Accidental Blogger

Sometimes the most interesting conversations between A.B. bloggers take place behind the scenes – in e-mail threads. Occasionally some of them make it to the pages of the blog as posts and at other times not. Over the weekend, I had forwarded a couple of articles in mainstream publications to my fellow authors. Dean and Anna were not buying the arguments made therein without a healthy dose of chloride of sodium.

In Sunday’s issue of the New York Times, the peerless Maureen Dowd analyzed Hillary Clinton’s game plan – play both sides of the field and call every move by your opponent a foul! Here is a sample:

On “Nightline” last week, Hillary once more wallowed in gender inequities, asserting that it’s harder for her to run than her opponent — a black man with an exotic name that most Americans hadn’t even heard a year ago.

“Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field,” she said, “but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there.”

Is that how she would deal with dictators, by playing the refs and going before the U.N. to demand: “How come you’re not asking Ahmadinejad these questions first?”

Tangled in her own victimhood, she snipped to Cynthia McFadden that Obama had written in his book that “he’s a blank screen and people of widely different views project what they want to believe onto him.” She said voters were projecting their hopes onto that blank screen even though “he just hasn’t been around long enough.”

In the next breath, asked about the women who feel sorry for her, she said: “I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It’s hard. It’s hard being a woman out there.”

So projection is bad with Obama but good with her?

I found much truth in Dowd’s acerbic observations. But Dean had this to say:

Ms. Dowd seems more than a little confused, as I read this. If cerebral arguments would be refreshing, then why has she stooped to, e.g., sartorial ones? She coyly pretends she can’t discern the message of the Clinton ad, and instead takes jabs at clothing and accessories, her glasses, her pantsuit. Clearly, the ad is exploitative in a cheesy, melodramatic way, and Clinton is pretty clearly desperate at this stage, but Dowd is not inclined to say as much. Instead, she wants to psychoanalyze Clinton and her hysterical male strategists.

The job announcement for prexy is being drafted as the candidates are being interviewed. Granted, this must occur to some extent, because the circumstances of the day will throw certain needs into relief. But Dowd assumes we all know exactly what’s required from the next President, even while she doesn’t directly broach that topic, content to belittle the whining of Clinton’s boys.

Here’s how I see this election. It’s very similar to how I often view the bench of the Supreme Court: a bunch of doddering old purely self-interested (albeit lazy) wealthy white men. Same goes for this slate. The prospects of Clinton as the first woman president and Obama as the first African American president, in other words, are mostly irrelevant. I wish Dowd, the NYT, and the rest of big media would assume a similar default position and execute their portrayals from that standpoint.

Then there was this article in the NYT regarding Obama’s relationship with Jewish American voters.  Colbert King has more of the same in the Washington Post – specifically on the Clinton campaign’s attempts to paint Obama as anti-Semitic and anti Israel.

….The Clinton campaign has done all this to paint Barack Obama as bad for Jews and Israel.

Sadly, they aren’t the only ones perpetuating falsehoods about Obama. The Internet is full of lies about the candidate, such as the accusation that Obama does not swear allegiance to America, that he took the oath of office with his hand on the Koran and that he is a Muslim. All untrue.

……But this is not about Internet crazies or campaign smears. The issue here is Hillary Clinton’s standard of conduct when it comes to comments by a candidate’s supporter.

As the Politico’s Roger Simon reported this week, fresh from her clash with Obama in Ohio, Clinton went to Texas, where one of her ardent Latina supporters told a Dallas TV station that blacks haven’t done anything to help Latinos. "They used our numbers to fulfill their goals and objectives," Adelfa Callejo said.

Then came Callejo’s kicker: "Obama has the problem that he happens to be black."

A Dallas reporter asked Clinton about her backer’s remarks. Clinton danced: "I want us judged on our merits. . . . I want people though to look beyond, look beyond race and gender, look at our records."

The reporter followed up: Is this something you reject and denounce?

Clinton: "People have every reason to express their opinions. I just don’t agree with that. I think that we should be looking at the individuals who are running."

Question: Do you still want her support, though?

Clinton laughed and said: "This is a free country. A lot of folks have said really unpleasant things about me over the course of this campaign. You can’t take any of that as anything other than an individual opinion."

Question: "But you criticized Obama for not rejecting the support of Farrakhan."

Clinton: "I don’t see any comparison at all . . . and I don’t know the facts of what you’re telling me over the TV."

Her campaign called the station back later that night, after word of the broadcast had spread and no doubt after it had studied the interview. Officials announced that their candidate rejected and denounced Callejo’s remarks.

So, will the overwhelming support of African Americans for Obama make him the Democratic nominee in 2008? Or will the animosity / suspicion of Obama among other minority communities (Asians, Latinos and Jewish Americans) tilt the scale for Hillary?  The breathless speculations in the MSM will have us believe that it will be one or the other. "Hogwash," said Anna:

Andrew and I were discussing this article, and ones like it, last night. One thing we both find irritating about the meme that "Obama needs to assuage Jewish fears," see also, Russert on Farrakhan during the Ohio debates, is that, when all’s said and done, Jews represent 1.7% of the American population (though, of course, Jews control the media…Jews like Rupert Murdoch). Jews cannot possibly win or lose Obama this election. 

As for the substantive truth of the sentiment, I’d like to see statistics on the breakdown of Jewish voters before jumping to conclusions.  Similar articles ran during the Kerry campaign, that is if Kerry wants to win, he’ll have to persuade the anti-Muslim/pro-Israel Jewish hawks that he stand by their interests as staunchly as the Republicans. But when all was said and done, Kerry received 77% of the Jewish vote, 82% among Jewish women. Obama’s support in the Jewish community seems to be splitting roughly exactly along primary trends, generally, with state by state variations that reflect the differences within the Jewish community. 

There’s a small, vocal minority of freakish, bigoted pro-Israel hawks within the small, vocal minority that is the American-Jewish population, and the mainstream press seems to love to feed it, while right wing media, from the other direction, continues to lambaste us as a bunch of ACLU rabble rousers, an image I’m happier to cultivate.

Part of me wonders whether the feeding of the anti-Muslim segment isn’t because it allows non-Jewish Americans to project their fears through someone else’s voice. I have similar suspicions about the Obama can’t win because Latinos-hate-blacks thread. Certainly there’s bigotry in the Latino population, but it also seems to me that the white target audience of those articles love to read about Latinos expressing animus toward African Americans, because it legitimates their own bigotry, while allowing them at the same time to feel superior to the  Latinos for expressing that animus openly. 

The much more decisive split against Obama in the Asian community has gone largely, bizarrely unreported in this election– mimicking, I suppose, the relative invisibility of the Asian community in the media, in general. I did see an article in some LA rag (LA Times or LA Weekly, I can’t remember) a while back on why Obama’s emphasis on "change" might not resonate among some older East Asians from more conservative, and particularly from Confucian traditions. I remember thinking, interesting theory, but then East Asians also brought us the revolutions in China, Vietnam, Korea, the Cultural Revolution, etc. (Among older immigrants, this may well be another source of skepticism and/or fear toward popular movements).  As you say, the strongest break seems to run generationally, and along the lines of access to information, which also runs generationally.

For me the kicker is that Hillary may have scared enough people with her 3am phone call ad and the smear campaign against Obama’s supposed Muslim, anti-Israel credentials (not just among minorities) to squeak through in Texas and Ohio on March 4.