From My Inbox

by hilzoy

From Senator Clinton:

"I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise."

Good for her. Time to come together.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

...still wondering if those who campaigned for Obama by joining in the mob trashing Clinton are ever going to apologize for doing that, or just continue to be ungracious winners patronizingly telling Clinton supporters to get over it already.

[hilzoy]

Jes: Did I say that, or anything like it?

Again, it would help if I had some idea which of my posts you thought were over the line. I have no interest in criticizing Hillary Clinton any more; that I did so, when I thought that things she had done merited criticism, does not seem to me to merit an apology.

We disagree. I understand that. But if you think I crossed the line, tell me more about how I did so.

[Jake]

...still wondering if those who campaigned for Obama by joining in the mob trashing Clinton are ever going to apologize for doing that, or just continue to be ungracious winners patronizingly telling Clinton supporters to get over it already.

I find this to be a fairly bewildering statement on a couple of levels.

This post is, first and foremost, about Senator Clinton's words to her supporters. It is not about Senator Obama or his supporters. I guess I'm a little surprised this is the first thing you wanted to discuss in this light.

I'm not going to bite beyond that. I'm a little disappointed that Senator Clinton wasn't given a bit more time to decompress. I think she deserved it, even though I was disappointed she didn't concede Tuesday night. Regardless, I find this letter to her supporters to be representative of a good step toward unity. Why not embrace that?

[The Commander Guy]

"I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise."

I hate to get into clintonian semantics, but this carefully worded sentence does not actually admit that Obama is gonna be the nominee.......yet.

[Ugh]

still wondering if those who have called Obama supporters a mob are ever going to apologize for doing that

[Tropical Fats]

When Senator Clinton apologizes for "...as far as I know", "Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience, Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002", race baiting in South Carolina, the "Commander-In-Chief threshold" comments that are already being featured in RNC ads, her other glowing praise of John McCain that will be featured in future RNC ads, mocking Obama's speeches, and everything else she did that weakened Obama for the general election - when she apologizes for all that, I'll apologize for the intemperate things I've said about her that may have upset anybody.

Not before.

[The Modesto Kid]

Jes: I don't know how bad of an offender I've been against Clinton in general this season; but yesterday I did apologize over at my blog for one bit of intemperate and hostile language. We square?

My too-hasty post on the "Bad Movies" thread was borne out!

[The Modesto Kid]

Fats: I think an apology from Clinton for saying those things is the last thing I want right now, because for her to apologize would (a) bring those remarks freshly into the public consciousness -- not that the Republicans are not going to bring them out anyway, but still -- and (b) show Clinton in an atmosphere of defeat, which I don't think is conducive to her campaigning for Obama in a pumped-up way -- this last is what I am really hoping for, and would totally redeem Clinton in my eyes. Save the apologies for her memoir.

[ral]

I feel sure we can count on Senator McCain to provide Senator Clinton an opportunity to reconsider her judgment. All she has to do is wait for it.

[Jake]

Yeah I agree with Modesto here. This is the beginning of a long apology/reconciliation between the two camps, and I don't think it's healty for Obama supporters (and I'm one of them) to expect or demand that Clinton apologize for every slight over the course of the campaign.

Let's follow Obama's lead on this. I expect him to be fairly gracious towards her over the coming weeks. I fully believe he knows that their places could have easily been reversed.

[Gary Farber]

"I hate to get into clintonian semantics, but this carefully worded sentence does not actually admit that Obama is gonna be the nominee.......yet."

Perhaps those of us who wish to think of ourselves as grownups might consider displaying some presumption of good faith?

I'm doing so. I believe Senator Clinton. I thank her for her statement.

Today is a new day. We need to beat John McCain,and get as many Republicans as we can out of Congress, and out of the state legislatures.

I'm going to do my best to put this terrible nomination campaign behind us, and move on. I want to give all my fellow Democrats as much of a clean slate as I can, and regard tomorrow as yet another new day, with past grievances forgotten as best I can, and where they're not to be forgotten -- and I confess that there are many I will be unable to forget in the slightest for a very very very long time, if ever -- I will pretend it is otherwise.

