The Savvy Vengeance of Sonny Corleone, Versus Redemption

More brilliant writing and campaign analysis from the pen of Lisa Van Dusen - a good reminder to many U.S. journalists - wit and wisdom need not be amputated from the passion of truth - zjm




Older,white women here, everyone else, there

by Lisa Van Dusen | May 25, 2008

One of the bonuses of watching a campaign from the back of the crowd is that sense you get, which you can't from the television coverage, of why everyone else who's there is there.

You would think, given the history, that African-Americans would attach a discernible sense of vindication or settling of accounts to Barack Obama's candidacy. But most of the black voters I've met talk about redeeming history, not avenging it. "I remember what it was like in this state when people were being lynched," said an 85-year-old black man in South Carolina. "I never thought I'd live to see this."

Clinton supporters, the most passionate of whom are the white women 50 and older who make up her base, seem to identify more viscerally with their candidate. They respond to her on rope lines and in gymnasiums as though she's the receptacle and champion of all their thwarted dreams and unanswered slights. Surprisingly, they seem to see her, more than Obama's supporters see him, as the Great Avenger.

At Obama rallies, when you stand and look out at half a mile of people of every colour and age (except that notable shortage of older, white women) and catch that self-consciously un-cool, gobsmacked hush of history on the camera riser, you can't help but ponder the Democratic Party's horrible discomfort if it had to cram this genie back into the bottle.

Maybe Clinton's well-documented story -- the philandering husband, the subjugated ambitions, this new upstaging by a younger hotshot guy -- contains enough emotional touchstones to give women who've been through enough something to see in her that mirrors their own stories, whether she talks about it or not. "I've been through a lot and so has she," as one 50-year-old Philadelphia Clinton supporter put it.

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Clinton has not, throughout this campaign, set herself up as a champion of women. She had deliberately avoided doing so because she didn't want to ghettoize herself in an electoral demographic and, early on, was trying to establish herself as a plausible commander-in-chief by downplaying her gender.

In this brutal final stretch, when she needs that same demographic, Clinton is going to the mattresses (to cite fatally misguided political strategist Sonny Corleone): Having sealed her status as the candidate of choice of hard-working white voters, she is turning to the natural base she's been politely avoiding by unleashing, in the past week, a combination of sisterhood rhetoric and cries of sexism.

In a Washington Post interview, she decried a pattern of sexism "deeply offensive" to millions of American women while denying any racism against Obama, only days after the Post itself ran a piece outlining the storefront vandalism, slurs against volunteers and racist tirades to phone bank workers that her rival's campaign has seen.

For whatever knee-jerk sexism has been directed toward Clinton, those older white men on the sexist fringe who would never vote for her because she's a woman are outweighed by the number of older white men on the racist fringe who will never vote for Obama because he's black, at least among Democratic primary voters.

To blame all animosity toward the former first lady on her gender alone is not only an insult to women who don't operate the way she does, it diverts legitimate questions of character in a race to replace a president whose character issues, many of which were evident in 2000, have arguably made him the most disastrous and least popular president on record.

In discussions about this campaign, I've spent some time explaining my views on Clinton. Like many of those DC-based pundits she's accusing of pushing her out in order to fuel a base-driven backlash, I spent more than a few bleary mornings in Washington in the 1990s fetching the Post from the lawn and reading far more about Clinton's life than I'd ever expected or wanted to know.

RELATIONSHIP WITH POWER

It was a time -- during which she declared her intention to run for a Senate seat, flagging her presidential intentions, while her husband was still being impeached -- that revealed an awful lot about her relationship with power.

That dynamic is playing out now in a way that could cost her party the White House.

Among the signs women wave at Clinton rallies is one that reads "Hillary Cares About Me." There have indeed been signs back from the podium that that's true, at least this week.