Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

The Clintons Take Drama to Shakespearean Levels

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How much like the Macbeths are the Clintons? Though they switch roles between Lady M and McB himself, the two seem to be hell-bent on remaining in power and will bring down the Democratic Party in the process if they must.

Note to the Left: Listen, I am not really a Democrat any more than I am a Republican, but this is a moment in history where I think we need to be strategic. If John McCain wins you’d just better pack and move-he’s about as centrist as he is psychologically stable. So for all of Obama’s flaws, I don’t feel like I can afford a McCain presidency. There’s not enough Pepto-Bismol in all the world to stomach the disaster that is going to be. But i digress.

Just when I thought it was all over, signs seem to point to the fact that the Clintons may still be hoping to sabotage the Obama candicacy in hopes of a Hilary Clinton ticket in 2012.

In a “non-shock of the week” turn of events, The Atlantic Monthly’s September feature story proves that the Clinton Campaign worked really hard to drape themselves in the fabric of American flag-style patriotism, and paint Obama as foreign other who couldn’t be trusted (this scoop, combined with me picking up the last two brilliant issues at airports this summer means the mag has won itself a new subscriber in Kenyon Farrow!). Non-shock as it is, The Atlantic has published all the emails/memos on their site proving it (theatlantic.com/clinton), and the story is an interesting timeling of the inner workings of her campaign. Joshua Green writes:

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

But we thought since she lost, she’d concede to get a cushy job in the new administration (though not the VP slot) and leave well enough alone. Maureen Dowd, who undoubetdly despises the Hillary Clinton, wrote in her column yesterday that Hillary and Bill are still planning to use their platforms as major speakers at the Democratic National Convention to set Hillary up as the nominee in 2012, and damage Obama’s chances against McCain now.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.

She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

LOL!!! Further proving Dowd’s point, Bill Clinton had the fucking nerve to tell ABC News last week that Congressman James Clyburn (D-SC) had purposefully made him look like a racist and ruin Clinton’s Negro Pass in the Black Community-a fact which Clyburn categorically denies.

Clinton told ABC News last week that Clyburn “used to be” an old friend of his, but he “was not Hillary’s supporter. Never. Not ever. Not for a day.”

When told that Clyburn had said Clinton damaged his own credibility with the black community, Clinton responded, “That may be by the time he got through working on it, that was probably true.”

Though Clyburn usually operates with the utmost restraint, I think he should tell Bill:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Gi28pNruA&feature=related]

What's So Different About Oregon & Kentucky???

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The nano-second after the polls closed in Kentucky, CNN announced Clinton to be the winner of the primary there-and she won the primary with a 30 point lead. Over the last week, the press has been obsessed with Clinton being stronger against white working-class voters, as opposed to Obama, who is popular among Black (and Black people are simply Black, no nuances about class/gender divides necessary. The little discussion of other racial groups and voting as all but disappeared.) and White upper-class liberals.

But I decided to look up the Census data on both states to see if this is really true. And I am not sure that this definition explains Clintons wins in the Appalachian states (OH, PA, KY, WV, IN, TN).

Kentucky:

Whites: 90.2%

Blacks: 7.5%

High School Grads: 74.1%

College Grads: 17.1%

Median Income: $37.0K

% Living in Poverty: 16.3

Now, let’s look at Oregon:

Whites: 90.5%

Blacks: 1.9%

High School Grads: 85.1%

College Grads: 25.1%

Median Income: $42.5K

% Living in Poverty: 12.9

Now, when you compare those numbers, are they really statistically that different, enough to explain the difference between what’s happening in two states, who, by the numbers, look fairly similar compared to what the press is saying explains their differences? If you want my humble opinion, there is something happening in these Appalachian states that cannot be accounted for simply by “white working class.” Just this weekend, Obama spoke in front of 75,000 people in Oregon, and from what I could tell, most of them white. He also won the Oregon primary by about an 18 point lead.

What do you think is driving the difference?

A friend pointed me to this website called US Election Atlas, which breaks down the primary results by county. We looked at some states where we know the race/class breakdown by county, and many cases, the media narrative doesn’t seem to fit.

Was Clinton Behind Jeremiah Wright's Resurface?

