What will it feel like to be an Obama supporter, I wonder? I guess I'll find out in an hour or so. At any rate, here are a couple of pre-Hillary speech links I wanted to share...
Obama supporters and other Democrats are finally getting around to wooing Clinton supporters. As much as I enjoy the attention, I have to admit that I think a lot of this stuff is a day late and a dollar short:
Even the Democratic National Committee chairman is avidly trying to make up for accusations that he allowed sexism in the race to pass unchallenged.
"The wounds of sexism need to be the subject of a national discussion," the chairman, Howard Dean, said in an interview. "Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers" toward Mrs. Clinton.
This is nice. It would have been much nicer to see this kind of reaction when it would have mattered, though.
Even today, I'm seeing pundits on TV and commenters here talk about, oh, heavens, her ambition! How audacious she was! Even while she's literally in a car, traveling to an event where she'll be ending her campaign and urging her supporters to get behind the Democratic nominee (So divisive! Obviously intent on destroying the party!), people just can't seem to avoid getting in a couple of final potshots.
We've discussed the NARAL endorsement of Obama here before, and Obama supporter Katha Pollitt suggests it will hurt women in states like South Dakota, where tiny NARAL affiliates have to fight anti-abortion ballot measures:
NARAL's puzzling, no-strings endorsement of Obama could not have come at a worse moment. Not only was it too late to matter, it needlessly infuriated the Clinton-favoring donor base and important state affiliates. Meanwhile, South Dakota NARAL's operation consists of one paid staffer.
If I might digress a bit and say one word about the Clintons, who to many are personas non grata in the Democratic Party now. Whatever happens, Bill Clinton will still be the 42nd president of the United States and the first two term Democrat since Roosevelt. That's never going to change. Democrats should ask themselves, once the smoke has cleared, if it's really a good idea to discredit his accomplishments. However you personally may feel about him, there is value in a popular ex-president remaining popular. Political value. (See: Reagan legacy project.) The question is what they are valued for.
Katha Pollitt, again, who writes about a real movement around Hillary Clinton's candidacy that has been ignored:
Now those women, not all white and not all working class, are on the political map, and so are the issues that made them identify with Clinton: the glass ceiling and the sticky floor, the inequality built into marriage and family life, sexual harassment and assault, lack of support for caring work--paid or unpaid--and, underlying them all, a fundamental lack of respect that over the years can make a woman feel fed up to here. It's an irony of this campaign that Clinton was seen by the pundit class as a kind of über-diva whose attempts to reach out were transparently phony (beer and Canadian Club, anyone?) and yet millions of ordinary women--white, Latino and black--saw their struggles mirrored in hers.
I've found the party's response to these issues pretty disappointing so far, but I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised during the course of the fall campaign. This is really about what we say we are as a movement, and our actions in the upcoming weeks will either alienate millions of Clinton supporters forever, or draw people back into a party that will be better for having these discussions and facing these issues head-on. I don't know what will happen yet.
