6 posts tagged “like hell she is”

Big surprise.  I know.  Nobody makes you read my vitriol.

Anyway, so Barack said some stuff in front of a wealthy audience "behind closed doors" in San Francisco, and it's a pretty big deal.  You know what I'm talking about, or else you live under a rock or possibly in the Southern Hemisphere.

Let me start by saying that I'm white, we are definitely working class (though I have a postgraduate degree *sniff*), we make *significantly* less than the median household income in this country, we are married with one kid and two dogs, and we live in a small, religious, Republican town.  For my part, I have almost always lived in small towns, though never in Pennsylvania.

And the thing that makes me bitter is the way the media is talking about what Barack said.  First and foremost is that the "guns, god, and xenophobia" part of it is really taken out of context.  I didn't know that until Joan Walsh wrote a nice little blog entry about it.  If you want to know more of what Obama said, go there.  When you read the whole thing, it comes off *a bit* different, no?

Second, the vast majority of the talking/writing class who are accusing Obama of elitism and being disrespectful to the working class are NOT working class.  So, you live in Manhattan and work for a major news network and have stylists do your hair everyday, and you want to tell ME how I think about what Obama said?  You want to tell ME that I'm being disrespected?  No thanks--I can read, and I can decide for myself if what he said is offensive, OK?  I don't need you, some asshole pundit, to tell me what I think.  Thanks.  Slate ran, like, 4 or 5 pieces about it, all of them blasting Obama but in different ways, all of them assholish.

Third, are they deliberately misunderstanding what was said?  They have to be deliberately misunderstanding this, just to make hay from it because that's what they do.  For example:

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.  Source. 

That is not what Obama said or even really implied.  You, elitist bastard, are putting that whole "lacking the self-awareness" part in there yourself.  The point was not that we quaint Li'l Abners don't know where our misery comes from--the point was that administration after administration, it just keeps getting worse, to the point that we don't believe any administration gives a shit about our situation (and we are *quite* aware that urban Democrats don't) or that we have any power to change the economic situation.  Obama didn't say or imply that we're too stupid to figure out what's wrong in our towns.  He said that when the economic situation is persistently dismal without real hope for a solution, well, people hold on to their traditions and culture more tightly than people whose economic prospects are good. 

Obama furthermore did not state or imply that "Once the Pennsylvanians get some jobs back, they'll change and become as enlightened as Obama or the San Franciscans to whom he was talking"  (Kausfiles).  Say what?  He didn't say this because he didn't say that they were unenlightened.  He said they were "bitter" and by that he meant "angry" not "unenlightened."  He meant they were angry about the severe economic screwing they've got in the past couple of decades.  He has never said or implied that religion is backward or that hunting or other sporting uses of guns are backward or unenlightened.  (And, fortunately for all of us who hate being pandered to, he has also not regaled us--all of a sudden!--with tales of how his grandfather took him behind the barn and taught him to shoot when he was just a little boy--oh, fuck off Hillary.  Just fuck off.)  He didn't say or imply that Pennsylvanians need enlightenment--he said they need jobs or reasonable hope of jobs and economic development in their towns, and he implied that once they have those things, perhaps they won't feel so angry and hopeless. 

What are the real economic differences between the two parties, anyway?  Both seem to support NAFTA, "free" trade, most elements of the Farm Bill, and so on down the line.  Does either party have a plan for bringing decent jobs back to rural America?  No.  Rural people don't typically support welfare, mainly because they think that if jobs are available, it's better to work.  But, it is no great comfort to be asked to give up a factory job that had benefits for a service job that pays half of what you were making and has no benefits, all in the name of the great economic theory people in Washington and the universities like to dream up. 

On the other hand, I've been trying to warn my similarly well-educated liberal-ish friends for a long time that the rhetoric coming from the left was severely and possibly permanently alienating a core set of voters that basically agree with them but get turned off by being called names.  Seriously, check these quotes out:

"This quote and the resulting feeding frenzy are a huge opportunity for Obama to get the attention of low-information small-town voters who are skeptical of him and convince some of them to vote their pocketbooks instead of their culture."  (ah, okayyyyyy...we're "low-information?"  Really?  I consider myself pretty high information, too high most of the time.  And you will probably never convince most of us to vote our pocketbooks over our culture--sorry, but some of us actually care about our culture.)

"Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes."  (And that is from Todd Gitlin, Ph.D. in dumbassery.  Yes, we're rubes, and low-information rubes.  The only thing we can understand is flattery and pandering, which is why NONE OF US are completely irked at Hillary's recent embrace of her gun-related past.  That NONE OF US there is totally sarcasm.  You didn't know rubes could be sarcastic, did you?)

In an essay titled "The Urban Archipelago" a few years ago, the editors of Seattle's alt-weekly the Stranger wrote: "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion -- New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on ... And we are the real Americans. They -- rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs -- are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers ... We can secede emotionally ... by turning our backs on the heartland ... We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan."  (OK.  Deal.  You take Manhattan, and you go ahead and secede.  I will remind you that, while much food is eaten in Manhattan, none of it is grown there.  Perhaps you can import it from the Republic of California, but only if we let you transport it through our territory.  What is this "real Americans" bullshit anyway?  Sanity?  What?  From what I hear y'all have high violent-crime rates, a great deal of poverty and racism of your own, and insane amounts of traffic--that's "sanity" and "real America?"  OK, man, if that's what you want.  Fortunately for us, this deal also means we get virtually all the National Parks and Forests, most of the bizarre roadside attractions that make American roads so great, and all the corn we can eat.  Sweet.  Keep your Manhattan and your Los Angeles--they don't have anything we want anyway.  Also, St. Louis?  Really?)

Yeah, and I haven't even started on the specific comments in which liberals take on gun owners (my penis is so small, in fact, that it does not even exist--and that is exactly why I own guns!  Facile Freud, at your service), trucks (ditto!  god forbid we should find either trucks or guns to be useful tools), child-rearing (I'm going to spank my kid just to spite you!), and, well, it just goes on and on.  Liberals constantly say they are the party of the working class, the party of compassion.  But where is this evident?  Hillary, who once did genuinely show compassion, has become such a cynical tool that she apparently cannot see why someone would care about the sniper fire thing or the Mark Penn thing or that whatever fond memories she has of shooting with her grandpa she consistently votes for gun control, and it is not clear where she draws the line of Enough Gun Control.  For all we can tell of her, she will pry the gun from Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands. 

So, I ask again, where is the compassion, enlightenment, and care for the working class evident?  When was the last time the Democratic party had a really good idea for how to help small-town, working-class people?  ...I'm waiting...  It does not follow that simply because you oppose tradition that you are enlightened, either, so don't tell me that because you support gay marriage, you get an automatic enlightenment badge.  Yeah, yeah, "universal health care," SCHIP, blah blah.  Any rural person will tell you that it's not about welfare systems--people want jobs, they want to keep their farms, they want their downtowns to start looking alive again.  A lot of small towns in the West are organizing community stores as a way to begin the revitalization of the downtown--we're starting one here, for example.  Not that the typical Democrat knows or cares.  And neither Hillary nor Barack is currently offering a health care plan that actually insures everyone, at least not without forcing them to buy insurance that they may or may not be able to afford.  I tell you, we can barely afford ours, and it's cheap from what I can tell (my husband's employer is one of the last great manufacturing employers, I am convinced--seriously, he has all kinds of benefits, they pay well for this area, they are very ethical and organized in all their dealings with their employees.  So I guess what I'm saying is eat more instant potatoes, because that's what they make, and they treat their employees remarkably well, and we are very fortunate.  Eat at KFC because then you're eating my husband's potatoes.  Wow.  That sounds kind of nasty.  Anyway...). 

Yeah, I don't know, but I don't think Obama is the one disrespecting rural voters.  He perhaps did not say it in the most elegant way possible, but at least he has a grip on what the problem is.  It's too bad the media and most other Democrats don't.

(oh, right, I know, our culture is mere nostalgia for a "past that never really existed" and we have no right or justification to want to hold onto it and anyway all country music is shit now.  right.  got it.  blah blah blah.  watch as the democrats shake their heads in confusion after they lose to McCain...just go ahead and secede)

Grr.  Twice tonight.  Twice in one night I have, showing my characteristic lack of luck and poor work ethic (I'm supposed to be working, not trolling the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, but anyhow), stumbled upon an article that has outraged me. 

