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.
Thank you for puts these thoughts in print - I have been thinking along the same lines.
Good luck with the job. I wish you the happiness of a secure and predictable income, something whose benefits are best understood by those who have done without.
What Athena said. Also, {{{hugs}}}. I think a lot of what you’re going through is definitely the job thing, which I’m going through as well. It’s so frustrating to have had so many interviews and no job offers yet!
I’ve been lurking for a while, but I just wanted to say your posts at Feministe are missed. I’m also really sick of the primary, and scared to death that McCain will win. I admit that I voted for Obama in my primary, though not wholeheartedly, but as the race goes on I just like Clinton more and more.
(I almost delurked earlier when you wrote that post about your cat not covering. Seriously, is it THAT HARD?)
Thanks, all.
The year started out with such promise, and within a month it descended into rancor. There are people I used to consider friends who aren’t anymore, and entire swaths of the blogosphere where critical thinking has been abandoned. I mean, I understand enthusiasm, but the starry-eyed hero worship of someone who is, after all, just another pol — and at that, one with a pretty damn thin record of accomplishment — is really pretty freaky.
I had a boss once who used to tell us during training sessions that we absolutely had to figure out a way to deal with the negative facts in our cases — the ones that weren’t going to change. And it feels like the more rabid Obama supporters don’t even want to hear that there *are* any negative facts associated with their guy. The approach they take to anyone who brings up the negatives — shouting down, shaming, accusations of racism — really makes me wonder what they’ll do when they have to face the GOP slime machine.
Hell, it makes me wonder what they’ll do if he wins, and they find out he’s actually a politician.
I miss your posting at Feministe! I understand what you mean, though — time was, when I went through the mod queue at my blog I only had to worry about spam and misogynist trolls. Now the hardliner Obama trolls (not all Obama supporters, just the ones that spew venom) are at the top of the list, above misogynist trolls and spam. It feels virtually impossible to have a calm, reasoned argument over the candidates these days.
Yeah, and the few attempts I made at Feministe to discuss the issues — or to discuss larger issues of misogyny, which you’d think feminists would be alert to regardless of whom they support — just convinced me that it wasn’t worth the conflict.
I do get my fix elsewhere; you may note that I’ve made some additions to the blogroll. Not to mention some deletions.
I totally agree–if you (and by you, I mean Zuzu) make a reasonable, thought-out statement (ie, the dog whistle post at Feministe), there’s immediately a crowd of sharks who think you’re an Obama-hating, Hillary-loving fascist. I’ve been stunned by the vitriol that’s out there and have been avoiding political discussions for precisely that reason.
What are the additions to your blogroll? I’d love to find some more reasoned posts on the subject.
Hmm. I hate to be accused of being a troll, but it seems that there might be a few problems with your positions. First, there seems to be some false equivalence going on here. Yes, both Obama and Clinton are politicians, and yes, both have said some unnecessary things. But I have not seen evidence of gender bashing by Obama’s campaign to equate to the race-baiting Clinton’s campaign has engaged in (both being far milder than the GOP has and will continue to use). There sems little to dispute that Clinton’s campaign went negative, as a strategy, first and hardest. Second, the criticism that Obama’s record is “light” seems to be a rehashed talking point, not a fact (unless you concede that Clinton’s record is light, too). Unless you don’t count his work in the Illinois legislature (it is, after all, public work as an elected official), Obama has far more in the way of accomplishments than Clinton. And neither has been extraordinarily productive in the US Senate.
Really, not trolling, just suggesting some points for you to consider.
Unless you don’t count his work in the Illinois legislature (it is, after all, public work as an elected official), Obama has far more in the way of accomplishments than Clinton.
Actually, I don’t count his work in the Illinois legislature for much. The first five years he was there, he got nothing passed because the legislature was under Republican control, and in his final year, he was given credit for a whole lot of bills that he didn’t do the work on, because there was a kingmaker helping him out.
As for the rest of your points, I don’t really care who went negative first. It’s politics; people go negative. I think that a lot of the “racial” stuff is overblown (i.e., the “fairytale” stuff. Hello?) and/or pushed by people like Kos.
However, I’m also not talking about the campaigns as much as I am the supporters. And there’s gleeful gender bashing aplenty. This guy is fairly representative of the kind of thing I’m talking about. And then you have people like Keith Olbermann, or Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein, who just casually smear Clinton by uncritically passing on their assumption that she was behind the Wright thing getting out — even though ABC News made it known that they purchased the Wright DVDs from Wright’s own website, and Fox has been hammering this for quite some time now.
