Paging Joan Walsh. Here is your "wail worth hearing.." This is nuts, and the fact that there are white Democrats defending this woman, or even acting like she has something to contribute to the conversation is disgusting. Check over at Larry Johnson's site and see how many people are defending this fool. Listen to her claim to be "the furthest thing from a racist" shortly after stating that "99 percent of the blacks don't know why they're voting. While your at it check out Will Bower claiming that Harriet meant nothing by her "inadequate black male" remark. I would love to the black Obama supporter who could go on TV and claim that Hillary was "an inadequate white woman" and 99 percent of white women who voted for her didn't know what they were doing. I don't want to hear anymore foolishness about how sexism is more acceptable than racism. The only people who believe that are idiots, who don't know what racism is to begin with, because they've never had to wrestle with it. This shit is just "White rights" dressed up as feminism. Get these mofos out the effing party. Send them to McCain. It's where they belong anyway.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The inherent contradictions in her argument for Clinton over Obama are throughly astounding. The biggest one has got to be that, although Obama apparently has less "experience," it seems her main reason for wanting Clinton to be elected is because they're both women, yet black voters must share her same sentiment, and because she herself is unable to find anything positive about Obama, then said black voters - myself included - "don't know why they're voting." Covert racism is an increasingly annoying prospect, a topic she's incredibly averse to commenting on.
Also, Yglesias and dNA sent me here and keep up the good work.
ugh, whatever. let this lady make a complete ass of herself and discredit herself and her opinions with each word she utters.
also love that she ran immediately to fox news. reeks of desperation on both sides.
"Get these mofos out the effing party."
Slightly unrelated, but this is one reason I (eventually) supported Obama. To drive as stake through the heart of the Southern Strategy, of that rump of the Democratic Party that managed to stay overtly racist and loyally (locally) Democratic.
One promise of Obama (and I think he's gonna disappoint of of us in many ways; he's just a politician, though one I trust more than most) is that he can lose the (overt) racists and still forge a majority. And a much stronger party we'll be, for the loss.
You mentioned in a previous post that one surprise of the primary season was how willing whites are to vote for a black candidate. I'd like to hear more about that. I live in Maine, my almost-exclusively-white town had a caucus, in which I think it's safe to say not a single dap was, erm, dapped (not even any fist bumps!). Maybe it's easy not to be racist when you live in an almost entirely segregated world, but I suppose the opposite could be true, too--that proximity breaks down barriers. But my lily white town in the whitest state went Obama 400-200.
I dunno. I'm absolutely confident that I'm racist as the next white guy, and my town's racist as the next white town, but as far as voting for a black man for president, this wasn't even close.
gussie writes: You mentioned in a previous post that one surprise of the primary season was how willing whites are to vote for a black candidate.
I can see how this is surprising if, as is the case for most Americans, somone is just getting to know Obama and isn't from his home base in the Midwest/Illinois (Land of Lincoln), where he won over (first) a racially integrated neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago (Hyde Park) as a State Senator in '96, then won a U.S. Senate seat for Illinois in 2002, most of which outside of Chicago is rural and white, as are of course large parts of Chicago. Of course it helped that the Republican Party has collapsed in Illinois, the way it has nationally, and in 2002 Obama was up against a Fundamentalist wing-nut -- who was also black.
In the SuperTuesday Illinois primary, Obama swept the state outside of Chicago, and the majority of Democratic primary voters were women. Something similar played out throughout the Midwest in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota. The media has paid no attention to the history here: despite anti-black racism that has roots everywhere, these were all Northern Free states at the time of the Civil War, and had active lines of the Underground Railroad leading up to Canada. Appalachia and the South have different stories, and we've seen how that's affected the campaign.
If anything, more whites -- to the extent that that "white" is a static category of analysis itself (at different times it has not included Jews, Catholics, Italians, Poles, the poor, rural folks, etc.) -- should be surprised that so many blacks (another fluid category) voted for him. It was only relatively late in the game that so many left the Clinton camp. And Obama himself has taken conscious decisions to beef up his repertoire of conventionally black culture traits as he outlines himself in his writings.
America may not be post-racial, but it IS multi-racial, and so is Obama, and that's why he is such a beacon of hope to so many, especially the young, the urban, and the educated, and independent.
I couldn't agree more. Older white voters seem to think that if they were Democrats in 1964 and hold the same social views now, that the Party has somehow moved to the Left without them (see: Lieberman, Joe).
The reality is that as time moves and social conventions change with them, people need to adapt or move out the way. Older white women who were for interracial marriage but are against same-sex marriage are no longer Democrats.
By all rights they are modern Republicans. Perhaps liberal Republicans (and we could always use some more of them), but Republicans nonetheless. It's time for them to make the switch official, moderate the Republican base, join Joe Lieberman as sellouts to all that they once claimed to believe.
I, for one, won't miss them a bit. I'm more than convinced that Obama volunteers will register enough new voters to more than make up for the defections of the racist Democrats to their natural home in the GOP.