The first one was a review of The Omnivore's Dilemma written by some Atlantic editor who is clearly a vegetarian, although he failed to come right out and say that, and is the sort of vegetarian who is never going to accept for any reason under any circumstance that anyone might have a decent reason for eating meat.  His decision that, in the facile words of The Smiths, "meat is murder" puts him on a higher plane than the rest of us, those of us who are clearly in denial about what it means to take a life in order to sustain our own, those of us too ignorant and immoral to follow him.  Well, you know what, buddy?  Fuck off, alright? 

Yeah, I know, that's not a good argument, but the minds of people like this (which by no means includes all vegetarians, thank heavens) are closed already.  There is no argument that I can make, no amount of elegant prose I can assemble, no moral justification I can muster to convince someone like this that eating meat is not the original sin.  I do want to point out, though, that Michael Pollan (and others--most hunters will tell you this) says that killing for your food puts you in a different relationship with death, makes you face the inevitability of it and the cycle of life in ways that can be disquieting, humbling, and profound.  Vegetarians never seem to believe this, probably because you don't get quite the same shock of our fragility and the eternal cycling of nature by uprooting carrots, but it's true.  Anyway, the fuckwit reviewer says that actually (because he is so much smarter and well read than Pollan, of course!) psychologists tell us otherwise (since when do psychologists know shit?):  As Otto Rank put it, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other."  Our reviewer does not see, apparently, that this is not the opposite of what Pollan said.  The death fear of the fucking ego (sorry for the cursing--if I don't do that, seriously, the pomposity here will make my head explode) comes from our belief that we are separate from nature, that we are above and outside of the circle of life that makes life possible.  Our fear of death is based largely on the fact that we are in denial of it.  When you face the inevitability and even elegance of it, you lose the fear, certainly.  Am I totally wrong here or is this not one of the teachings of Buddhism?  We fear death because in our self-consciousness we see ourselves from outside as if we were outside of the systems and cycles of nature that, honestly, bring death to all--without exception.  We think, in our great big fucking narcissism, that we are so great that we are the exceptions, that our "souls" are so special that they cannot possibly perish.  Whatever you think about the immortality of the soul, though, the bare, ugly fact is that your carbon-based ass is doomed. 

The person who kills her food already admits this and thus, either gradually or suddenly, loses the fear of death and admits, as Heidegger would say, death into her home.  Are people better off when they fear death or when they accept it as natural and right?  You be the judge. 

The second article made me draw one primary conclusion:  Maybe we should just elect Hillary Clinton so that feminists will shut the fuck up.  Good Christ.  If you're a man and you dislike Hillary Clinton, then you are a misogynist because a bunch of youngish women say so.  Period.  If a woman *feels* like your remarks are sexist, then you are a woman-hater.  I love how the author marshalled this evidence primarily from among her friends and none of them can *quite* put their finger on where the sexism is in the remarks of their male, Obamaniac friends--they just kind of feel it's there.  She admits that Hillary's actual policies and positions are sometimes objectionable--the more you look at Hillary's record, the more like a freakin warmonger she seems--but there is a certain rabidity, maybe, that these incredibly sensitive young women are picking up on that just has to be rooted in misogyny.  Not that they have any evidence!  Just their hunches!  Not that their male friends who hate Hillary treat actual women in their lives with any hint of misogyny.  But, obviously, the standard line is that men fear and hate powerful women, so that must be what's going on here.  Right.  Case closed.  Brilliantly reasoned.