At least until the second Tuesday in November.

What y'all do is up to you. That's what I'm doing.

Anyone who wants to join me is free to speak up.

[Blackburn]

"...still wondering if those who campaigned for Obama by joining in the mob trashing Clinton are ever going to apologize for doing that, or just continue to be ungracious winners patronizingly telling Clinton supporters to get over it already."

Since your asking for apologies, who exactly should apologize? And where and how should they apologize?

[MaryL]

I'm with you, Gary. I'm putting aside the frustrations of the campaign, and I'm taking Senator Clinton at face value because I think she's too damn smart and too damn honourable to play destructive semantic games or to try to pull a fast one at the convention (as some paranoids on the Web still think she could do.)

[von]

I apologize for trashing the Clintons -- Bill and Hillary both. Each does/did a pretty good job while in power, despite being a generally despicable human being.

Ooops. Also apologize for calling the scum-sucking Clintons "generally despicable human being[s]."

Ummm, strike "scum-sucking" from the above.

(This is harder than I thought.)

[Mary]

I am not talking about OW, but sometimes I wonder if the most partisan progressive blogs should suspend their comments for two weeks. In this transition period of hurt and disappointment, it is so easy to confuse supporters with the candidates.

[Hogan]

I hate to get into clintonian semantics, but this carefully worded sentence does not actually admit that Obama is gonna be the nominee.......yet.

No, but "On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy" does.

[Blackburn]

"Today is a new day. We need to beat John McCain,and get as many Republicans as we can out of Congress, and out of the state legislatures."

For those of us who suffered through the Nixon and Reagan-Bush years... what Gary said.

[von]

On a weightier note than my comment at 10:13 a.m., I am pleased that Obama has won the nomination. Likely, I am lonely in my view that either Obama or McCain would make a pretty good president. (I'm also likely lonely in my view that their Iraq policies would be close to 95% the same -- but I am pretty sure that I'm right.)

[Gary Farber]

I've turned my couple of comments here into a very sloppy blog post; apologies for the solecisms and awkward writing, but at the moment, it's that or not at all.

Anyone who agrees with me is, of course, free to link to that elsewhere, and I'd be most appreciative of anyone who did. Thanks.

[david kilmer]

Very nicely said, Gary. I don't have a readership to speak of, but I'll definitely link to it.

The "irony of [you] saying it" made it even better :)

[wonkiewonkie]

I'm not going to apologize. In fact I don't think there was a mob of Clinton haters any more than there were people with Bush Derangement Syndrome. However I am not going to list all of the things she did and said that I found offensive because there isn't any point now.

If I had a chance to tell Mark Penn or Ben Woldson or Hillary herself what I thought, I would take it. But there is no purpose to being offensive to the people who saw things in her that I didn't see and didn't see the things I did.

[Bruce Baugh]

Gary, good stuff.

I reserve the right to complain about present problems. (I would like to see some response to the Republican National Committee's use of Clinton's comments a while back about McCain and Obama, for instance.) But there'll be time for postmortems on and on...later. Time for a campaign now.

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

Perhaps those of us who wish to think of ourselves as grownups might consider displaying some presumption of good faith?

I'm doing so. I believe Senator Clinton. I thank her for her statement.

Today is a new day. We need to beat John McCain,and get as many Republicans as we can out of Congress, and out of the state legislatures.

I'm going to do my best to put this terrible nomination campaign behind us, and move on. I want to give all my fellow Democrats as much of a clean slate as I can, and regard tomorrow as yet another new day, with past grievances forgotten as best I can

What Gary said.

It is time to move on. Holding grudges won't help anyone to achieve anything constructive here. From this point forward I think we will hear nothing but words of reconciliation from both candidates, and I do not expect either side to be demanding apologies of the other, certainly not in public.

We should follow their lead in this - that is sort of the point of wanting somebody to be your leader, isn't it?

