Baiting and the Peril of the Democratic Party

There's nothing that Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer, Howie Kurtz, Chuck Dodd, Faux Noise, and their corporate masters would like better than to see Democrats collapse in a sex/race feud.

Listening to a snippet this morning of Blitzer interviewing prominent former Senator Tom Daschle, now Obama campaign adviser, I was struck by two things. Although the adviser repeatedly emphasized that the public is sick of he said/she said, Wolf ignored him and, over and over, pressed for answers on he said/she said, including Bill Clinton's "fairytale" critique and Hillary Clinton's comments about LBJ and MLK. And despite his protests to the contrary, the Obama guy delighted in taking what he hoped would be hits at Clinton on, guess what, he said/she said.

These two candidates must understand that news media like controversy--real or contrived--and that their corporate owners have a dog in this fight and it isn't a Democrat. It's time for a big WAKE-UP CALL to both Clinton and Obama, on equal terms, with equal emphasis, saying, "DO NOT RESPOND TO HE SAID/SHE SAID BY RACE- AND SEX-BAITING. PERIOD."

It's going to be tough because the media keep inventing controversies and distorting especially the Clintons' statements.

Who with two sober brain cells to rub together can be offended by the statement that it takes a president to translate grassroots movements into legislative and regulatory change? Who except folks with chips on their shoulders would hear in that obvious fact of life a slam at Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly when it came from the mouth of one of the most pro-African American politicians in US history?

We, too--we voters--absolutely cannot allow the collective MSM (mainstream media) to dictate this election, whether by running unflattering photos of Ms. Clinton (itself a sexist act because of the disparate value assigned to older men vs. older women), or by picking a let's you and him fight battle between the two leading Democrats in order to divide and conquer the Democratic vote.

We're watching media anchors and spokespersons attempt to do exactly this. Unless Clinton and Obama figure this out and find a greater interest in shooting it down than in trying to make personal points from it, we're going to have a problem.

You can't ride a tiger without being in a very dangerous position.

Let's take a moment to visit the websites of the leading commentators, media, and candidates to let them know we're onto the race- and sex-baiting and want it to stop NOW. Let's start with GOP pimp Tim Russert. A, there were no "tears." Stop repeating the lie, as you did this morning on MSNBC, because it's a lie. B. Stop repeating Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s odious smear, as you did this morning on MSNBC, because it's a smear. Your job is to report fact, not haul around partisan garbage.

Pico's Wee-Wee List 2

There's something else we've never experienced before: An African American presidential candidate being heavily criticized in a hard-fighting campaign. (We've been criticizing Hillary and Bill relentlessly for 18 years, in and out of campaigns. Not new.) And that means, to me, that all of us are going to have to let up on the sensitivities if we're going to get through this without reacting to every comment as if it is racist.

What Bill said--I heard him--was that this whole thing, meaning Obama's anti-war position, is a fairytale. He didn't say Obama's campaign is a fairytale. Big difference. Not every putdown is race-based or an allusion to something race-based. If Sharpton implied something else, he's on Pico's wee-wee list.

And this, snipped from Daily Dish: "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool." - a "Clinton adviser" to Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

If the implication is that this is a racist comment, Pico pisses on Sullivan. We're grown up enough to look at class and race in one glance, aren't we? Isn't this pretty much what African America was saying by asking if Obama is Black enough? What's the problem? White Americans are going to be critiquing this candidate, and that's as it should be. What sucks is when any American attacks any candidate using race-baiting and woman-baiting and queer-baiting and immigrant-baiting and so on.

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Pico is fed up with Chris Matthews' running sexist sabotage of Hillary Clinton. Whizzzzzzz.

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I hear Marion Jones was sentenced to six months today for lying about having used steroids. I want to see Mark McGuire similarly sentenced. I'm not holding my breath.
Jones is the Martha Stewart of athletics. It would be so much more valuable for us all if she were sent out on a national speaking tour to highschools, to talk about steroids, personal character, clean competition, all that. I saw her press conference when she confessed. I've seldom been so impressed by someone sucking it up and taking responsibility. IMHO, she outclasses every compromised athlete in all of sports. Pico wees on the head of this judge.

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Sometimes I think that Andrew Sullivan believes he was elevated, on a shell, fully formed, from the sea. He writes:

That's a helpful distinction. Of course, I've long sided with Camille Paglia on this question. I belong to a minority, but I've always insisted on playing by the same rules as straights. I want no special privilege and no government discrimination either. My libertarian-conservative approach to gay politics was laid out in Virtually Normal. It's one reason I don't fit in with the Human Rights Campaign people either. I'm happy to live my life, and let others live theirs'. I don't want or need the government to love me, make me feel better or tell me how to live. My deep difference with Hillary Clinton is precisely this. In my view, it takes an individual. And that's not a function of misogyny. It's a function of believing in liberty.

No if's this time: Sullivan gets to feel the wrath of Pico. Because, duh, it's a function of unexamined privilege. Any notion that he might ever play by the same rules as straights is pure fantasy because straights won't let him, or else there'd be no reason for straights to differentiate him as they do, and, not coincidentally, no way for him to capitalize on his Otherness. Thus, ironically, it's also a function of unexamined oppression. If he weren't Queer, and English, he wouldn't be collectible and if he weren't collectible, he wouldn't have the platform he has. There are thousands of straight boys as talented, and English, and attractive, as he.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., Crossed a Dangerous Line

Democrats need to be very careful that the Obama/Clinton competition does not deteriorate into a race v. gender battle, in which we are split into a nasty, bitter, and needless war with potentially enduring consequences.

