Pea Soup: Exorcising the Demon

June 16th, 2008

I got another of those repugnant e-mails about Obama the other day from a relative; I have tried oh-so-many times to make clear why I don’t want to see them, making it obvious that character assassination and dark innuendo offends me and that an intelligent conversation can’t survive in the emotional climate such hatefulness establishes … but no, they’ll continue to come to me. And I will find the Snopes page that debunks them, send it along … and wait for the next one.

The e-comment that I referenced in the weekly was so rife with accusations that unless I post it, you can’t see the complexity of Obama disdain it includes — here’s a snip:

Hillary Clinton has actually passed bills in the senate, did not miss 1/3 of her tenure, is not a racist sociopath-read Dreams From My Father nor an elitist or egotist. Barack Obama is an egotist. He is a GOP plant. You seriously need to look at the big picture. You are missing the forest big time focusing on a sapling. Don’t you get it? Obama has an IQ of 112, attended a racist church associates with sociopaths like himself, is a bigot, has a foul wife and is an issue illiterate. He LOST 20 debates. He could not answer any of the questions. He is more stupid than Dan Quayle and Bush put together. He is a moron and so are you for lauding this unqualified affirmative action candidate. You like the rest of his mindless supporters have no clue what he stands for because he himself does not have a clue. The brilliant Obama managed to lead such a “successful” campaign that he effectively lost the entire self-respecting female population-you know those of us who are educated not those of us who would like to be because Obama tells us we are if we vote for him.

It also included a last line telling me that none of this was racist since her husband and children are black.

I didn’t respond to this letter; like the relative that sends me racist, fear-mongering e-mails, this woman wouldn’t hear me anyhow. I’m not her enemy, although she considers me one. The emails from my relative reflect the generational fear about “get whitey” issues; I don’t know what hers are sparked by but I’m betting they’re a lot more complex than an adherence to feminism. And I’d give a pretty to know how much of this opinion was promoted inside the Clinton campaign. It takes a zealous determination to look at Obama and see Dan Quayle, doncha think?

The Pubs are going after Michelle now — even though her statement about being proud of America [touted as, again, "get whitey" anti-Americanism] was echoed this week by McRib when he answered such a question [although for different reasons] by saying “It’s tough in some respects” to be proud of America.” OK — we can’t have this both ways. We can’t pillory one and have the other agree without getting some on him.

Even Laura Bush has attempted to soften the attack by indicating that Mrs. Obama was not being unpatriotic — but that was dismissed quickly; hear-no-evil, see-no-evil and stay home to bake cookies is the Pub First Lady [= First Wife] position and one Laura has accomplished with as much breaking style and cutting opinion as Mamie Eisenhower before her.

The real knuckle-draggers in this nation are hoping for a race war — sounds Charlie Manson-like, and about as credible. FOX News had to apologize a third time in as many weeks for calling Michelle Barack’s “baby mama” … I’d love to have been a fly on the wall watching the glee-turned-gloom of the dweeb who thought he was really nailing the culture with that one; what an oaf! The thing with these things … including the public statements by McCain and Bush and others who play out this old energy in their consciousness … is that they don’t tell me about the world, they tell me about the personality of the originator. The world has moved on — these guys have been left behind [no religionism implied.] They think they’re defining the playing field … when they’re really only defining themselves.

I trust we’ll all notice; and I think Richard Reeves is right [first piece] that what we’re looking at in cartoon fashion gives us all the information we need to choose a better option. There’s some nasty stuff in here — what we’re looking at from the fringe. A few heads turn around and spew, below — worth keeping an eye on. Forewarned, so they say, is forearmed.

In other news, Gore has finally endorsed Obama — and Iowa is being called the new Katrina: see here and here. FEMA is on the ground, although from my own experience of their assistance locally when we were tornado-hit, I’m glad that Iowan’s have their own kind of neighbor-to-neighbor assistance projects. While Dubby plans to visit next Thursday, after completing his farewell tour of Europe, one might ask where the Vice President is [prob'ly cleaning his gun and counting his oil profits.] Obama cancelled a speech in Iowa so as not to divert attention from the rescue efforts, and filled sand bags in a little town in Illinois, preparing for flooding from the Mississippi. He didn’t fill just one for a photo op — he filled 15 and seemed to enjoy himself, mentioning that it was a welcome relief from talking all the time.

Iowa itself is responding to its emergency, but the government is still dinking around; Republicans have no plan for governing, just campaigning … which is why they’re dying a slow and deserved death. But you’ve got to give them credit — they really got that “drowned in a bathtub” thing down!

Interesting reads here, including Matt Taibbi and Mark Rich.

Jude

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Richard Reeves
Fri Jun 13

PARIS — Newspapers around the world have reprinted and focused on a story that appeared June 8 in The Observer in London about deep-seated racism in rural America. The headline:

“Democrats in Rural Strongholds Refuse to Give Backing to Obama.”