I would like to thank Senator Clinton for breaking new ground in showing that gender is no longer a barrier to the Presidency of any great consequence, and I expect that the next female candidate to seek the office will be evaluated fairly on her merits in no small part thanks to the effort that Hillary and her supporters put into this campaign. That is a great honor which should not be overlooked or diminished regardless of the final outcome in this historic and very close race. I have no idea if something like this will happen in the course of the various events and photo ops, but at some point I would love to see Barack and Michelle's girls give Hillary a big hug, as a way of saying “thank you” for this achievement.

[joel hanes]

I have consistently opposed Sen. Clinton's candidacy since its inception, on many blogs. I don't think that I was primarily motivated in this by sexism, but was instead concerned with breaking out of the political pattern of the last two decades, which I feel cannot be accomplished with Sen. Clinton at the helm. I took the cue for much of my criticism from Molly Ivins.

And yet, echidne and Avedon and bitchphd and melissa and amanda and Jeslurgiac have shown me that much ostensibly-policy-based criticism of Sen. Clinton has been phrased and pitched with sexist framing. I am sure that at some point I have made tone-deaf postings that offended, simply because I have written much, and because thirty years of trying have not yet completely freed me from the assumptions and the privileged viewpoint of a white American male life.

I sincerely regret any offense. I've learned a great deal from reading the feminist critiques of this primary campaign. Likely I still suck, but maybe I suck a bit less.

Jes, if it was me, I'm sorry.
I'll try to do better.

[Gary Farber]

"In fact I don't think there was a mob of Clinton haters"

What, anywhere?

This is the problem: endless numbers of people keep making, or denying, generalities that have to be true as generalities, while not realizing that by doing so, they enrage everyone who fits their generality, but of whom their claim isn't true.

When you use that structure for a claim, you have to be doing that. The language does what it does, your intentions having nothing to do with it.

So, please: notice that by structuring claims this way, you have to be making untrue and unfair and hurtful assertions.

So maybe everyone should stop it.

Be specific about whom you're making claims about, hmm?

Thanks.

[Gary Farber]

"and Jeslurgiac"

Jesurgislac.

[russell]

Perhaps those of us who wish to think of ourselves as grownups might consider displaying some presumption of good faith?

I'm doing so. I believe Senator Clinton. I thank her for her statement.

What Gary said.

I would like to thank Senator Clinton for breaking new ground in showing that gender is no longer a barrier to the Presidency of any great consequence, and I expect that the next female candidate to seek the office will be evaluated fairly on her merits in no small part thanks to the effort that Hillary and her supporters put into this campaign.

What TLTIABQ said.

I'm also likely lonely in my view that their Iraq policies would be close to 95% the same

IMO this is quite possible, verging on likely. No matter who wins in November, they are only going to be able to do whatever is possible. And, they're going to have to respond to whatever happens in the world between now and then, and after then.

Iraq is, I think, long past the point where we control the options available to us.

What will be different, I think, between a McCain and an Obama presidency is the broader attitude toward the rest of the world in our foreign policy.

Do we continue to be the belligerent bad actor, or do we return to a doctrine of cooperation, and a sane and judicious use of force? Do we approach the world with an assumption of good faith, or with an assumption that we can and should break heads to get our way?

The endgame in Iraq aside, that's still a pretty significant difference.

Thanks -

[John Cole]

When Senator Clinton apologizes for "...as far as I know", "Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience, Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002", race baiting in South Carolina, the "Commander-In-Chief threshold" comments that are already being featured in RNC ads, her other glowing praise of John McCain that will be featured in future RNC ads, mocking Obama's speeches, and everything else she did that weakened Obama for the general election - when she apologizes for all that, I'll apologize for the intemperate things I've said about her that may have upset anybody.

And I will toss in invoking Rezko during the SC debate, gleefully needling Obama and adding to the BS pile-on by Stephy and that other idiot in the final debate, doing her "WHITE PEOPLE WON'T VOTE FOR HIM" Appalachian tour, calling him an out of touch elitist, lying about Michigan and Florida, lying about the popular vote, dismissing every state that she did not win as not counting, and on and on and on.

And to make it all worse, she did most or all of these things AFTER it was clear she could not win, all the while penning John McCain's commercials for the fall. For me, that is what is most unforgivable. she did all of this when it was clear the only way she could "win" was to have the supers overturn the pledged delegate count, ensuring she lost in November.

