 | You Want a Woman to Be President? You Want a Black Man to be President? |
You want a woman to be president? Fine, vote for Elizabeth Dole. She’s a woman. She’s a Senator. She ran for president once. She has “experience.” I mean, hell, who cares that she hardly ever proposes legislation that goes anywhere or even makes a speech, that she drove her own party’s fundraising apparatus into the fraudulent ground, and that she’s notorious for ignoring her own constituents. She’s a woman, after all!
You want a black man to be president? Fine, vote for Alan Keyes. He’s a black man. He repeatedly ran for Senate and President (which is what gave John Edwards his “experience”). OK, sure, so he wants to turn the public schools into an instrument of Christian proselytization, proclaims that God gave Man global warming in order to increase food security, asserts that evolution doesn’t even exist, and assures wary voters not to fret, because Jesus Christ would vote for him. Who cares? What matters is that he’s a black man.
Does anyone know how many millions of women and black men there are in this nation? Now does anyone know how many women or black men would do as well as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama if they declared their intention to run for president?
I would like the supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sniping that if you don’t support their candidate you’re a sexist or a racist to get a grip. The two candidates are where they are today because they are skilled campaigners and because large numbers of Americans agree with their visions for America. Both Clinton and Obama have succeeded to the extent that they have because they have garnered the support of large sections of the electorate who are not women, or black, or lawyers, or college educated in an East Coast elite school, or any of the other markers that might be used to characterize the candidates.
Clinton and Obama are good candidates. That is why they’re doing well. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy is not part of a grand conspiracy for the ladies to make you wear panties, gents (as much as you doth protest rather too much that you don’t want that. Rosey Grier told you decades ago that it’s all right to cry, little boy). And Barack Obama’s ascendancy is not part of a grand conspiracy for those people to take over “your” neighborhood (as long as you’ve got that lawn jockey holding the lamp at the end of your driveway, I don’t think you have to worry much about attracting “the blacks” anytime soon).
Turning a presidential election into a test of racial or gender loyalty is to sap the race of its intellectual content. And besides, it won’t work because neither Clinton nor Obama will win an election in which some large portion of the Democratic Party is defined as the evil other and shoved away. Identity pigeonholing in presidential politics rebounded unfortunately on the pigeonholer in the 1980s and it will do so again today.
Hey, I have an idea. How about supporting candidates based on their records and policy platforms, and not on the variety of their gonad or melanocyte? Give it a whirl. Focusing on ideas: it’s so crazy, it just might work!
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Sorry, but I don’t see how Hillary Clinton is a good candidate. She broke trust with antiwar Democrats back in 2002, and she’s never made a move to win that trust back. That, and her campaign has itself been the source of a great deal of nasty bigotry. You just haven’t seen that kind of unrestrained venom coming from the campaign of Barack Obama.
Comment by J. Clifford — 3/11/2008 @ 9:55 pm
2002 was SIX YEARS AGO. Does anyone really carry a grudge that long? You should be asking about the policy positions of the candidates and what is best for the country.
According to a Zogby poll July 18, 2003:
I find it hard to believe that New York, which was at ground zero of the 9/11 attack, had substantially different views about Iraq from the rest of the country.
The Obama campaign unfortunately tries to call anything and everything bigotry to avoid answering legitimate questions. That might go over with the left wing of the Democratic party, but I don’t think it will fly in the general election.
You want to see unrestrained venom from the Obama campaign? Oh, it’s out there all right–some unbelievably nasty stuff–read some of the obamabot comments on other blogs.
Comment by Iroquois — 3/11/2008 @ 11:56 pm
Some of these comments appear to come from some pretty cynical and sick puppies. No wonder our country has become so screwed up.
all of us are mixed with something! irish with french…etc i will paste it at my forum at “LargeMingle.com” it is a dating site for celebrity plus singles and their admirers!
Comment by pluscindy — 3/12/2008 @ 4:00 am
Geez, Iroquois. Do you just “forget” the top Bush blunder that’s currently sinking our ship of state? We could sure use that $2 million a day for other causes right here at home about now. i mean LOOK AT THE DEBT! We should NEVER have invaded Iraq - it had NOTHING to do with the twin towers going down! The public was railroaded into this war through “cooked” intel, outright LIES from our commander in chief, and a secret agenda that we weren’t privy to at the time (but which has since surfaced - grabbing the oil by establishing a base for our military in the middle east). Instead of promoting a (truly) green energy policy, Bush went along with Big Oil’s interests (and still does) at OUR EXPENSE. Clinton and many others (including you i guess) were jived into supporting this unplanned, mismanaged, fundamentally flawed foreign invasion by us (and all the other side-effects like the current domestic spying policy). When a mistake of this magnitude occurs, the right thing to do is admit it and correct it as best we can. We’re by no means doing that and it’s ruined our reputation, our military and our economy.
Comment by Tom — 3/12/2008 @ 8:46 am
Hillary has already said that she would do that vote differently if she could do it again today. But she didn’t do it today. Back in 2002 New York had been attacked and was in a feeding frenzy. Do you remember the flags? Do you believe for one minute that a senator from New York could have voted differently at the time? It’s silly to base who you support for president on that. Especially since only Hillary says she will begin troop withdrawals within a certain time frame of getting into office.
Obama says we are fighting the wrong war and that if he is president he will move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He says he plans to expand the war, not end it. It sounds terribly odd to me that the same writers (like jClifford) who are so anti-war when it comes to Iraq are so willing to turn a blind eye to a candidate’s pro-war rhetoric when it comes to war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Unless jClifford has some other hidden reason for being such an Obama shill.
Oh wait, there’s that other thing that Obama has…green us, between us, spleen pus,..I’ll think of it in a minute.
Comment by Iroquois — 3/12/2008 @ 9:15 am
What matters is that Alan Keyes is totally conservative, totally pro-life, and backs it up with action.
For those of us who want to conserve America, and who won’t vote for unconservative McCain: http://www.alankeyes.com
Comment by Katrinka Yobotz — 3/13/2008 @ 11:19 am