A man named Johnny Telvor of Williamson, W.Va., is the star of the piece, offering a string of quotes about how he is a Democrat who will vote for Sen. John McCain in November for the very simple reason that Barack Obama is black. He’s a colorful talker, this Telvor, saying:

If Obama wins: “We’ll end up slaves just like they was once slaves.”

On McCain: “McCain will win here. No doubt about it. … At least he’s an American.”

Then the writer, Paul Harris, comes upon Jack Spence, a retiree sitting on a street bench, who says: “I can’t vote for a Republican. My daddy would just roll over in his grave.”

So, Spence says he just won’t vote because he’s not going to vote for Obama. Harris asks whether there is anything Obama could say that might change his mind. Spence answers: “Nope!”

Then he adds that it doesn’t matter anyway. Why? “Look, someone will kill him. Whoever Obama picks as running mate will end up being president.”
Then Harris goes to Pikeville, Ky., where a maintenance man, Stanley Little, says he is a Democrat, too, but that “McCain is one of us. Obama ain’t.”

Are these folks for real? I suppose they are, my fellow Americans, although I did try to find the loquacious Mr. Telvor without any luck. The name does not appear in any of the standard directories — superpages.com and all that. A call to the local newspaper, the Williamson Daily News, did not produce anyone who had ever heard the name Telvor in that town of just 3,000 or so people. Then I was assured that “Everyone knows everyone around here.”

(There are more than 40 John or Jack Spences listed in West Virginia and 14 Stanley Littles in Kentucky. But I was unable to find the quoted ones.)

Anyway, all Americans of a certain age have heard all of this before — and we tend to think there is a lot less of it than there used to be. I also believe nutty talk like this, and the characters who spout it, will actually end up helping, not hurting, Obama’s chances to be president.

One of the things that pushed civil rights ahead in the 1960s was that many Americans were stunned to see and hear — via that new medium, television — what our brothers under the flag looked like and said back then. Most Americans now are probably too young to remember the words and faces of smug, smiling and violent white Jim Crow Southerners. But images of almost forgotten men — such as the politicians Ross Barnett and Paul Johnson of Mississippi, Lester Maddox of Georgia and George Wallace of Alabama; and the lawmen, Cecil Price and Lawrence Rainey of Philadelphia, Miss., and Bull Connor of Birmingham and the snarling dogs he set on black children — opened American minds to the racists among us.

Rather suddenly, the more naive of us were forced to watch our fellow Americans in action against other Americans of a different color. We wanted to look away, but we couldn’t. Part of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. was drawing attention to these folks and of crafting a rhetoric of American values, using the great words of our founding (and of the Bible) to ask which side we were on. Many of us, beginning with two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, chose to stand with the minority.

We had to. Americans are people whose self-image depends on believing they are doing the right thing. The United States is not geography or the product of thousands of years of bloody history. America is an idea; it is in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the words of Lincoln and of Martin Luther King. You become an American by signing on to those ideas — or that is at least the way we want to see ourselves.

In the end, if the most ignorant kind of racism comes to the fore in this campaign — and it probably will — I doubt that we as a nation are going to choose to stand with the Johnny Telvors. ++

How we peg Obama may tell more about us
John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer
Sun, Jun. 15, 2008

So how do you refer to Barack Obama? And why?

Do you call him African American? Black?

What about multiethnic? Longer than black, shorter than African American.

I’m not here to call right or wrong; I’m here to ask.

Some who think themselves witty quip that “we’re all multiethnic.” Shallow. Multiethnicity involves not genetics but awareness. Multiethnic people are aware of their ancestry and consider it part of their identity.

Obama’s ancestry is as European as it is African. He knows it, foregrounds it, tells the story. Yet the media, old-schoolers that we are, call him “America’s first viable African American presidential candidate.” He is routinely called “black,” never “Anglo.” (Never.) Maybe it’s that, if you look dark, even somewhat dark, people call you black. (You can substitute almost any color in place of the word black.) Some say, not without cause, that the media stress his blackness out of an American habit, born of Jim Crow and the “one-drop rule,” under which, if you had any African descent, you were all African.

I hope not. “One drop” is an outgrown way of thinking, obsessed with tracking how much, in what amounts, by what relations “bloods” are “mixed.” It believes in purity and pollution. Keep score! Keep the lines clearly in view, all percentages, all derivations!

What do we gain, what have we ever gained, by such compulsive housekeeping?

A lot of such housekeeping went on a while ago, with the question of whether Obama was “black enough.” He lived abroad until he was 10, then was raised by his maternal grandparents in Hawaii, where he attended a good school. That allowed him (so some said) to avoid the challenges and obstacles too often in the way of blacks. An uneasy argument, if you follow it out. It assumes that, to be black, you have to be damaged, and if you’re not, you’re not black enough.