So if we are going to start demanding apologies, Hillary better start first, because she has more of them. By a wide margin.

[Gary Farber]

John, do you have a working email address you might perhaps send me? None of the ones I have for you, including the one on your blog, seem to work any more (and maybe haven't for god knows how long).

Thanks, if so.

[byrningman]

(I'm also likely lonely in my view that their Iraq policies would be close to 95% the same -- but I am pretty sure that I'm right.)

I would agree with that, only with the substantial caveat that if the treaty the administration is currently seeking is as misguided as rumours suggest, then all bets are off.

I also hate to rain on everyone's happy parade, but I for one remain skeptical that Clinton is now going to turn into a model of party solidarity. Rather than tiptoe around her eggshell ego for the next two months, Obama would be well advised to choose his non-Clinton veep ASAP and leave all this nonsense in the rearview mirror.

[Francis]

As the expression goes, politics ain't beanbag. Sen. Clinton fought a very hard campaign, collected millions of votes and came within a whisker of winning the nomination.

I recognize that millions of American preferred her to Sen. Obama to represent the Democratic Party in the general election. Having generally not had my own preferred candidate not win the nomination any number of times, I appreciate and sympathize with the extraordinary frustration those voters feel by having come so very very close and yet not prevailed.

I personally was offended by some of her harder-edged comments, but as I said earlier, politics ain't beanbag. I do not ask for and do not expect to receive apologies from her or her partisans. I reach out my hand to her partisans and request, for the good of this great country and indeed the world, that they join us in supporting, campaigning for, and ultimately electing Sen. Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.

Magnamity is easy in victory, but it's all I have. Please accept my apologies for the sexism and general boorishness of many Obama partisans. Please let's put aside our differences and join together. This election really matters. Don't let your frustration with your candidate's defeat lead to greater harm.

Thanks,

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

So if we are going to start demanding apologies, Hillary better start first, because she has more of them. By a wide margin.

Hey John, not that I disagree (at least in private), but aren't you supposed to be "on the wagon" with this I-cannot-rationally-discuss-a-certain-candidate stuff? Do we have to put a lock on the liquor cabinet, to keep you from sneaking another hit of the sauce?

:-)

[Jeff]

I'm going to do my best to put this terrible nomination campaign behind us, and move on.

I've tried to do so. Hopefully, after Saturday there won't be any distractions from doing so in full. That is to say, I have tried to put the campaign behind me, but can't fully until it's officially over. What Clinton says will determine whethwer she truly thinks it is or not.

=================

An idea I saw from Feministe was that someone should give a "gender speech" analogous to Obama's "race speech" after the Wright mess first started. I think Clinton could have given the "gender speech" after New Hampshire, pointing to the sexism in the coverage of her speech. I'm not sure she's the ideal person to give it now. One person suggested Michelle Obama.

Do you (a general "you") think this is a good idea?

[hilzoy]

I'm on the unity bandwagon. I hereby apologize for any time in which I did cross the line.

[Turbulence]

I'm really confused how Clinton will be able to walk back her attempts to de-legitimize the nomination process with respect to FL/MI votes. She has consistently made a very strong case to her supporters that their votes were not counted and that she was staying in the race in part to fight against that injustice.

While I can see her saying that "Obama is my good friend", "Obama is much much better than McCain", "I wholeheartedly support Obama", etc., I can't imagine how she re-legitimizes the nomination process. Can she really say: "I was wrong to talk about stolen votes; nothing was stolen and I was speaking out of my frustration and sorrow"? I can't imagine her admitting to that level of deception.

If I'm right and she glosses over the FL/MI issue, why should those supporters that believed her previous FL/MI statements and were enraged accept her concession now? These people are already operating under the assumption that Clinton won the nomination but that evil party elders stole it from her because...um, I don't know, but the point is that the nomination was stolen from her. Starting from that mental model, any Clinton concession that doesn't address the FL/MI issue head on seems likely to be perceived as "after stealing the nomination from her, they forced her to make happy talk about unity, just to complete her humiliation".