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I knew something about this didn’t smell right. Initially, watching Reverend Jeremiah Wright on PBS was really useful and informative, and then seeing him in front of the National Press Club was, well, interesting.

I actually very much appreciated his opening (and scripted) remarks. But as the Q&A went on, I had to wonder, WHAT THE FUCK IS HE DOING? AND WHY NOW?

I know it must have been hard for Wright, or anyone, to be publicly thrashed the way he was in the media over the last month or so. I understand it must have been hard to listen to someone you helped acclimate himself to Chicago, baptized their children and preside over their wedding, to distance themselves from you in order to appeal to white voters. I also agree with Wright’s notion that the media attack on him was less about him per se, or Obama really, but was really about white America’s continued fear and anxiety that Black people really can’t stand them-and that the Black church, even after the Civil Rights Movement was long destroyed, still can be a place to radicalize Black people! And they really ain’t tryin to have no President who has anything to do with Black “radical-ism”.

In any case, Wright really seemed to be doing more than responding to his critics yesterday. He seemed to be both mocking the “press” and all its fakery of objectivity and fairness, and by extension, mocking the people who have tried to paint him into the box of the angry (and foolish) black preacher. But his mockery, in many ways, seemed to re-inscribe himself into that very box he seemed to want to move out of. He seemed to be caught up in the celebrity that the moment has given him, and less like someone who was really trying to redeem his reputation or that of his church, or the Black Church as a whole.

I am not arguing for a bourgie politics of respectability. I am not saying he should back away from his statements about the US, 9-11, HIV or anything of the sort (though in some places I wish he had more factual information and data to back up or re-frame his messaging in these issues). I am saying he has to know that the way he came off was cocky and at moments buffoonish- and really did very little to salvage his reputation of that of the Black church.

What’s interesting though, whether you believe he was trying to protect himself and the Black church, or that he was caught up in the moment or the idea of his own bravado and celebrity, he might have been a pawn in a political game, and did not see it coming.

Daily News columnist Errol Louis seems to suggest that Wright may have been set up by a Clinton supporter, who was the person who asked him to speak at this press conference. Errol writes:

Shortly before he rose to deliver his rambling, angry, sarcastic remarks at the National Press Club Monday, Wright sat next to, and chatted with, Barbara Reynolds.

A former editorial board member at USA Today, she runs something called Reynolds News Services and teaches ministry at the Howard University School of Divinity. (She is an ordained minister).

It also turns out that Reynolds - introduced Monday as a member of the National Press Club “who organized” the event - is an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter.

On a blog linked to her Web site- www.reynoldsnews.com- Reynolds said in a February post: “My vote for Hillary in the Maryland primary was my way of saying thank you” to Clinton and her husband for the successes of Bill Clinton‘s presidency.

If it turns out that Wright was set up, and this was a ploy to cost Obama the nomination, I wonder how Wright will reconcile this with himself.

Or worse even, as NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert expresses, was this Wright’s way to get back at Obama?

Media Analysis of Obama/Clinton PA Primary

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This morning I woke up to check in on the PA primary, to see if Clinton was still leading by 10 points. She was. But when I was watching CNN, their morning anchors bantered on and on, segment after segment, over and over again about Obama’s “white problem,” to explain why Obama struggles to get votes in the primary from white working class America. I was so disgusted by this framework because it presumes that the problem is Obama’s, as opposed to AMERICA’s race problem. The fact of the matter is, Obama has done everything but get a chemical peel (and be a Republican) to appeal to white voters, what else do they want? Some of these people will never vote for him, simply because he is black.

The other problem, as so eloquently put by The Root.com columnist Melissa Harris Lacewell, who spoke to “the Blacks are Men, and the Whites are Women” narrative put forth by CNN and the rest of the press:

“A lot of people have tried to gently explain the divide, so I’m just going to put this out there: Sister voters have a beef with white women like Clinton that is both racial and gendered. It is not about choosing race; it is about rejecting Hillary’s Scarlett O’Hara act…Black women voters are rejecting Hillary Clinton because her ascendance is not a liberating symbol. Her tears are not moving. Her voice does not resonate. Throughout history, privileged white women, attached at the hip to their husband’s power and influence, have been complicit in black women’s oppression. Many African American women are simply refusing to play Mammy to Hillary.”