How could it happen? If either campaign accidentally or intentionally walks onto--or is whispered to have walked onto--that sensitive territory fenced by ugly stereotypes, old wounds will be opended and latent fury will be rekindled, causing a chain-reaction of backlash attacks.

If that happens, the victor will be racists, sexists, and the GOP.

We could be seeing something like that now, nascent still but nonetheless worrisome, in the hyped-up matter of Clinton's tears and the way in which at least one Obama spokesman has chosen to use it.

For starters, there was no "crying." There was an emotional moment and a break in her voice as she spoke about her love for and concern for the nation, a powerful exercise of control, and a very rapid recovery. One Newsweek reporter who was present at the meeting corroborates that, and also clues us about the kind of media manipulation we can continue to expect:

Even as she spoke, a local television reporter was broadcasting live that Clinton had started crying. Other reporters tried to correct him, even as he was still on the air. No, she didn't cry.

WTF? No mystery here. Many interests would be served by a ceaseless incantion that Hillary is too weak (read "woman") to hold down the Oval Office. Republicans, anti-Clintonites, and sexists of both genders apparently wanted that Muskie moment so badly that they were willing to manufacture it. Then, predictably, a MSM snearfest ensued that even John Edwards stooped to join, full of snipes about her sincerity and her timing, and bristling with insinuations about what showing emotion might mean for a US President at war.

Garden variety smear stuff, offensive and sexist and obnoxious. But when Jesse Jackson, Jr., grabbed the opportunity to imply that Clinton never once cried about Katrina (read "the poor African American people of New Orleans") or the troops (read "the mostly poor non-white kids dying for our country"), it went way past routine media misogyny.

If my own reaction is a microcosm, the potential for angry division is unnerving. Of course, maybe it's just me and we can all go back to snooze mode. In case not, however, I want to deconstruct Jackson's nasty little smear both to explain my anger and, I hope, to show the kind of thing we should be vigilant about and quick to stamp out.

We can skip the part about how Jesse Jackson, Jr. isn't in a position to know when Hillary weeps and why, and the part about how no American politician distinguished him- or herself in the aftermath of Katrina, and the part about how any presidential candidate who had called a press conference to weep before St. Louis Cathdral would have been DOA. Those are dime-a-dozen smears and implied untruths typical of slimeballers.

But Jackson took this a step further. His was a callous, calculated, and obscene effort to politicize a national disaster in order to trash a fellow Democrat and a woman, using Rove-worthy smear tactics: the gender card, innuendo, race-baiting, and putting Clinton in the unwinnable, impossible position of proving a negative. I not only don't want this kind of crap in our party and resent it. I also fear it greatly.

His message, decoded, is that Hillary was lying about her feelings and put them on display jus' like a woman to manipulate the voters (read "male" voters). Translated, she's just one mo' manipulative bitch who's too frigid to care about, let alone weep for, desperate, drowning African Americans and poor kids being blown to bits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thanks, hear?

This privileged son of Civil Rights legend, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., hasn't earned the chops to attack Clinton about anything. Unfortunately, by voluntarily putting out a string of sexist stereotypes, he didn't just piss off a lot of women. He enacted live and on national TV the equally divisive, ugly stereotype that African American men despise women. And in the service of what? In order to inject an uncommonly nasty dose of sexist race-baiting into a contest for the presidency? Brilliant, dude.

The likely achievement here is a bunch of infuriated women and a bunch of infuriated African Americans, all jumped up for no good reason--merely on the basis of Jackson's petty little war of choice. (I would expect this kind of thing from Huckabee, but not from someone who knows the Clintons' civil rights record, and not from a fellow Democrat.)

So yeah, Jr. hit a nerve. He and any other Obama handlers who think this is an effective way to fight Clinton need to sit down, shut up, and let the grownups handle this--people with extreme sensitivity to the potential for mutally assured destruction--or they will stir up a whirlwind that the party, the nation, the candidates can't afford to deal with.

God forbid that someone comes out now to retaliate with a comparable slur that pits gender sensitivities against race sensitivities. Unfortunately, that's just the kind of thing a push-caller planted by the GOP would do. We know that this happens. Thsi isn't speculative. Remember the phone campaign in SC that implied that McCain had fathered a Black child? Here's the race-baiting counterpart for Obama: "Would it affect your decision if you knew that Obama is a wife-beater?" Again: that's a hypothetical, utterly untrue. I use it only as an example of a plausible smear campaign that could create a rupture among Democrats along race and gender lines.

I don't need to tell you how that would go down. If such a whisper campaign were laid at Clinton's door, we would inherit a storm of rage that could last a generation whether it came from Clinton's campaign or not. And obviously, there are similar possibilities when the table is turned. If Jackson or anyone else continues in this nasty divide-and-conquer vein, I think we could be in trouble as a party, and potentially lose the election even as we claw each others' eyes out for no reason at all.

I really want you to let me know if you think I'm over the top on this. I want to hear from you, and if you see the potential I see, I'd love to know how you think we can sidestep this kind of mutually assured destruction. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us.