It Can't Be Because He's More Qualified

This is among the many items that have brought about what is sure to be an interesting post:

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, begone.

The airwaves will at last be free of comments that liken Clinton to a "she-devil" (Chris Matthews on MSNBC, who helpfully supplied an on-screen mock-up of Clinton sprouting horns). Or those who offer that she's "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court" (Mike Barnicle, also on MSNBC).

But perhaps it is not wives who are so very problematic. Maybe it's mothers. Because, after all, Clinton is more like "a scolding mother, talking down to a child" (Jack Cafferty on CNN).

When all other images fail, there is one other I will not miss. That is, the down-to-the-basics, simplest one: "White women are a problem, that's -- you know, we all live with that" (William Kristol of Fox News).

I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card."

Most of all, I will not miss the silence.

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't publicly uttered a word of outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Will Clinton supporters then begin to miss the lies, the damn lies, and the damnable lies?

Will Clinton supporters all of a sudden begin to miss the bait-and-switch game that began well before South Carolina?

Will Clinton supporters miss the rights they so tenuously enjoyed and watched slip away when they enabled John McCain to become president?

I was in New Hampshire when Senator Clinton was being told to iron shirts - not in support of any of the candidates who eventually ran - but to get Al Gore's name on the ballot (that worked out real well).

I attended a handful of her early rallies there, and I heard the snickers and the jeers (but not the ironing comments). I cannot disagree with the basic fact that there was - and still is - some gender discrimination against Senator Clinton. But the scope and effect of it is rather different than these people seem to be willing to admit.

The rest I'm not too sure about, but based on the past I'm confident that not one of these items is too far from the truth (although Senator Mikulski's comments nary mentioned gender bias in any way). Yet did a handful of admittedly marginal players in the media really make that big a difference?

Or is there something more at work here? Could it be these fine people imagine this "inexperienced" candidate burst on the scene fully formed in October of 2007 out of Illinois? Not really caring to look at his 20 years of public service both as a politician - and as a private citizen (not to mention his 2004 Convention speech) - in favor of a blind and delusional devotion to their candidate?

Don't bullshit me about gender bias. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are remarkably similar we are told, but are they truly? What qualifications did Hillary have besides her husband's last name and organization - an organization that was supposed to hand her the nomination on a silver platter?

I just want one Clinton supporter to list for me her qualifications to be President of the United States. With this caveat: this list must also take into account her dismissal of approximately 30-plus states and African-Americans, her comments concerning obliterating Iran, her stance on give-away trade, her pandering to gun owners and Pennsylvanians, and her obvious self-interest at the expense of her daughter during at least four different speeches.

Just one... without falling back on the gender-victimization card.

As I've said before, Senator Clinton's past - before she attached her fortunes to Bubba - is admirable. Some might say it's a liability considering the way she previously used one nebulous association of Senator Obama's against him. I certainly do not see it as such (hell, I would love to have a time machine to take part in such a colourful past, having been born about two decades too late).

But that's not what she chose to run on, and how her use of her husband's coattails is supposed to qualify her as Presidential material - not to mention the ideal of so many women - amazes me.

So, about Senator Obama... is he a man whose family helped him rise to the heights he currently enjoys on food stamps and sweat? Or a man who with that same help - and a healthy dose of self-discipline, effort, and insight - brought himself to the place where 75,000-plus people thronged to hear him speak this past Sunday?

Then there's this:

To Veronica Tonay, 48, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Clinton supporter, Obama has become a pop star, the contestant on "American Idol" who wins votes because he's cute, while the best singer is eliminated.

"We are electing the leader of the free world, and that person has a finger on the nuclear launch code," she said. "It's not about likability." Her stance was cemented when a young woman in one of her classes declared that she wouldn't vote for Clinton because "she is not a beautiful woman."

If Obama is the nominee, Tonay said, McCain will be just fine with her. "In the end, I won't vote for Obama because I don't know who he is, and I don't trust him," she said. "If McCain gets in, he would have a weak presidency, and we would have a Democratic Congress anyway. Obama could do more damage."

I highly suspect this person voted for Bill Clinton over Paul Tsongas in 1992. The candidate with the lower-lip bite proclaiming his choice of briefs over boxers on MTV, versus the droning nasal voice of sound policy embodied in a Massachusetts liberal with years of experience.

I forget, how did that work out after he was done pillaging the Oval Office?

So again, what is the reality behind this dislike of Obama? Could it be because he is so much like us, rather than one of the wealthy elites this Republic has come to depend on to its detriment over the past 50 years (excluding the perhaps singular case of Jimmy Carter)?

Is that what these people truly dislike about him, rather than his gender?

Perhaps it is easier for some people to see the simplest explanation rather than the obvious truth. Senator Obama represents something different alright. Perhaps not so obviously in policy, nor in politics, but in a personality shaped by different forces.

Forces that, to be honest, quite a few of us are familiar with.

Forces not found in the fine times of the 1950's and 1960's, but the barer times some of these very people - men and women both - brought us when they chose Reagan over Carter. When they picked Clinton rather than Tsongas. When they voted for Bush instead of Gore.

That he has not played the victim quite as well as Hillary in order to achieve the opportunities he is now faced with - either from mistreatment by his fellow Americans, the media, or anyone else - is perhaps too much for those who find some comfort in their own failures by doing so.

That failure is also not one shaped by gender issues. It's shaped by the realization that their chosen candidate was fatally flawed from the beginning, regardless of whether that person was a she or a he.

A candidate who represented a return to the failed policies of the 1990's that brought us the Republican-controlled Congress and “W”. NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The Current Account Deficit and the current financial disaster that has not yet fully unfolded to its logical conclusion. And everything that came afterwards from those years...

Perhaps instead of saddling the rest of us with their self-inflicted disappointment, they should just stay home this November. Let the future take shape, before this nation drowns in a past that we - who are being called upon to serve it - will not miss at all.

I would rather they looked long and hard at their choices this fall, and made a legitimate decision to look forwards and outwards rather than at the past - and at their navels.

But if their choice is a man shaped by the forces of opportunism and image, rather than a man who has built his career on substance and intelligence, their silence would be preferred. Not because they are women, but because they are about to choose wrong... again.