Amen. Similarly, Black Commentator asks the Clintons to account for their longstanding relationship to the descendants of Scarlet O’Hara, The Daughters of the Confederacy.

And race/gender issues aside (sort of), Talking Points Memo TV did a great analysis of the delegate battle, which helps to sort through all the rhetoric about Clinton’s “being able to win the “must-win” states for Democrats. Definitely worth watching.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbGvvhdpuR0]

Condi is NOT Running With McCain. Period.

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There’s been lot’s of talk coming out of the press about the Republican “Dream Ticket” which would be Senator John McCain and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. There was even a recent poll in New York State that showed with Rice on the ticket, McCain could beat Obama and/or Clinton in a general election. But the truth is, Condoleezza Rice is not running with no John McCain. Period.

Why is the media letting some DC spin doctors spread this drama? According to the Washington Post, the story made its way to the press because “Dan Senor, a GOP political operative, claimed on ABC’s “This Week” that Rice was “actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning” for the job.”

Bullshit. They are just so desperate to get a Black woman on the ticket to try to combat the momentum Obama has, or to give Black folks a reason to go “Red” if Clinton is the highly unlikely nominee.

Yesterday, Democratic strategist Donna Brazille was on NPR’s News and Notes, and flat out denied that such a thing was possible. And if there’s a Black woman inside Washington who’d know other than Rice, it’s Brazille.

But even before that, Rice was reported by Reuters to have said in press conference in LATE FEBRUARY that “I have always said that the one thing that I have not seen myself doing is running for elected office,” Rice said at a news conference. “I didn’t even run for high school president. It’s sort of not in my genes.”

The media has the memory of a gold fish-and they’re just about as gullible.

Alice Walker On the 2008 Primary

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LEST WE FORGET, An Open Letter To My Sisters Who Are Brave

From Alice Walker

I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar. When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss* May Montgomery. She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that Of course they would not. No Montgomerys would. My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style. We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn’t pay it to a nigger. That before she’d pay a nigger that much money she’d milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that “Jane” and “Dick” had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter. The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

*During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as “Miss” when they reached the age of twelve.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their “democratic” right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free. I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not… Read the rest at The Root.com

Hillary Clinton: A Lover of Democracy

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Hillary Clinton, who has painted herself as the white working class hero, and the person who has “earned” her way to the Presidency (as opposed to Obama, who according to Geraldine Ferraro, is an affirmative action candidate) had this to say in to NPR about the battle over Florida and Michigan, and and how to best solve the problem of allowing people to vote in those states regardless of the debates (from this larger MSNBC story):

“On NPR this morning, Clinton called the Jan. 15 Michigan primary a ‘fair’ election. When asked by interviewer Steve Inskeep how it was fair when Obama’s name was not on the ballot, she replied, “Well, that was his choice, Steve.”

Thanks for the tip, A.L.

Geraldine Ferraro: Victim of Racism?

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Former Vice Presidential candidate and major fundraiser for Senator Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro claims she is a victim of racism. First, in an interview with the Daily Breeze, Ferraro commented that:

“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

First of all, the comment that if “he was a woman (of any color) he wouldn’t be in this position” makes no sense because he is RUNNING AGAINST A WHITE WOMAN! I do think it is much harder for a democratic/progressive woman of color to get far in a presidential campaign (Shirley Chisolm or Carol Mosely Braun for example) but this “gender trumps race” shit that Ferraro and Steinem have helped to promote speak to the most deep-seated bitterness of the white women’s movement toward people of color, and their complete inability to have a nuanced analysis of both how sexism can be at play AT THE SAME TIME that racism is also at play.

I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, though. OK I wasn’t. But I thought maybe she had some larger point about Obama being tokenized by the party or voters to say “racism is over.” That’s a conversation I think is relevant. But Ferraro doesn’t say that. She shows just how racist she is by later defending her comments to CNN by saying

“Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, ‘Let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world,’ you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,” she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California. “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Yes. Geraldine Ferraro. A victim of reverse racism.

Give me a fucking break.