I'm not worried about the Clinton supporters who don't know anything about FL/MI or those who do know and are unconcerned about it. Those are the supporters whom it will be easiest to unify anyway. The supporters that will be most difficult to pacify are those who are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that a terrible injustice has been perpetrated and that Obama's nomination is illegitimate.

[cleek]

Starting from that mental model, any Clinton concession that doesn't address the FL/MI issue head on seems likely to be perceived as "after stealing the nomination from her, they forced her to make happy talk about unity, just to complete her humiliation".

i assume that's exactly what will happen.

the craziest of the crazy people (NoQ, H44, etc.) have already bought into the idea that the entire primary was a conspiracy against Hillary. they've spent months constructing elaborate fantasies about how Obama, the trilateral commission, the MSM, and the GOP all got together and schemed to disenfranchise and humiliate all the women in the country. these aren't rational people. by now, their fantasy world is bigger than Hillary, so i don't think there's anything she can say to bring them back.

[Turbulence]

cleek,

My real concern is that we don't know how many people bought into the 'nomination was stolen from Clinton' meme. I sort of expect that No Quarter and Hillary is 44 and Taylor Marsh will never recover, but I've seen some impassioned rants about 'they stole the nomination from her!' at more reasonable places like Shakespeare's Sister. That makes me wonder just how widespread this notion is.

[John in Nashville]

Perhaps those of us who wish to think of ourselves as grownups might consider displaying some presumption of good faith?

I am trying to ascribe good faith to Senator Clinton; however, her words and actions during the course of the primary campaign make that difficult to do. The "commander-in-chief threshold" comment is Joe Lieberman/Zell Miller/Judas Iscariot territory. The "RFK was assassinated in June" comment was downright ghoulish.

I will feel more kindly toward Mrs. Clinton when, as I hope will happen, she displays some magnanimity in defeat. To this point, however, I suspect that she still hopes for misfortune to befall Senator Obama, a la Paul Wellstone and Ron Brown.

[david kilmer]

"And I will toss in..."

Like tossing a spice into an overcooked dish, or like tossing a grenade after the war's over?

[magistra]

Jeff - this is based on what I write about the idea of a 'gender speech' by Clinton in the Feministe comments.

Any such speech would have to consider what it was about Obama’s speech that make the impact. That was an attempt to listen to what ordinary white people felt and sympathise with them, and not just explain to them what black people felt. Clinton making a speech about the pervasiveness of sexism wouldn’t be a new gender speech, but the same old gender speech, and it would be taken by many men as men-bashing.

If Clinton wanted to make a gender speech she should have thrown Gloria Steinem under the bus when she started going on about women being more oppressed than blacks. Clinton should have pointed out that it wasn’t a contest about who had suffered most and that what she wanted was equality for all. And she should also have tried to reach out to the many men whose response when feminists complain about male power is, ‘well I don’t have any power either’. Feminists need to link the oppression of women to the general exploitativeness of the US system (as Obama did by talking about the problems shared by the black and white middle classes) in this way if they’re going to build a wider coalition.

But I don’t think Clinton can get beyond Gloria Steinem’s second-generation feminism, unlike Obama getting beyond Jeremiah Wright’s sixties view of race. I don’t know if there are female US politicians who can.

[Nell]

magistra: I don’t know if there are female US politicians who can.

That's a mighty broad brush. There are a lot of female U.S. politicians, even leaving aside the ones who are anti-feminist (the Jean Schmidts of the right, e.g.)

One of the better-known women politicians is the Speaker of the House. Can you provide examples of Rep. Pelosi making statements or taking positions that in your view are similarly constrained by "second-generation feminism"?

[david kilmer]

Nell - how about this one?

"If people are ripping your face off, you have to rip their face off"

Maybe that was a bad example.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

'I'm also likely lonely in my view that their Iraq policies would be close to 95% the same'

IMO this is quite possible, verging on likely. No matter who wins in November, they are only going to be able to do whatever is possible. And, they're going to have to respond to whatever happens in the world between now and then, and after then.

I agree with this pessimistic sentiment, and with the notion that at a broader level their foreign policies will tease themselves apart. First and most prominently in Iran, tho' this assumes that the current administration doesn't decide to create limiting facts on the ground in the next 6 months.

