A Family Fight or a License to Hate?

A Family Fight or a License to Hate?
guest post by Joanne Parrent

So, Democrats, the media tells us we are in the midst of a “family fight.”

To introduce myself and my family, I am a latte-drinking, white, college-educated
progressive Democrat who, despite my demographic, supports Hillary Clinton.
Maybe it is because I am also a woman over 45. My mother and my late father
are “blue collar” Democrats. My Dad worked in a factory in the Detroit
area all his life and my mother, in a medical supply house. My mother, whose
vote doesn’t count – for now at least – because she lives
in Michigan, supports Hillary. My younger sister, another educated progressive
Democrat, (who, oddly, thinks Starbucks coffee is too bitter and doesn’t
drink lattes), voted for Obama. We had several “family fights” about
this, mostly by email since I live in the great Hillary-supporting state of
California and my sister lives in Maryland, an Obama stronghold.

It occurs to me that my “family fight” somewhat mirrors the Democratic
primary that the media has frequently characterized as a “family fight.”
Therefore, I thought Democrats, particularly those latte (or non-latte) drinking,
educated, progressive, blog-reading Democrats in the upcoming primaries, would
like to hear about my family fight and what I learned from it, in the hope that
it could illuminate the larger battle.

When I asked my sister why she didn’t want to vote for the first viable
female candidate for President – and a brilliant person as well –
she told me that she “hates” Hillary Clinton. Stunned at the intensity
of her feelings, I asked her “Why?” She proceeded to give me some
reasons that I found startlingly similar to the Obama campaign talking points:

1) Sister: Hillary voted for the war in Iraq.
Me: Actually, she voted to give the President the authorization
to go to war so the threat of war would force Saddam Hussein to allow UN inspectors
back into Iraq, which it did. Bush, not Hillary, then decided to stop those
inspections before they were done and invade Iraq. (I sent her an article
in the Huffington Post by anti-war activist, former Ambassador and husband
of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, about this.)
Sister: I don’t have time for this. She still voted
for the war, and Obama was against the war.
Me: Obama didn’t have to make that tough decision.
He wasn’t in the Senate. He wasn’t representing the state of New
York that had been devastated on 9/11. He just gave a speech at an anti-war
rally in Chicago, in his very safe, very liberal State Senate District. How
much courage did that take?
Sister: Look, I’m inspired by Obama. Democrats have
the right to be inspired too, you know.
Me: Okay, you like the guy. I am not crazy about him, myself.
He seems like a snake oil salesman, selling hope and change. But I don’t
“hate” him, and you still haven’t answered my question about
why you “hate” Hillary.

2) Sister: Hillary is just like Bill Clinton. She’s
too moderate and they both “triangulate”. We don’t need
another Clinton. I’m tired of Bushes and Clintons. We need something
new. (To her credit she didn’t use the epithet “Billary”
which may have been too sexist for her. Or she may have just been embarrassed
to say that to me.)
Me: Have you seen Hillary’s policy proposals? They
are very similar to Obama’s. In some cases, particularly her health
care proposal, they are more progressive than his. (I sent her one of economist
Paul Krugman’s articles from the New York Times on why Hillary’s
health care plan which will cover everyone is better than Obama’s, which
will only cover children.)
Sister: Who has time to read all of these things? Politicians
never do them anyway. He inspires people. That’s what we need in a President.
I’m going to lose my job if you don’t quit writing all these emails
and sending me all these articles.
Me: I am just trying to find out why you “hate”
Hillary so much?

3) Sister: Hillary Clinton will do anything to get
elected. She’s running a negative campaign.
Me: Can’t you see that that is just code for she’s
an ambitious, ball-busting bitch?! What kind of sexist double standard is
that? Hillary has paid her dues. She didn’t run for President in 2004
after only four years in the Senate. She waited until 2008 after being elected
by the state of New York with a huge majority to a second term. Yet, Obama’s
ambition is very apparent. He has run for higher office every three years.
He is impatient to get to the highest office in the land. And, do you really
think Obama won’t do anything to get elected? Both he and his campaign
have been very negative. He or his campaign spokespeople have said she:

• is a “calculating, poll-tested, divisive figure”
• “consistently” and “deliberately” misleads the
American people.
• is “dishonest”
• is attempting to “deceive the American people”.
• is “one of the most secretive politicians in America”.

• is “a monster”.
• is “not being straight with the American people”.

They have also claimed that:

• “The American people are not going to elect a president
that they do not trust”.
• And, (probably the worse), they have said that John McCain is seen
as more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton.
Obama is a master at the very negative campaigning that he and his campaign
accuse Hillary of practicing. And, though he calls her a liar, he has lied
plenty in this campaign. (I sent her a New York Times news article about
how he lied about a Senate bill that he claimed to have passed but didn’t
regarding radioactive leaks at nuclear power plants.