Some of the best commentary on the raw, naked misogyny of Obama supporters in the blogosphere and in the media comes from a couple of people who hate Clinton, Avedon Carol and Susie Madrak. Somehow, they’re able to separate how they feel about Clinton’s accomplishments and record and how they view misogyny.
In fact, see Susie Madrak’s comment here for a good example of what I’m talking about:
I don’t watch tv, so I haven’t seen Olbermann on this, and I haven’t read Ezra Klein. But if your argument is that Josh Marshall is misogynistic, or unfair to Clinton, then I think you might be projecting too much here. Marshall has been pretty diligent about calling out nonsense from supporters of both camps. His statement, if i remember correctly, was not that Clinton was behind the Wright brouhaha, but rather that it only was news because Ferraro’s comments had made news the preceding few days, and he blamed Clinton’s campaign for it’s tepid response to those. Incidentally, so do I, mostly because they were stupid.
I don’t know the veracity of the Houston writer’s claims (and I wonder if you do), but I do know that Obama wrote far more legislation than Clinton has (although it is true that most of that did not pas the Illinois legislature). Even without that, his senate experience does not pale in comparison to hers. On the other hand, McCain has a shitload more experience than both of them; hopefully, you’d not argue that makes him a better candidate. I’m sorry that overly zealous supporters have subjected you to gender bashing. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Clinton getting blamed for McCain’s presidency, because Obama will beat him. The majority of voters are not going to support McCain’s embrace of the current fiasco.
Great post, Zuzu. I completely understand what you’re saying. And you certainly don’t need to keep reiterating your point so that others “get it”. You’ve left enough bread crumbs that they ought to be able to figure it out themselves.
Sorry, Dave. Here’s what Marshall said:
IOW, Marshall’s blaming Clinton for Wright, as if she wrote his sermons or she was the one who pushed this story. And like Ezra Klein, who so breezily assumed that this was a “Clinton oppo dump,” Marshall didn’t check his facts. Sean Hannity’s been flogging this story for a long time, and ABC News got its own videos. Obama himself tried to put a lid on Wright last year and minimized his public presence.
And the Josh Marshall of last year would have checked his facts (Ezra, I’m not so sure about). But he’s in the tank for Obama now, so he just passes along every unsubstantiated rumor that she’s the really really bad one and she’s the only one who’s gone negative.
I’m where I’ve been all along in this campaign - on balance preferring Obama (I voted for him, not apologizing for that vote), but not, I think, hero worshipping him, and still liking Clinton as well. Some of the complaints about racism seem overblown to me (”fairy tale” really does read as a reference to whether Obama’s Iraq record is all that different from Sen. Clinton’s, Kos seems to be wrong, and too cavalier in making a serious charge, about the darkened face in the photo, the 3AM ad may be fear mongering, but ordinary fear mongering positioning Clinton as more experienced and hawkish, not special racist fear mongering). Some complaints have been reasonable (the whole series of Clinton surrogate statements right before the South Carolina was starting to look bad, though I’m satisfied she put a stop to it, and Ferraro was out of line suggesting Obama only got so far because he was black, remarks that kind of deserved Ezra’s mocking response).
And most of the really misogynist or racist stuff that’s been coming up seems to me to be either coming from loose cannon supporters that neither campaign can really control, or from the right where you’d expect it.
But neither actual candidate has crossed any lines that would prevent me from very willingly voting for either over McCain in the fall. They’re both pols, but they’re both pols that will get me better policies than McCain would, bottom line.
Really, not trolling, just suggesting some points for you to consider.
Really, zuzu, it’s not like you’ve actually put any thought into your posts or been keeping up with the news or anything. /sarcasm
That right there is why I’ve been tearing my hair out — the steaming piles of condescension.
…just “gah!” and thank you for not giving up completely.
I wish you’d been blogging more about this but totally understand why you haven’t. I’ve been appreciating your comments at Shakesville, though. Thank you.
Part of the problem is that I haven’t been online and/or posting all that much anyway, so when I do post something, threads get derailed immediately with the tu quoques: “Why haven’t you posted anything about this other nasty rumor that I heard Hillary did? What are you, racist? You’re in the tank for her! Admit it!”
I mean, Melissa has been scrupulously fair about covering the *issues* without attacking the *candidates* and she still gets called out on this all the time.