been doing more subtly for months now. While he’s at it, of course, he’s attempting to emasculate Obama.

Aside from being troubling in its similarity to tactics used by the current administration, this crap bothers me because I feel that it confirms what I’ve felt all along: Hillary Clinton isn’t interested in pulling women up behind her, unless it’s when she can say it and get a few votes. She’s not out there trying to prove that women can be president. She’s out there trying to prove that she’s an honorary man and thus gets a pass.

Ariel Levy wrote about this phenomenon in Female Chauvinist Pigs, a book I both liked and found problematic. Levy wanted to site the problems with this phenomenon in “raunch culture,” but her strongest arguments were not against raunch itself but against the commodification of sex and against this very “honorary man” phenomenon–hence the title.

Like Margaret Thatcher and many other women leaders, Hillary Clinton spends lots of time trying to prove she’s got, as my father says, the “balls for the game.” And in an article in The Nation about the Pennsylvania primary, one man at least showed that she’d proved her point.

A construction contractor who gave the name Mike Giordano said he did not watch Obama’s speech on race after the Wright controversy broke because “I don’t listen to those people. They don’t make sense when they talk.” And he summed up the presidential contest this way: “They put a senior citizen for President, a woman and a black man. What do you got? Nothing. But that woman’s got balls.”

The greatest irony of this is that Hillary Clinton, back when her husband was running, was seen as way too powerful and emasculating, so much so that his (and her) approval ratings actually went up among men when rumors of his infidelity and sexual harassment charges came out. Stephen Ducat wrote about this extensively in The Wimp Factor So how is it that now she can get away with being that emasculating woman? Is it different now that she’s running for office herself, rather than as first lady, or is it going to play right into GOP hands for the fall?

Perhaps Clinton’s rhetoric works against Obama, who got my vote precisely because his language and that of his advisers appeals to my feminist sensibilities, but it won’t work against an actual war hero and certified White Guy, John McCain. It’s just one more example of her handing arguments to the Right while making arguments that do nothing for her against McCain.

I suppose the best thing I can say about this is that it allows Obama an easier time attacking the both of them. He can knock militarism and it hits both opponents. (And don’t get me started on the gas tax.)

And if the superdelegates are dumb enough to overturn the majority of the voters to hand the nomination to the person who’s headed right at every opportunity, they may well watch those voters defect to McCain–as well as watching those on the left, particularly the black voters who’ve been disenfranchised one too many times, vote third party again. (Cynthia McKinney, are you listening?) You can’t draw votes away from the Republicans by being just like them.

(cross-posted to Alterdestiny)

I’m not an economist, nor a student of economics, or anything remotely like it.

Still, I’m going to say that Hillary Clinton’s latest plan to gang up with McCain on Barack Obama by supporting McCain’s proposal to suspend the gasoline tax for the summer is terrible policy.

Aside from the fact that yet again she’s running closer to McCain than to Obama, and thus actually making herself a weaker general election candidate (how many swing voters are you going to convince away from McCain by sounding just like him? That’s right, NONE.) this is actually just a plain bad idea.

Taxes are the great boogeyman in American politics these days, aren’t they. Everyone bitches about them, and whenever a politician says “lower taxes” it’s a magic tool to win votes.

But taxes pay for things we need and want. They pay for infrastructure that we desperately need. They pay for teachers and Medicare and police and firemen.

Republicans are great at whining about taxes while allowing huge businesses to run roughshod over us.

Suspending the gas tax, sure, will make gas a few cents cheaper a gallon for the rest of the summer. And hell, I could use that few cents a gallon–it’ll add up.

But it will do NOTHING to alleviate the real problem, which is our dependence on a finite oil supply that largely comes from the Middle East, and it’ll also do nothing to stop the record profits of the oil companies. It’ll just take more money out of the government’s hands to do things that we desperately need it to do. (And, it must be noted, to spend on stupid things like portraits of the people at HUD.)

So why does Hillary Clinton support it? Because it’s another way to criticize Obama while stealing a line out of the Republican playbook? Nah, she’s surely not that cynical…

Anyway,  I’m proud of Barack for standing up to this crappy reasoning. Let’s hope more people see it as such.

(And don’t even get me started on our tax rebate.)

No, it’s not about Bill Clinton.

Via Alterdestiny: McCain to his wife: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.”