Obama’s multiple ethnicity gets played the other way, too. The McCain campaign will, as it must, exploit voters’ discomfort with the Obama difference. When that campaign calls McCain the “safe” candidate, sure, they mean McCain has more experience in foreign policy. But what makes McCain “safe,” really, and Obama “unsafe”?

Ethnicities, alas, don’t always intermix willingly. When Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (from Kenya) courted Ann Dunham (British ancestry, Kansas), their families didn’t like it. Obama and Dunham didn’t listen. Their marriage, though it did not last long, did give birth to a singular American life.

Multiethnicity can indeed yield very interesting, worthy lives: Consider Malcolm X, Tiger Woods, Naomi Campbell, millions and millions who are not famous. There’s resistance: Some people (of all backgrounds) still don’t like crossing the (more and more imaginary) race line. Not that “race doesn’t exist.” It does, just barely: Genetic science shows that while race-based differences exist, they account for only a very tiny amount of difference among people, about one quarter of one percent, in biologist Richard Lewontin’s formulation. What exist only in our minds are the “lines” that demarcate the races. Those exist only if we let them.

The media, and some voters, are having trouble placing Obama because he muddles the lines. And to be sure, he uses his multiethnicity to advantage, presenting himself in different ways to suit different audiences. Such a person faces us with the future - and let us remind ourselves that the future is often the unrecognized present. The world that’s coming . . . check that . . . the world that, for millions and millions of us, is here, now . . . what will it be like? What is it like?

It’s one in which we are not blind to ethnicity, mono- or bi- or multi-. Why ignore something that can shape you, body, soul and story? Value it, though, as something that makes each person singular and unrepeatable, to be celebrated and respected. Not as a divider, a test of purity.

A person’s descent is always interesting - but never determines anyone’s intrinsic worth, should never create divisions to be feared and policed. That future, for millions of us, is already here. It’s a break from the past, and if we are not there ourselves, it’s up to us to catch up.

What you call Barack Obama reflects where you stand on all this. So . . . what do you call him? And what does it matter? ++

Why White Supremacists Support Barack Obama
How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.
David Peisner, Esquire Magazine
June 13, 2008, 8:50 AM

If recent polls are to be believed, white voters favor John McCain over Barack Obama by nearly ten percentage points, but the McCain and Obama camps probably haven’t factored in the following fact: In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists. (Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size — limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist — but just because it wouldn’t fly with Gallup doesn’t mean there ain’t a kernel of truth in there.)

This is just one of many surprising views that emerged after we talked to extremists about this historic electoral showdown between a 46-year-old black man and a 71-year-old white man.

Tom Metzger
Who: Director, White Aryan Resistance
Likes: White people, karaoke, environmentalists
Dislikes: Race-mixing, Jews, the federal government, capitalism
Career Highlights: Was Grand Dragon of Ku Klux Klan in the 70s; won the Democratic primary during his bid for Congress in 1980; appeared on the episode of Geraldo Rivera’s show in 1988 when Rivera’s nose was broken in a brawl.

“The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who’s in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person — more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. I’ve got the quote right here: ‘I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s white race.’ The problem with Obama is he’s being dishonest about his racial views. I’d respect him if he’d just come out and say, ‘Yeah, I’m a black racist.’ I don’t hate black people. I just think it’s in the best interest of the races to be separated as much as possible. See, I’m a leftist. I’m not a rightist. I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.”

Ron Edwards
Who: Imperial Wizard, Imperial Klans of America
Likes: Guns, bed sheets, burning crosses
Dislikes: Black people, homosexuals, immigrants
Career Highlights: Sued in 2007 by the Southern Poverty Law Center for inciting the brutal beating of a Latino teenager; building the IKA into one of the nation’s largest Klan groups by allowing non-Christians to join.

“Obama, I think he’s a piece of shit. I don’t care that his mother was white. I don’t think he has enough brains to do anything good. All he’s living off of is the color of his skin to get elected. I don’t think America wants a black president. Most of them are too afraid to say that they believe the way I believe. They sit around their dinner table and talk the way I do, but when they get out in public, they have two faces and show the other face. When people are voting in the booth privately, they’ll vote Republican even if they’re a Democrat. If he wins, I’ll laugh. I don’t like McCain, but he’s the only one I can vote for. He’s against a lot of the things that I’m for. I’m afraid that he’s going to mess with gun laws. But I’m going Republican and I talked to my guys and most of them are voting for McCain too.”

Erich Gliebe
Who: Chairman, National Alliance
Likes: Third Reich, the movie Rocky
Dislikes: integration, Jewish-controlled media
Career Highlights: Turning white-power record label, Resistance Records, into a million-dollar-a-year business juggernaut; an 8-0 record as a professional boxer under the nickname, “The Aryan Barbarian.”