Sister: Quit sending me these emails! Can’t we
just agree to disagree? I’ll vote for her if she is nominated. But,
I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

That, sadly, was the end of our conversation. But from it and others with Obama
supporters, as well as listening to the regular anti-Hillary rants on the “progressive”
Air America talk radio, I realized something quite disturbing. I realized that
a very important pillar of Obama’s campaign strategy is exploiting the
irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton. This hatred was first brought to us by
the Republicans, and it is now the rallying cry of Obama supporters. The negative
things Obama and his campaign have been saying about Hillary are 50 times worse
on the blogosphere and the progressive talk stations (she’s a “bitch”,
a “f**king whore”, “Billary”, “warmongering”
etc.) than even that coming directly from him and his campaign. But the license
to do this, the license to spew negative and vile, often misogynistic hatred,
has come from Obama and his campaign – if they can call her a divisive
liar, why can’t talk-show host Randi Rhodes go a little farther and call
her a whore?

The other strategic pillars of his campaign are 1) his ability to give inspiring
speeches about change and hope, 2) his race, which legitimately brings pride
to African Americans and makes white liberals feel good about their support
for the first viable African American nominee and 3) his hip, trendy, youthful
coolness. None of these, in my opinion, are the best reasons to choose a President
who will have the responsibility for pulling us out of war, an economic mess,
a climate crisis and various other difficult, explosive foreign policy problems.
But they aren’t ugly.

The exploitation and encouragement of Hillary-hating by the Obama campaign,
however, is ugly. And, it is insulting not only to Hillary but to all women
and particularly those who have worked hard and competed in male-dominated professions
– like politics.

What is astonishing about what the Obama campaign has accomplished is that
it has built so much of its support on this sexist, negative and inaccurate
portrayal of Hillary Clinton, while at the same time successfully spreading
the myth that it is the Clinton campaign that is negative. And the Obama campaign
couldn’t have done this without the willing participation of Obama, himself,
which belies the claim that he is a “unifying” figure and that he
practices “new politics”, let alone that he brings people together.
In fact, he is bringing people to his campaign by scapegoating and demonizing
the “other” – the old, traditional, divisive, bitchy, lying,
politics-as-usual Hillary Clinton.

Yet, in reality, Hillary is not only not traditional: she is, in fact, a very
unusual figure in American politics – a First Lady who became a Senator
and then ran for President. How many of those have we had? She also is not only
not divisive but she has shown, as a Senator, that she can work with people
who hated her and her husband when he was President. She has healed relationships
that one would expect could never be healed.

Women across the country are working their hearts out for Hillary, not only
because they want to see this brilliant woman become the first woman President,
but because they are furious at the ugly misogyny coming from the Obama camp.
And they know that the Obama campaign could not have been successful in building
their support on the demonization of Hillary without the willing cooperation
of a male-dominated, sexist media. A media that rarely reports that his campaign
is regularly calling her some of the worst epithets ever thrown at one Democrat
by another, but one that pounces on her when she or her surrogates even mildly
criticize him. A media that doesn’t even notice that he is a Democrat,
who, in attempting to tear her down, actually tears down the administration
of the one Democrat since FDR, Bill Clinton, who has won two terms of office.
(In his “bitter”/”clinging” remarks, Obama stated that
the Clinton years were as bad for working people as the Bush years.)

I couldn’t talk to my sister about all of this because she wouldn’t
listen. But, I’m hoping that voters in the upcoming primaries will listen.
I’m hoping that Democrats, particularly those latte-drinking college educated
Obama-leaning people will educate themselves to what is really going on in this
primary election. I’m hoping that not just women, but men with daughters,
mothers, wives and sisters, men who respect women – will no longer be
inspired by hatred.

I’m hoping that this Democratic “family” will not stand by
and watch as Obama and his campaign tear down Hillary Clinton and get away with
it in the media, if not in the hearts half of the primary voters so far.

There is no question that this primary campaign has alienated a lot of women.
And women are this party’s biggest block of supporters—almost 60
percent of reliable Democratic voters. If we abandon so many women, the backbone
of our party, by nominating Obama, it will be more than a family fight. It will
be a very bad time for the Democratic family – without the scores of women
in local offices to answer the phones, canvass and run the ground game. We won’t
have much of a family with women walking out of the house in droves.

We need these hard-working reliable “mamas” – and Hillary
Clinton – much more than we need a candidate who has given his followers
a license to hate – Barack Obama.