Show Me The Proof
Thu May 08, 2008 at 06:58:06 PM PDT
As diaried in several excellent entries earlier (for example here and here), Hillary Clinton in a USA Today interview said that "hard-working Americans, white Americans" are a part of her base and that "whites in both states (Indiana and North Carolina) who had not completed college were supporting me." Later in the interview Clinton asserts:
"These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that."
But where is the proof that these voters will NOT vote for Barack Obama if he is the nominee? Where is the fount of knowledge from which everybody knows that? Truth be told, there is no proof and there is no fount. In fact, I believe that the overwhelming majority of Clinton's supporters will vote for Obama this November. They are Democrats and they will vote for a Democrat.
Will he lose some of her primary voters? Certainly, but the truth is that she would also lose some of them herself. A person who will not vote for a black is just as likely to not vote for a woman. Racial prejudice and gender prejudice often travel arm-in-arm. As every woman should know, women could not even vote in the United States until 1920 because everybody knows that
Women are certainly far less tolerant than men of opinions other than their own, and in this respect they need to undergo a thorough schooling.
Until they overcome the failing, women shouldn't vote (PDF format)
Sounds foolish from our perspective as 21st centurians, doesn't it? But is it really any more foolish than Clinton's contention that voting is, for Democrats, somehow a Hobson's choice (a free choice in which only one option is offered, and one may refuse to take that option) of voting for Hillary or not voting Democratic at all? I think not.
Perhaps Senator Clinton should argue for a constitutional amendment that allows Bill Clinton back in the race. After all, he could easily attract some of the white male (and quite a few female) Appalachian voters everybody knows that won't vote for a woman. Wouldn't work, unfortunately. Even the big dog himself lost the white male vote by 49% to 38% to Dole in 1996, and that outcome would have been even worse if Ross Perot hadn't peeled some of the white male vote away from Dole.
At the end of the day we are left to ponder these questions: What does Hillary hope to gain? Will her statements about hard working white voters endear her to Puerto Rico's voters? Seems unlikely. Will denigrating millions of white voters who have already cast primary votes for Barack Obama cause them to switch their loyalty to Hillary? Also unlikely. Will it convince undecided superdelegates to overrule pledged delegates, popular vote, number of states won, and every other metric by which Barack Obama leads?
I sure hope not. Everybody knows that would be disastrous.
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