“Obama might be a better candidate for our cause because he’s racially conscious. One of our big things in the National Alliance is to raise the racial consciousness of our people. Young whites in universities, they’ve been stripped of any kind of racial identity. Obama may be a racist in a positive sense for his people — that will awaken a lot of the whites, knock some sense into them. They’ll see that non-white Americans are allowed to be proud of who they are, to be racially conscious, to talk about their people or their community without being attacked as being racist. Let’s face it, white people aren’t going to fight for their causes, for their kind with a white president. I don’t think McCain even acknowledges that a white race exists. He’s all about granting amnesty to illegal aliens. The fact he wants to keep us in wars in the Middle East for 100 years, that’s not a good thing. I give Obama credit, he seems to have stuck to his guns as far as pulling the troops out of Iraq. He’s a very intelligent man, an excellent speaker and has charisma. John McCain offers none of that. Perhaps the best thing for the white race is to have a black president. My only problem with Obama is perhaps he’s not black enough.”

Rocky Suhayda
Who: Chairman, American Nazi Party
Likes: Hitler, white people
Dislikes: Jews, immigrants, multinational corporations Career highlights: Being widely quoted bemoaning in the fact that so few Aryan-Americans had the cojones of the 9/11 hijackers: “If we were one-tenth as serious, we might start getting somewhere.”

“White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals — basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women — when usually negroes who have ‘made it’ immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize — that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks. Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on planet Earth. It’d be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Yahanna
Who: General, Israelite School Of Universal Practical Knowledge
Likes: Segregation
Dislikes: White oppressors, black women, American culture, Muslims, Christians, Martin Luther King Jr.
Career Highlights: Featured in 1999 BBC program about black supremacists; his street corner rants in Washington D.C. spurred changes in the local noise ordinance.

“Finding out Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for president was one of the saddest days in black history. Another legacy of black death is about to begin, just like it began back in the ’60s with probably the greatest traitor to black people in modern-day history, Martin Luther King. Every black leader that has some form of power has given black people false hope, when in fact, the closer they get to the white establishment, the more they become an actual enemy to black people. Black people need to move away from the establishment and towards a moral change. As for Obama, first of all, he’s not even a black man in the terms of what real black people consider a black man. He’s of African and white descent. How easily he dismissed his affiliation with Reverend Wright, was a clear indication that this is a politician, not a man of any real conviction. The same way he threw away that Reverend, once he becomes president, he must throw away black people. He’s going to have to harm black people to make white people satisfied that he’s not Reverend Wright’s boy. The disappointment we’re going to suffer from him is going to set us back another fifty years. McCain is definitely the better shot for black people.” ++

Is America Ready for Another White Male President?
Lincoln Mitchell, HuffPo
June 15, 2008

During the Democratic Primaries, when discussing the chances of Obama and Clinton, with some frequency, the person with whom I was talking would lean in towards me and say “Do you really think America is ready for a black/woman president?” Like many people, I found the former question racist and the latter one sexist. As a white man, I also resented the implication that I somehow understood that America wasn’t ready, whatever that meant.

Initially, I responded to these questions with anger, but then began to preempt them. Whenever the presidential election came up in discussion, which was about ten times a day, I began the conversation by leaning forward conspiratorially and say “The Republicans have a problem. America is not ready for another white male president.” The responses I received were always similar. First a nod of agreement, than a look of confusion that a sputtering response like “you mean Obama I mean black president Clinton woman…”

When I first started doing this, I thought I was just making up a clever response, but as the election approaches, increasingly I believe that I am right in this assessment. During the recently completed primary season, roughly 35 million people voted for somebody who was not a white man.

Clinton and Obama’s overall vote total far exceeded that of all the white men in the race, for both parties, combined. In the Democratic Party, none of the three highly qualified white men, made it as far as Super Tuesday. Even in the early states when the Republican primary was still competitive and Republican voters could choose from a broad range of conservative white men, the majority of voters eschewed the white male options in both parties and voted for either Clinton or Obama.

I have never been accused of being an optimist, and would never assert that sexism or racism is somehow finished in American politics. Both were evident in full force, overtly and subtly, in the recently completed primary season. The latter will undoubtedly continue to lurk around the edges of the general election between now and November.

Nonetheless, there is increasing reason to believe that these tactics, although sure to be present, will be less effective in 2008. This is partially due to the deep and broad dissatisfaction with the Bush administration as it winds down, and the corresponding profound desire to see change which many Americans feel. It may, however, be due to something beyond that. During the primary season, Obama was able to appeal to an extremely broad swath of the electorate, while maintaining a strong base in several demographic groups as well. His strength in, for example, western states is very unusual for any Democrat, let alone an African American one. His early, and somewhat persistent, support among some Republicans is even more striking. Clinton’s strength, in some states, among blue collar white men, was equally impressive.

Attempts to attack Obama through his former pastor, or his church, made far less of an impact than one might have expected, given the racial component to these approaches. Racially tinged criticisms of Michelle Obama have been similarly unsuccessful as have other efforts to portray Obama as the black candidate. Interestingly, the most successful attack on Obama in the primary was probably the attempt to portray him as an elitist. The inaccuracy of that attack notwithstanding, it should be noted that there was no racial component to the one critique that may have hurt him.

