Hillary's last great hope
From Hillary Clinton's explosive interview staking claim to a "broader base" among "hard-working Americans, white Americans":
West Virginia and Kentucky are the next battleground for swing, working-class voters. These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that. And I think it's important that I won this group decisively in Texas, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and even North Carolina. We've got to appeal to those voters if we're going to win in November. . . .
[T]here was just an AP article posted that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how . . . whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. And in independents I was running even with him and doing even better with Democratic-leaning independents. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.
Herewith two additional images. Their relevance to this post is left as an exercise for the reader. If you remain befuddled, roll your mouse over each image, or click through:
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Labels: 2008 campaign
1 Comments:
Okay, I don't mean this as a defense of Clinton, I really really don't, because I don't like her approach here, for many reasons. To name just one, what about the Latino voters that she claims support her? And I think she is wrong here on many other counts, some of which are alluded to in the post.
But stepping back for just a second, I have to say, that despite e.g. Donna Brazile's representations to the contrary, (for example, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buqry41EC8k ) I'm pretty sure the Obama camp is having the same conversations about race based demographic groups, and making the same calculations, but more privately. In fact, I know they are.
So while I'm totally down with condemning her for what she said, I have to say the fact that she publicly mentioned white voters as a discreet group maybe bothers me less than others. I understand that the fact that I am white probably has something to do with this.
But I'm also a woman. And women are always talked about during political campaigns as if we are some freakish special interest group. Remember "soccer moms"? Just today the WaPo ran an article titled, I kid you not, "Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens" (See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/08/AR2008050802999_pf.html ) On the stump, Michelle Obama makes very particularized appeals to women about why they should support her husband.
I usually don't like the things that get said about "women" or the dumbass sexist generalizations that are made, but it does give you a sense of your enemy, which is in its own way helpful.
We are a culture that talks far more openly about gender divides than racial divides. I'm not sure that bringing conversations about race into a more public sphere is a bad idea. Though Clinton's approach here is certainly bad, please do not believe for a minute that I think otherwise.
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