[magistra]

Nell - when I said I don't know whether there are female US politicians who could come out with a statement parallel to Obama's, that was a statement about my limited knowledge of the US political scene.

I'm British, and though I'm interested in US politics at the presidential level (the British need to be, so we know who to kow-tow to next), I don't have a particularly good sense of the American women in less senior political positions. Are there ones who you would class as feminist, but not second-generation feminist? (I realise that discrimination may mean that women tend to rise to political prominence later than men, so that female politicians may be more likely to be baby-boomer generation than male ones).

[hilzoy]

magistra: part of the problem, here, might be the conflation between second-generation feminism, and "Gloria Steinem’s second-generation feminism". I'm more a second-generation feminist than any other kind, though I was always somewhat heterodox (e.g., when reading stuff from the 70s in which "liberal feminism" was dismissed in favor of "radical feminism", generally on the grounds that it was obvious that we all ought to go as far as possible in some direction or other, so obviously the more radical the better, I always used to think: huh?)

In any case, I'm certainly not part of some later wave. But I found Gloria Steinem's article offensive as a feminist. And I don't think that would be all that unusual, among politicians or elsewhere.

[Nell]

@magistra:
Never mind, then. I made the unwarranted assumption that you were a U.S.-ian and took the 'I don't know' as 'I doubt' rather than a literal statement

@david kilmer:
Despite the complete irrelevance of that Pelosi quote to the subject at hand, I can see why you found it impossible to resist citing it! ;>

Or maybe it's not completely irrelevant: An essentialist feminist would disagree with Pelosi, because women are so fundamentally different and more peaceful that face-ripping is a violation of our nature. The quote makes Pelosi out to be a classic liberal equality-of-opportunity feminist: if the playing field is level, you have to rip of their face if they're ripping off yours or you'll lose the, um, game.

[Slartibartfast]

the craziest of the crazy people (NoQ

Well, Larry Johnson is out of his tree. He just seems to have pumped up the volume, of late.

[david kilmer]

"Despite the complete irrelevance of that Pelosi quote to the subject at hand"

It's the kind of quote that makes you think she's not constrained by much of anything, let alone a particular revision of feminism.

Hilzoy - What in particular did you find offensive about the Steinem article? (Apologies if you already discussed it elsewhere.) If we're talking about the same article, I thought it was fairly well-reasoned.

[david kilmer]

Nell - I re-read your last paragraph a few times, and it keeps seeming subtler and subtler. I hope you didn't think I meant anything beyond what I said above.

"An essentialist feminist would disagree with Pelosi, because women are so fundamentally different and more peaceful that face-ripping is a violation of our nature"

I must be truly naive. Are there feminists who really think like that?

[hilzoy]

magistra: possibly I was getting it confused with another one. Didn't she write a later piece? Or am I just hopelessly muddled (always a real possibility: I am not nearly as careful about comments as I am about posts.)

That piece is decent, though I don't think she obeys her own rules about not getting into a contest about which is worse, racism or sexism. I found this disingenuous, given the history of suffrage in this country: "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot." Likewise, the part that starts: "So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?"

I really hate this competition. I think racism and sexism are quite different. Nothing about race plays the role that children being raised predominantly by women plays in gender relations; nothing about gender plays the role that residential segregation and the huge difference in accumulated wealth plays in race relations (in the US). They are just very, very different.

And there's no reason at all to minimize the persistent effects of racism to mind the treatment that Clinton got in some quarters, or to pretend that blacks got the vote, really and truly, by 1870.

[JakeB]

david kilmer--
yes there are, although I would suspect such strong essentialists are quite a small percentage of women who call themselves feminists.

[hilzoy]

OT: today's quote of the day

"Ferraro said she has not been asked to raise funds for the Obama campaign."

[Jeff]

But I don’t think Clinton can get beyond Gloria Steinem’s second-generation feminism, unlike Obama getting beyond Jeremiah Wright’s sixties view of race. I don’t know if there are female US politicians who can.