Listen, there have been very real cases of sexism directed at Hillary throughout her career in politics.  But not everything is.  Some people have strong dislike of Hillary because they don't feel she's honest, and that is going to draw moral fervor out of some people.  Some people retain intense dislike of Bill that gets transferred onto Hillary, not least because the prospect of Bill back in the White House is unsettling as hell for a lot of us (yes, "us"--ever since NAFTA and welfare reform, I have not been a fan--that's right, I don't support NAFTA).  A lot of people believe that the Clinton White House will again be plagued by scandal and meet resistance from Congress that will hurt their chances of getting anything done--not an unreasonable fear--and this also causes some of the strong anti-Hillary sentiment.  Some of us who were against the war at the start and never believed in the "intelligence" and wept a little at watching poor old Colin Powell prostitute himself by delivering it as fact have a very strong distaste for her because she was apparently too willing to go along and believe--that isn't who I want answering the phone at 3:00 a.m.  So, there's actually quite a lot going on here. 

The problem is that the first serious bid for presidency by a woman is Hillary Clinton, one of the most divisive figures in the current political scene who happens to be married to one of the other most divisive figures.  The problem is that *some* feminists are using Hillary's run as a test case against which to judge how sexist America still is as a nation.  But not all Hillary-hatred has anything to do with her vagina, and indeed much of it has to do with her husband and his Wandering Penis, the investigation of which thoroughly distracted the nation for so long.  This isn't a fair test case, because she isn't some abstract Platonic form WOMAN--she's Hillary Clinton.  It is fair to dislike, even hate, her and still not be a misogynist.  (Yes, again, I do realize there have been sexist comments directed at her, just as there have been racist or at least racist-ish comments directed at Barack.  The question here is really whether those represent the views of a majority, and I think the overwhelming answer is that they do not.  If McCain wins in November, it is not going to be because the Dems had a woman or a black candidate--it's going to be because the Democrats will take whatever advantage they have and piss it away.  I have a silly notion that being fingered as a sexist, not for anything you said but just kinda for the way you said it maybe?, is not going to win over the white male vote.  Call me crazy.)

Finally, I have to take up with this particular sentence for a minute, or many minutes:

"Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire."

Let's take a minute and reflect on those three things she mentions as places where women have not "caught up" to their male counterparts.  Equal pay?  Well, first, a lot of economists don't agree that it exists, once all variables are accounted for.  Variables includes things like the age of the workers (since the Census data includes all workers, and most senior ladies did not build up a career steadily over time, they make less money than men of the same age who put in more work years), time off for parenting (you could argue that gender inequity still exists there, sure, and I will argue that it is going to remain the case that women will more often take/need time off for parenting than men do until such time as we are either all hermaphrodites [which could happen in this great age of plastics] or that we get a kind of Handmaid's Tale society going, where some women do the reproducing and child care for other women so that they don't have to--the more nannies and surrogate moms we get, the closer we come to Margaret Atwood's fantastic utopian novel!  Wait--it is utopian, right?  Only, in our nanny version, the women aren't literally forced to do it, it's just that they have no other options due to the severe economic stratification that has resulted, let's face it, in large part from the lifestyle of the white privileged overclass, women and men alike), career choices (with more women choosing careers in lesser-paid fields and men typically doing more dangerous and rat-racey type work), and so forth.  If you look at the youngest workers in the Census data, the gap is 5 cents, i.e., women make 95 cents for every dollar a man makes, and considering some of those women are most certainly nonworking women and/or mothers, well, it's probably not as big a deal as we're meant to believe it is.  Five cents won't even buy a damned Atomic Fireball anymore.

The other issue here is another kind of economic disparity.  Men still earn most of the money, but women still do most of the spending, possibly as much as 80% of the discretionary spending.  So...so...well, I'll leave it up to you to decide what that means, because I'm once again on the verge of one of my "so, if I was a man, I would be drunk every night and would totally get hookers!" proclamations.  

OK, so the second claim about "domestic expectations."  Well, we've already pretty thoroughly hashed out the division of household chores bit, no?  I think I beat that one into the ground already.  Is there something else that is included in "domestic expectations?"  I don't know--I think it's a bit vague.  Women are expected to be more prettified and take more time with appearances, true, although men are doing it now too, and these days a lot of women are *choosing* this, so...well, so...