The broader political context — that 2008 is shaping up to be a strongly Democratic year, is not the only factor driving this. Something is changing in American politics. Perhaps all those young people chanting “race doesn’t matter” at Obama rallies in the early primary states were telling the truth, at least for many of their generation. While there are certainly still reservoirs of nasty and extreme racism among all age groups, it may be that among young people these views have been relegated to the fringes of political life, and that for many people of that generation race is not an important part of their vote decision.

Another possible explanation is that after a generation of the Democratic Party nominating presidential candidates who are liberal on social issues and who have been consistently attacked by the right as being out of touch with American values and captive of gays, African Americans etc, all of the voters who can be moved by appeals to intolerance have abandoned the Democratic Party years ago. The question of whether or not America is ready for an African American or female president, in addition to being offensive, is also irrelevant. Of course, there are probably many Americans who would not vote for either for president, but that is not how elections are decided. The real question should be are Americans who either voted for, or considered voting for a liberal like John Kerry in 2008 or Al Gore in 2004, ready to vote for an African American or woman candidate. To this question, the answer is an unambiguous yes. Racism is still alive and well in America, it is just effecting fewer vote decisions.

America is not, however, ready to elect another white male president who builds a message of intolerance into his campaign, because there are almost no voters left to pull away from the Democratic Party through appeals of this sort and, more importantly, a substantial number of voters who no longer have the stomach for this kind of campaign. This is particularly true this year. For Senator McCain, this means that he must resist the temptation to go to the well of intolerance, and more importantly, must control the wild cards around his campaign and the myriad independent and semi-independent efforts who might otherwise do this. McCain’s campaign is fighting an uphill battle, but they can make it easier for themselves by recognizing just what it is for which America is not ready. ++

McRats for McCain
John Nichols, The Nation
06/15/2008

Everyone has heard of the Obamicans — Republicans, such as Susan Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon, who back Democrat Barack Obama for president… Now, we have the McRats — Democrats who back Republican John McCain…

Dismayed Republicans emerge as Barack Obama supporters
Sarah Baxter, Times UK
June 15, 2008

Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain?
FRANK RICH, NYT
June 15, 2008

TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.

The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.

But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.

Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over what role misogyny played in her defeat. A few female Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on YouTube and Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote for Mr. McCain.

Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.

The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.

This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.

Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” and The Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.

Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).

“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.

There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, wrote this month that Mr. McCain is “incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain ditched the preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley after learning that their endorsements antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he ended up getting a whole new flock of evangelical Christians furious at him too.

The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are planning a large rally for convention week in Minneapolis. The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Mr. Obama, as have both the economic adviser to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Lawrence Hunter, and the neocon historian Francis Fukuyama. Rupert Murdoch is publicly flirting with the Democrat as well. Even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker this month to gratuitously dismiss Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday proposal as “a false notion” before the National Press Club.

These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill reported that at least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Mr. McCain. Congressional Quarterly found that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out to Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have contributed to his putative successor.

It was just this toxic stew of inadequate fund-raising and hostility from the base — along with incompetent management — that capsized the McCain campaign last summer. Now the management, at least, is said to be new and improved, but the press is still so distracted by the “divided Democrats” it has yet to uncover how that brilliant McCain team spent weeks choreographing the candidate’s slapstick collision with a green backdrop and self-immolating speech in prime time two weeks ago.

The only figure in the McCain camp who has candidly acknowledged any glitches is his mother, the marvelous 96-year-old Roberta McCain. Back in January she said that she didn’t think her son had any support in the G.O.P. base and that those voters would only take him if “holding their nose.”

The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote. ++

McCain’s Playbook: Hate, Fear and Caveman Politics
Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the media-manufactured ‘maverick’ has remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge.
Matt Taibbi, RollingStone
June 16, 2008

Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who’s never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?

You’d never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America “backward,” to the failed ideas of the Sixties. “I’m surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!” he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, “That’s not change we can believe in!”

The choice of New Orleans as a launching pad for McCain’s national campaign is the kind of leadenly obvious move that people who do politics for a living are pleased to call “sound strategy”: For a candidate supposedly desperate to avoid carrying the Bush label into November, this disaster-stricken city is about the only place in the country that offers a striking visual image of a Bush policy that McCain has actually criticized. So the candidate dragged himself onstage here, ostensibly to perform the dreary business of “distancing himself” from Bush by once again criticizing the president’s response to Katrina. The Bush-bashing money quote — “Americans have a right to expect basic competence from their government!” — was featured prominently in media accounts.

But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.

Even the briefest of surveys of the supporters gracing McCain’s events underscores the kind of red-meat appeal he’s making. Immediately after his speech in New Orleans, a pair of sweet-looking old ladies put down their McCain signs long enough to fill me in on why they’re here. “I tell you,” says one, “if Michelle Obama really doesn’t like it here in America, I’d be very pleased to raise the money to send her back to Africa.”