I don't know how she feels about face-ripping, but my Democratic Senator [*], Barbara Boxer, has always struck me as being good on women's issues without being tied to any "flavor" of feminism.

[*] My other Senator is a DINO on sooooo many issues.

[Nell]

@david kilmer:

No, I took no offense nor read anything in particular into what you said. The 'subtle' paragraph is one of my rare efforts at humor. I should perhaps have tagged it, since my general level of earnestness makes it easy not to assume tongue in cheek there...

And, yes, there are such feminists, though much less prevalent now than during the early to mid-1970s.

[hilzoy]

Also: this Time article on the Obama campaign is very, very interesting: on his management style, on some of the choices the campaign made.

[hilzoy]

That article includes this priceless quote: "John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, flatly declares that what got Obama the nomination "is not a general-election strategy" and contends that Obama's operation will be weak against McCain's crossover appeal in such states as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nevada."

Yes -- because nearly imploding during the summer, running out of money so that you have to (arguably) break campaign finance laws (and certainly violate their spirit), always works so well. (*giggles*)

[david kilmer]

what got Obama the nomination "is not a general-election strategy"

So he didn't use a general election strategy to win a race that wasn't a general election.... How weird is that? What do you want to bet he's too dumb to use a Democratic primary/caucus strategy to beat McCain?

[matttbastard]

More Joementum for McCain!

[magistra]

Hilzoy,

You're right to point out that not all second-wave feminism is the same, but I think there is a certain view that goes beyond Gloria Steinem (and I meant the NY Times article from January, which also offended me as a feminist for down-playing the problems that black men face and for implictly criticising women who chose to vote for Obama). I saw it, for example, in Robin Morgan's essay, and also some of the comments on your blog at one point (Redstocking, for example).

I think maybe it's more accurate to call it second-wave stuck feminism. This is the view that nothing has really changed since the 1960s as far as women's rights go (often with the patronising implication that the sooner younger women realise this the better). And that seems to me an almost exact parallel to Jeremiah Wright's views, that what is needed now is the same tactics and rhetoric as have always been used.

What really frustrates me about this kind of stuck feminism is that it downplays the successes of the women's movement of the 1960s. It is precisely because of what women like Gloria Steinem et al did in the 1960s that the problems that women face now are different (and not as great) as they were, and that feminism now needs to fight different kinds of battles for women. I am grateful for what those women did, but they have to accept that new generations will do things differently, just as they did.

[Kenneth Almquist]

Today is a new day. We need to beat John McCain,and get as many Republicans as we can out of Congress, and out of the state legislatures.

I'm going to do my best to put this terrible nomination campaign behind us, and move on. I want to give all my fellow Democrats as much of a clean slate as I can, and regard tomorrow as yet another new day, with past grievances forgotten as best I can, and where they're not to be forgotten -- and I confess that there are many I will be unable to forget in the slightest for a very very very long time, if ever -- I will pretend it is otherwise.

I try not to post "me too" comments, but Gary's sentiment seems to me to be so important that I had to repeat it.

I'd add that, in my view, Clinton and Obama supporters both had good reasons for supporting their candidates. During a political campaign it is easy to focus only on the flaws of the opposing candidate, but in my view Clinton and Obama are both extremely talented individuals, fully qualified to be president despite their flaws.

[Mary Jo Graves]

Although I was a HIllary supporter, I will find it much easier to fight McCain than to fight another Democrat. I realize that the best way for me to support Obama is to blog on his site, trying to explain how sexism and misogyny affect Hillary supporters and how important it is for Obama to reach out to them and make family and feminist issues an important part of his platform. I also will try to persuade Hillary supporters that being a feminist for McCain is a contradiction in terms. Right now I find several Hillary blogs unbearable to read.

I make clear I supported Hillary, but I am not defending her campaign or her policies or attacking Obama's campaign or his policies. I am trying to promote healing and understanding so we can win the most important fight of our lives.

[Mary Jo Graves]

To my detriment, I was raised Catholic. The idea that both Clinton and Obama campaigns committed serious mortal sins and need to confess and repent before they are admitted into the paradise of defeating McCain is rather repellent.