And finally--reproductive options.  Right!  Women are so far behind men on this one!  Let's see here:  Men have abstinence and condoms as methods of birth control--ah, and the vasectomy, let's not forget.  If pregnancy happens anyway, they have no choice about what happens to the fetus but will be legally obliged to pay child support, and if you live where I do, will be morally obliged to marry the mother.  And women have--well, it must be fewer options than that, right?  That's the implication.  Yet women also have available to them abstinence and condoms...and also pills and injections of various sorts, IUDs, tubal ligations, sponges and foams, the biorhythm method, the diaphragm, that new vaginal ring thingy, and heaven knows what else.  If unwanted pregnancy occurs, she can choose abortion, she can choose to keep the baby, or she can choose adoption.  Am I wrong?  Am I missing something here?  I think we're way ahead of men in terms of having reproductive options--we're just not necessarily any better than men are at using them.  Oh, right--she does say "secure" reproductive options.  And birth control is not securely available to every woman equally, admittedly, but with Planned Parenthood and public health clinics, it comes pretty close.  We need to close that gap, but women, it should be noted, do still have abstinence and condoms just as securely as men have them.  Available even at Wal-Mart!

So.  I know and understand that there is still sexism (and racism).  But a) her argument admits of no rebuttal--she knows you're going to say that it's just Hillary you're opposed to, not a woman president in general, and she just says that that's just the sort of thing feminism has been trying to fight, because if you really like women in power then I guess you have to accept any woman in power, right?  That seems to be the end of her story, even though she says otherwise earlier in the piece.  And b) these arguments are Simple Simon(e).  When the pay gap is diminishing rapidly, when women are attending college at the same rate as men and getting better grades, when women now share something like an equal amount of the domestic obligations with their husbands, when women no longer *have to* get married and have kids, when most women have a banquet of reproductive options open to them, maybe it's time to reassess what we talk about when we talk about sexism and misogyny.  I would have thought by now that Democrats would have fucking realized that the constant complaints at this very facile, very (let's say it) bitchy level is incredibly alienating to, wow, a lot of people. 

To some of us it seems whiny, elitist, way too feely, and essentially untrue in its major points.  There is nothing like listening to privileged white chicks gripe about the pay gap and their reproductive options to make my blood boil.  Just shutup already.  It is especially irksome to me given the fact that American feminism has little or nothing to offer to women who don't work and almost nothing for working-class women.  I didn't really notice this (I did notice the extreme elitism in most feminist writing, but not the ignoring of mothers) until I became a mother and faced the feminist wrath.  American feminism is not interested in mothers, and some strains of it are extremely hostile to mothers, unless they also work for pay.  Unfortunately, women were mothers long before money was even conceived of, and there is a fundamental bio-logic going on here that you're not going to convince most women to abandon.  That some feminists have become haters of mothers and children only serves to point up how very un-feminine American feminism often is--that you would not only deny but hate that part of who we are as women is misogyny of a far more disturbing sort than a Hillary nutcracker.  The Hillary nutcracker, at least, is meant as a joke--it is crass and unfunny, yes, but the women (and occasionally men) who loathe mothers and children are not even joking.  That's the sexism I worry about. 

I'm discombobulated.  I'm verklempt.  I'm flabbergasted.

I don't really think Barbara Ehrenreich is a tool of the Republican elite.  Right?  I don't think she's a scaremonger or a fishmonger or any other kind of monger, and I don't think she normally publishes "I gave birth to a four-headed antelope!" sorts of stories. 

So, uh.  WTFF?  No, seriously, can someone explain this to me?  Hillary Clinton is in a cult?  So, when Bill had his affairs, maybe those were cult rituals?  I think Christ was down with oral sex.  What else could he have meant when he said he came to bring a sword?*

Goddamn if voting Mickey Mouse doesn't look better with each passing day.

*Oddly, I can find no authoritative interpretation of the Gospels that supports the oral sex thesis.  Strange.

OK, I've been puzzling over the health care plans put forth by Clinton and Obama (and Edwards, not that it matters anymore).  I've read them.  I've read commentaries on them.  And there are still some things I don't get.

How are these requirements that insurance suddenly become universal (in that no one can be denied on the basis of preexisting conditions and so forth) and also affordable supposed to work?  I mean, as far as I can tell, both plans are still working through mostly private insurers--that is, insurance companies that exist to make profit.  I think that a) the insurance companies are going to put up one hell of a fight about that and b) Congress and the courts won't go for it anyway, because requiring companies to do this sort of thing seems like a government intrusion into business that no one will actually approve.