The diminutive and smiling old lady’s friend leans over. “That’s going a little too far, dear.”

“Too far?” says the first. “Farrakhan is saying they were brought here against their will, and their bodies are still feeding the sharks at the bottom of the sea! I mean, really!”

“OK, sharks still eating bodies,” I say, writing it all down. “Could I have your name, ma’am?”

“Janice Berg,” says the first old lady. “And lest you think I’m Jewish, the name comes from Norway. Berg is ‘mountain’ in Norwegian. I’m part German, part French myself.”

A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. “He exaggerates too much,” Ron says. “He’s not honest.”

“OK,” I say. “What does he exaggerate about?”

“Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother,” he says.

I ask him how this is an exaggeration.

“Well, he was saying . . .” he begins. “As if that qualifies him to . . .”

Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.

“Look, you either are or you aren’t,” she says.

“And he aren’t,” Ron says, nodding with relief.

Some of us who have been mesmerized by the Obama-Clinton cage match during the past six months may have developed certain delusions about the state of American politics, in two areas in particular. One is the idea, much pushed by wishful-thinking media commentators like myself, that the abject failure and unpopularity of the Bush administration somehow means the Republican revolution is over, and the mean-ass hate-radio conservatism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is finally dead. The other is the even more quaint notion that the historic, groundbreakingly successful candidacies of a black man and a woman have ushered in a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness.

It’s bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity. Once the victim of a classic racist smear job in backwoods South Carolina (where he was whipped in the 2000 primary after a Karl Rove whispering campaign suggested he had an illegitimate black daughter), McCain has now positioned himself on the business end of that same deal.

Like Hillary Clinton, an erstwhile vilified liberal who remade herself as a flag-waving, Sixties-bashing champion of “hardworking Americans, white Americans” once the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama forced her off her old turf, the one-time “insurgent” McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style.

The remarkable metamorphoses this year of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain would be puzzling and inexplicable were it not for a basic truism of the political-hate game. The reasons McCain and Clinton were villains of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity crowd in the first place had nothing to do with their policy positions or votes in the Senate or anything like that. Their real crimes were their arrogant insistence on exercising their intellectual independence, as well as their stubborn refusal to indulge in drooling-caveman demagoguery. The instant both of them crossed into the hater column and began feverishly jacking off the toothless racists of the Deep South with broadsides against the America-hating socialist menace Obama, all was instantly forgiven.

Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator’s “liberal” record. But these days I’m hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were “God’s children too.”

When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she’s supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: “I’m much more concerned about Obama.”

McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, “One of us! One of us!” all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he’s unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he’s given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.

McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said.

Standing at the meeting, I didn’t write Osteen’s name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us,” Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for “go, sell everything you have and give to the poor,” and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

This dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation of McCain offers the vehicle for his new platform, which is just the same old ring-around-the-collar fear-mongering horseshit used by a generation of conservatives, warmed over to fit 2008. In fact, in his stump speeches these days, McCain never veers off a strikingly Bushian binary version of reality, in which the world is divided into clear-cut camps of God-fearing American good and un-Christian, bomb-tossing foreign (and foreign-enabling) evil. McCain talks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his evil plans for world domination, Hamas and its rockets that rained on poor Israeli children in their Purim (he pronounces it pyoor-eem) costumes. Also in the “bad” column are Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the “far-left radical outfit” MoveOn.org, the wealthy liberals in Georgetown who opposed the gas-tax holiday for ordinary, decent folk because “they can probably walk to work,” and the Democrats eager to impose socialism because “they have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people.”

Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. His crude attempts to paint Obama with these brushes are more or less the whole of his argument for the presidency. Obama is terrorist-coddler because he is “ready to talk in person with tyrants” like Ahmadinejad, he hates soldiers because he refused to condemn MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad, and he’s a socialist because he favors health-care reform — despite the fact that the Obama plan isn’t “socialized” medicine any more than the universal requirement to buy private auto insurance is socialism.

And when it comes to Obama’s and his wife’s America-hating, well . . . McCain really doesn’t need to say anything about that. All he needs to do to remind audiences of Reverend Wright and Michelle “I’m proud of America for the first time” Obama is to offer a few bons mots in the opposite direction. “I seek the office with the humility of a man who cannot forget that my country saved me,” McCain likes to say. And while he doesn’t believe he was anointed by God to lead the great nation of America, he insists, “I am her servant, first, last and always.”

That’s it — that’s the entire argument. McCain is a canny enough old goat to know that the public’s insatiable appetite for traitorous enemies will do the rest. He’ll wave as many flags and stand in front of as many fucking fighter jets as you like, while the other guy lectures us about why he doesn’t always need to wear a flag pin in his lapel and calls a bomb-throwing Sixties terrorist “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” instead of calling for his immediate beheading.

Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama’s lack of patriotism. “What was that thing about anti-American?” she asks a friend. “What were they referring to?”

“What thing?” asks the friend.

“People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing,” Cindy says, frowning.

“You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?” the friend replies.

“Yeah, I guess,” says Cindy. “The anti-American thing.” “That bothers you?” I ask.

“Of course it does!”

“But you don’t even know what it is,” I say. “You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don’t even know who it was that said it!”

She shrugs. What’s my point? We all know what the deal is. When it comes to presidential politics, you either are or you aren’t. And Barack Obama aren’t. If you can’t grasp the simple math of that statement, you don’t know much about elections in this country. It’s not about the war, or the economy, or the faltering Republican brand, or any of that: This is about hate and fear, and a dark instinct in our blood going all the way back to Salem, and whether or not a desperately ambitious ex-heretic named John McCain can whip up a big enough mob in time to drown the latest witch.

Which means that despite all the talk about “change,” we’re once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world. What’s especially creepy about this flashback this time around is that it seems to mirror the tragic loop in McCain’s own psyche.

For all his frantic recanting of the many embarrassingly bipartisan episodes from his Senate past, McCain has never betrayed even a nanosecond’s worth of memories from the central catastrophe of his life: his capture and torture in a Vietnamese prison. But now that he is finally pitted, in the great battle of his life, against a smooth-talking peacenik nearly half his age who wants American troops to withdraw instead of pressing on for “victory” in an unpopular war, McCain can keep reliving all those old hurts and all those old battles over and over again, in front of sympathetic crowd after sympathetic crowd.

Never mind that Iraq isn’t exactly Vietnam, or that Barack Obama isn’t Jane Fonda — what matters is that the Republicans nominated a wounded old soldier who now gets to spend the next five months trying to exorcise his personal demons, and this serendipitous circumstance fits nicely with the party’s national strategy, despite the fact that pinning these old hurts on the likes of Obama makes no sense at all. Still, it’s not hard to hear, in McCain’s quasi-coherent rants, his bitterness at being abandoned to years of savage tortures while millions of little Hillarys and Bills and Obamas-in-training were getting high and balling each other during the Country Joe and the Fish set at Woodstock, instead of standing up and saluting the “winnable” war effort that got McCain sent to Vietnam in the first place.

Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn’t that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn’t cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate. In the present day, it is George Bush who got us into this new Vietnam-like mess and revived the specter of tortured prisoners, but McCain’s anger isn’t focused in that direction. He’s not mad that it’s happening again, not looking to blame the people who actually started the fire. Instead he seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave — and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won’t hesitate. So if you thought Hillary was bad, buckle your seat belts: The really dumb stuff is just beginning. ++

Domestic terrorists plotting against Obama
Militia bust reveals right-wing plans for race war.
David Neiwert, Orcinus via Alternet
June 16, 2008

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it’s becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they’re saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend’s sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday.

“Kahle said words to the effect of, that ‘if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,’” the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

In any event, a pattern is already developing, ranging from the Klan fellows who promise that Obama will be shot to the white supremacists who are actually rooting for him to win because they’re certain he will fail. We’re hearing a lot of language from the racist and “Patriot” right indicating that they expect a Democratic president to enact policies (particularly regarding gun control) that will inspire “civil war.” Which means they are looking for excuses to act out.

As always with these folks, there’s a lot of projection going on here. Because even if a President Obama follows only the most moderate of liberal agendas, the far right will look upon those policies as cause for “civil war.” That was how they responded to Bill Clinton, after all — a white male Southerner with generally conservative leanings. One can only imagine how a liberal black man from Illinois would fare.

The extremist right went into remission, largely, with the election of George W. Bush; militias disbanded because their followers believed the threat of an oppressive, gun-grabbing, baby-killing “New World Order” had largely passed. They bided their time by forming Minutemen brigades. Now they can see that their “safe” era is coming to an end.

All this time, there really has been hankering for an excuse to start acting out violently, and they see any Democratic presidency as providing that excuse. But an Obama presidency in particular will do so.

All of which makes rather ironic the fears expressed by the fellow who propped up that phony “Hillary Clinton Supporters For John McCain” page:

What good is a great economy if you have to worry about getting blown up by a car bomb every time you go to the Mall? You want another Baghdad here in the USA, not me! I want my grandkids to be free and that includes being free from the fear of being killed by a terrorist. If Obama is elected, you better hope he adopts Hillary Health Care plan, because you are going to need it with his idea of “Security” for this country.

Well, there is indeed a potential threat looming after this election in which terrorists will make ordinary people feel unsafe about going to places like malls — just like they did in the 1990s.

But they won’t be Arabs coming from Baghdad. They’ll be little Timmy McVeighs from Buffalo.

