You'd have to believe that women who supported Clinton are completely ignorant and infantile, before you could believe that those Clinton-supporting women could bring themselves to vote for McCain. (Well, we're not, and we won't; we like Obama too.) Just as I suspected, all that was hype. Frank Rich, in the New York Times, recently wrote an excellent artice from which I've excerpted:
Op-Ed Columnist
Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain?
"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.
"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."
0 comments:
Post a Comment