Also, how exactly are we going to mandate (Clinton does; Obama not, apparently) that everyone buy insurance of some kind without also having pretty far-reaching solutions for the growing lower classes?  I understand Clinton wants to mandate that everyone buy insurance but at the same time index the premiums to income--but we're talking mostly about families who are already stretched to the breaking point.  Real wages haven't gone up in my lifetime; we're losing jobs; we're in a bloody recession!  There are already plenty of us who can technically afford health insurance but still cannot actually afford to go to the doctor for simple things like strep throat*.  I don't see this helping that situation, although they claim that they are going to reduce health-care costs at the same time.  But it is not at all clear to me how exactly this is supposed to happen. 

I understand this has been compared to requiring car insurance, which we already do.  Except that there are actually a lot of people out there who flout that mandate because they either cannot afford or cannot get car insurance.  You can require people to do things that they still do not do--I know this well, as I have a 2-year-old in my house.  Paul Krugman is arguing that Clinton's plan, by mandating that all the poor schleps out there further stretch their budget by buying some kind of health insurance, will get us universal health care.  Mmmm, I doubt it.  It will likely get nearly everyone to be insured, yes, but if they still can't afford to go to the doctor when they need to, I don't think it's much of a victory.

I thought--silly me--that the idea behind universal health care was that all people would be covered and be able to afford to actually use the services of health care providers.  Unless Clinton and/or Obama suddenly comes up with radical plans to greatly reduce the already plentiful economic burdens on those of us who exist between the median income and the poverty line, I really don't see this helping very much. 

Am I too pessimistic, or am I missing some key part of their plans?  O wise readers, please tell me it's one or the other (or both) because otherwise, this poo just stinks.

*Last year, we (my family) were in this position.  This year we're a little better off.  The main difference is not that we have more money but that T's employer offers flexible spending accounts (which Hillary does not approve of, or so I hear) that allow us to deposit a portion of each of his paychecks into a special account we can use for medical expenses.  You get a tax break by doing this, but the tax break doesn't actually save us any money because our tax bracket is already a negative percent.  All it does for us is ensures that there is money for medical expenses.  We don't miss the $34 or whatever per paycheck, and then the money is there when we need it.  However, we don't miss that money mostly because we are excessively, obsessively frugal, and I believe a lot of families in our income bracket would miss it.

Oh, man, so I mentioned recently that when I took that quiz, the candidate I came up most matching with was Mike Gravel, right?  Then today I read this, and OH YEH, GRAVEL FTW!

Not that that will happen of course.  But imagine a world in which the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and the COMMANDER IN CHIEF of our big freakin armed forces thinks that war is never the answer!  Can you imagine?  It makes me all giddy just thinking about it.

I mean, seriously.  America is all about war.  And here he thinks that maybe we could find better things to do with ourselves than kill people?  It's...it's unimaginable.  It's also a strategy that will not get you put on any ballots anywhere in the country.  Super.

And another thing.  Since it looks like McCain is the likely Republican nominee, I've been thinking about the matchup, and I don't think Hillary can beat him.  Certainly she knows more about domestic policy, but the American people don't vote for someone based on what that person knows.  There is the war thing, of course, where Hillary claims to want to end it and McCain apparently doesn't care if it just sort of goes on forever. 

But.  McCain tends to attract right-ish Democrats and independents, whereas Clinton tends not to.  It is my humble opinion that McCain generally appeals to rural and Southern voters more, too.  And finally, and I think this may be a biggie--she's been running all this time as the "experienced" candidate, right?  I realize she doesn't have to keep a consistent message from the primaries to the general election, but a) she can't win the "experience" thing against McCain, no way, b) she can't become a "change" candidate because HELLO OLIGARCHY and anyway she represents politics as usual, and c) she will get hammered by the voters who already are inclined to dislike her for changing her message--wishy-washy liberals and the politician in her saying whatever it takes to get elected instead of what she really believes, etc.; we've heard this all before about many a Democrat candidate, no?  She could win on domestic policy because, again, she certainly knows a lot about the economy and health care that McCain does not.  But she can't win on foreign policy against him (she could have won on domestic and foreign policy against Romney, I think, and handily).

