Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Either here or at Feministe. To be honest, I’ve not really felt comfortable lately in the blogosphere, so I’ve been doing a lot of self-censoring. This primary has been hellish, and some formerly perfectly reasonable people have completely lost their shit. Every time I’ve done a post at Feministe about the election, someone accuses me — and it’s always an accusation, as if there were something wrong with it — of being a Clinton supporter. Sure, I’ve done a lot more posting about the misogyny of the press and of Obama supporters who seem to be absolutely gleeful that they can openly trash Clinton in gendered terms because she’s a power-hungry bitch standing in the way of their guy than I have about the accusations of racism against the Clinton camp (though I’m still trying to figure out how “fairy tale” and “kid” got to be racist terms). But when I posted back in early February that it was literally a coin toss between Clinton and Obama at that point, I meant it.

But since then, to be honest, the behavior of the press, of the Obamabots, of a lot of people in the blogosphere, of senior party officials and of the Obama campaign — not to mention Obama himself — has pushed me farther and farther away from him. It doesn’t help at all that there’s a clear double standard at work — where Clinton gets called on the carpet for things that *both* candidates, being politicians, do, but Obama gets a pass. And that whole mishegoss over at LGM over the Florida and Michigan primaries, where I got compared, in great detail, to John “Torture Memo” Yoo simply because I suggested that people who are going to make “rules are rules” arguments might want to take a look at the actual rules sometime.

I’m really beginning to be afraid that McCain might walk away with this one. One thing that keeps the patriarchy going is the failure of oppressed groups to work together. So as long as the narrative is Who Gets To Be First, The Black Guy or The Woman, the Rich White Guys get to keep themselves amused while the Democrats break themselves apart over increasingly bitter identity-based conflicts, real or the result of baiting.

And the best part is, if the Dem candidate loses in November, Hillary Clinton (and women) will get the blame for it. If she’s the nominee, it will have been because she “stole” the nomination with her race-baiting tactics, or because she’s the establishment candidate. Let’s just never mind the part where neither candidate at this point can get the required number of delegates to win outright, and that the superdelegates will be picking the nominee regardless. And that it’s entirely possible that she could win the popular vote even if he gets the greater number of delegates, and that the superdelegates might very well decide that the popular vote is more important than the delegate count.

And if she loses? Well, it will be because she just wasn’t likable enough, or she couldn’t get men to vote for her, or because she broke the party, or because she turned off voters with racist campaigning, or because the country’s just not ready for a female President. It *won’t* be because the liberal white dudes won’t vote for her because they don’t want to vote for a woman, or because the people who switched parties to vote for Obama in the primary don’t bother to vote in the general election since their guy’s not in it. Or because the press loathes her. Or because, god forbid, the people threatening to burn Denver to the ground if she gets nominated follow through.

If Obama gets nominated and fails to win in November, it will again be Clinton’s fault because she didn’t step aside and let him sail to an easy coronation, and so she poisoned the well. Or he’ll get Swiftboated — either by the Republicans, or by the press, who will discover that their true love is really John McCain — and she’ll get blamed for it because she questioned his experience during the primary.

Because that’s the way it works — you can blame anything on a woman. Especially if she’s Hillary Clinton.