There's a phrase that has explicitly and implicitly been making the rounds that irks the shit out of me.
It's the idea that if voter X votes for electoral candidate Y (at any level), that X is not voting "in their best interests."
This phrase is usually invoked when mention is made of poor and working-class whites that vote for Republican politicians and Republican policies.
Maybe voter X feels that the racist, homophobic, and women-hating policies of the GOP ARE in their best interests. You may not like that and I certainly don't like that but, for example, those 2008 Palin rallies and the highly charged rhetoric that GOP politicians and commentators spew on Fox News don't tell me anything different.
Maybe a prospective black voter's best interest is that the GOP nominee does not get elected President.
That doesn't mean that black voter Z thinks that the Clintons walk on water or even that Hillary Clinton will always enact policies that he or she likes or that Z has forgotten about the racism of Clinton's 2008 primary campaign.
It might mean that the most important factor for voter Z that the Democratic nominee is elected president in 2016.
Amid all the sturm und drang regarding Hillary Clinton's recent statements on the Defense of Marriage Act, the most odious implication of her statements is the idea that it was for the purpose of protecting the self-interests of LGBT's by saving the GOP (and lots of Democrats!) from writing discrimination into the Constitution.
With all due respect, Secretary Clinton, your husband's signing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 may have been in your husband's best interests for reelection but I didn't feel then (or now) that it was in my best interests. Considering the lack of evidence that there was a movement to write LGB marriage discrimination into the federal constitution at that time, it seems a little deceitful to claim that your husband signed DOMA in the best interests of the LGBT community.
As a rule, we usually don't know what the "best interests" of another actually are. Maybe we should ask them instead of making assumptions.
UPDATE (~12:15 CST): While, yes, Secretary Clinton's comments w/r/t the Defense of Marriage Act was the latest irritant, some Bernie Sanders supporters (Senator Sanders himself...not so much) have used "low-information voters" in a pejorative manner that pretty seems to suggest the same thing..
This isn't simply about Clinton's comments, it's about how we talk to one another and about one another.