Now, Obama, I think, could beat McCain.  In Barack and John, I think there are two such completely different people--in temperament, in experience, in beliefs--that it wouldn't be a fight over who knows more or who has more experience.  Instead it would be more of a debate about what we believe and what kind of person we want up there, and I think Barack could win that.  Change!  Youth!  Handsomeness!  Diplomacy!  Heckuva wife!  Unity!  Hope!  Did I mention the handsome thing?

So, does that mean I'm voting Obama?  No way.  GO GO GADGET GRAVEL!  GRAVEL/EDWARDS '08!  With Richardson as Secretary of State.  There's your change.  Suddenly we're a nation of leftish libertarians who decides to use the money freed up by ending the war on drugs to implement real sex education and make sure all people can get their hands on (and know how to use) contraception.  Suddenly we're taking real steps to fight poverty.  Suddenly we have an experienced diplomat--someone who fundamentally believes in diplomacy and knows how to do it--as Sec. of State.  What a different world it would be.

And what about Barack, whom I have grown to like?  Make him Secretary of Unity and Hope and Smooth Talking.  Make him Secretary of Positive Thinking.  Make him Secretary of How to Keep Your Integrity by Not Voting for Senseless Wars (of course, we won't have senseless wars if we have Gravel--wooooo, Gravel!).  Make him Secretary of Handsomeness. 

I guess Hillary could be Secretary of Pantsuits and Overanalyzed Crying.  She could also be Secretary of Takin' Care of Business (workin' overtime!).

I've completely lost my head.  I need this election to be over.

P.S.  How the fuck has it come to be that someone can win the popular vote but not win the majority of delegates?  The results from some states are showing Barack with a popular win but Hillary with more delegates?  Did we not learn anything at all from the Gore v. Bush debacle, people?  THIS IS ALLEGEDLY A REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY, RIGHT?  COME ON, PEOPLE.  I believe we are supposed to be nominating the person the most people actually voted for. 

So, I guess old Edwards has left the race.  We're down to Clinton v Obama on one side and McCain v Romney on the other.   I am becoming less optimistic by the second.

Last night I had a long, animated discussion about this with my mom and stepdad (then my uncle called and the first thing he shouted into the phone when my mom said hello was, "What is the deal with the Florida delegates?  What kind of stupid decision was it to not have the delegates count?" or something like that.  You get the idea.  We're all obsessed with politics in my family. 

Something in this did make me laugh today, though.  A writer on Slate said that working class and rural people were Hillary's natural constituency, and so Hillary might have a chance at some of the people who would have voted for Edwards.  Maybe he's got access to some polling data that I don't, but it made me laugh.  From what I know of rural folk--my family back in Arkansas, the good if somewhat militant people in Reserve, NM (pop. c. 300), this little enclave where I currently live--I think no way in hell is Hillary the candidate of the rural people.  The last time people in this particular area were polled the leading Democrat was Obama followed by Edwards with Hillary in a distant third (although everyone knows this area wants Romney so bad it keeps them up at night.  I don't really get it.  Do they think that just because he's Mormon, he'll take office and suddenly impose mandatory polygamy and maybe take us back to Prohibition?  I mean, he's still got a Congress to deal with and all that.  Anyway, how they can trust a big-business type is way beyond my comprehension).  So, perhaps if it's Obama, all is not lost, though I have already spoken to some independents who favored Richardson and Edwards and now, faced with Hillary and Obama, are already talking up McCain. 

*sigh* 

This primary system is completely fucked.  That is my humble, amateurish opinion.  Just fucked.  Thanks Iowa and New Hampshire!  Once again, thank you!  Of course, it's not the fault of the good people of those states--it's the fault of the parties for working their primary system this way and the media for playing it the way they do. 

It is also, somehow, the fault of Canada.  I haven't worked out just how yet, but I'm in a blaming mood today, so I'll get there.

(sorry, Greenhows!  sorry, Greg!  really I'm just jealous of you people up there.)