Then again, to the folks on the right, that doesn’t seem to be a problem. To the rest of us, well, we had better be prepared. I think we’ll all find that the “law enforcement approach to terrorism” is a lot more effective than those same right-wingers have been telling us the past few years. ++

The Hillary-ization of Michelle Obama
Kathy G., TheGSport

[Thanks, Deb!]

Before I get to the main subject of this post, I wanted to share my enthusiasm about my favorite new blog: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though Ta-Nehisi’s blog centers on politics, he is also the author of a fascinating-sounding new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. (You can watch an engaging video about the memoir here). He’s had some especially smart things to say about the presidential race. Read this post, for example, about Hillary Clinton’s instantly infamous “hard-working white people” remark, and why “the obligatory ‘not a racist’ defense” is irritatingly beside the point, and offensive to boot.

All this is by way of introduction to my favorite of his most recent posts, this expert takedown of Christopher Hitchens’ recent nasty, dishonest, and embarrassing attempt at a hit job on Michelle Obama (which appeared in Slate, wouldn’t you know. And just when I thought Slate couldn’t possibly suck any harder). Ta-Nehisi has a much, much higher opinion of Hitchens than I do (I think the man descended into disgraceful hackdom long ago), but that doesn’t stop him from seeing very clearly what Hitchens was trying (and pathetically failing) to do in that piece, and calling him on it. Among other things, Ta-Nehisi points out that if you want to smear someone for the non-existent radical views they allegedly had in college, it would help matters if you yourself don’t have a lengthy and well-documented past as a Trotskyite Trotskyist, as Hitchens himself does. D’oh!

The Hitchens piece, contemptible piece o’ shite though it is, a surefire sign that, now that it’s clear Hillary’s presidential campaign is all but over, the right is proceeding apace with its attempt to Hillary-ize Michelle Obama. We have, of course, all heard about how “unpatriotic” she is. Maureen Dowd has already cattily attacked her for not being sufficiently deferential to her husband. And now we’re being treated to Hitchens’ exegesis of how her college term papers prove she’s really Stokely Carmichael in drag. Delightful! But hey . . . radical, unfeminine, unpatriotic — remind you of any other right-wing caricatures of a certain prominent Democratic woman with a famous husband?

It’s not surprising that they’re doing this to Michelle, because it’s one of the most basic moves in the wingnut playbook. All Democrats are radicals who hate America, of course; in addition, all female Democrats are ballbusting beeyotches (just as all male Democrats are girly-men). The gender crap, sadly, is probably still going to be an issue for any Democratic first lady. The only first ladies who seem to be noncontroversial and enjoy wide popularity are the ones who, like Pickles, resemble Stepford wives. But overwhelmingly, it seems to be Republicans, not Democrats, who marry that sort of woman.

The role of first lady tends to be a poor fit for today’s Democratic wives, many of whom have been outspoken women with significant careers of their own. Though, of course, virtually any modern woman would chafe against the ridiculous 19th century-style confines of the role. Even the title itself — “first lady” — has the musty odor of an antique about it. It’s a term that sounds like it’s straight out of the 19th cult of true womanhood.

And speaking of the cult of true womanhood — here is the classic article on the subject, by the historian Barbara Welter (I took her undergrad course in the history of American women, more years ago than I’d care to remember). This is the opening paragraph of that article:

The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

I always did love that phrase about the true woman holding up “the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.” “First lady” is a term which originated in the 19th century, and the role of first lady was very much part and parcel of the cult of true womanhood. But, as we see, the cult of true womanhood was very much a racial construct — that was (a lot of) the point. So if Michelle Obama ascends to the role which is the apotheosis of the cult of true womanhood — the role of First Lady of the United States — I predict that wingnut heads will explode throughout the land. And there will be a whole other layer of bullshit Michelle will have to deal with. In addition to the anti-Democrat bullshit, and the sexist bullshit, there will be, of course, the racist bullshit.

My heart goes out to her. The road she will be traveling on will be a difficult one, in particular because there is no one in the history of America who has trod that particular path before. She is an exceedingly courageous person to have chosen such a public role.

Just by sheer virtue of being black and female, and daring to live a public life, she will be highly controversial. She will attract a hell of a lot of ugly hatred. Even for a person as strong as I am sure she is, there are sure to be times when that will be very, very hard to take.

What I’m wondering right now is, what can we - as Democrats, as feminists, as people who are deeply committed to racial equality — do to help and support her? Here’s the thing: we have, to an extent, the benefit of hindsight here. We know what the right did to Hillary, and we can expect them to do a lot of the same things to Michelle. How do we combat this?

I realize the Republicans and the right are going to do the same disgusting things they always do. But one thing we need to be hyper-vigilant about is not letting the media get away with repeating right-wing memes and narratives about Michelle (or Barack, or any Democrat, for that matter). Close scrutiny of the media coverage of Michelle Obama, as well as some energetic media-centered activism, will of course be crucial. Do readers of this blog have any more specific ideas? I’d love to hear your thoughts. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves