I agree with you and yours that people just don't feel Hillary like they do Barack, or even Edwards. Quite a few people I know very well get nigh hysterical about the prospect. (That's no doubt part of why my knee has been jerking so hard against Obama this past week--it's the protection reflex at work.)

But I lean towards thinking that will not be a problem for Dem enthusiasm in November.

To take but one demo, young people displayed mad enthusiasm in 2004, came out in huge numbers for Kerry, despite perhaps a general lack of feeling for dude in comparison to, say, Dean. I kinda think whomever the Dem nominee is, that trend will continue. If Hillary is the nominee, there will likely be a groundswell of feminist fundraising and GOTVing as well.

If Romney is the nominee, that might be an electric prod too. McCain and Huckabee generate much more buzz amongst independents and evangelicals respectively, (Reep voters under 30 are a rare breed, and have been rarer still in the primaries...) and their relative authenticity--setting aside their platforms for a second--makes either of them tougher opponents. But Romney seems like the perfect enemy for Dems to rally against: a double-talking, attack-dogging, vote-pandering, inauthentic, officious, 6-foot-2 square-jawed version of W.

Thing is, as of tonight, it looks like McCain may win.

Obama vs. McCain or Hillary vs. McCain. Do those contests sound exciting?

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, Hillary, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Republicans

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, bill clinton, billary, hill, Hillary, hillary clinton, trapped in the closet

You're so on point.

Obama is an inexperienced, inconsistent, sometimes straight lousy campaigner. But more to the point: he has had his lousiest debate appearances before African American crowds. Remember Hillary's call to arms around AIDS and black women last year?

I actually think he had a plan going in--to neutralize all the criticisms he's been getting from Billary. Makes sense on paper and it would have been fine if he had stopped--but he wasted so much energy on the side battle (and give Hillary credit for stuff like the Rezko bomb) that he ceded big picture stuff to Edwards. And Edwards absolutely killed it in there.

Then, during the sitdown session, Hillary was able to slide some lofty sounding rhetoric in there during the sitdown session as well. So all of Obama's thunder was stolen.

It might be time for the Obama camp to concede that, as great as their candidate performs in Reaganesque set pieces (like that didn't-you-see-it Ebenezer speech earlier that day), he's as useless a debater as George W. Bush.

Guess we all blew it with the b-ball and jazz and freestyle metaphors.

Re: Kucinich, I too subscribe to the polar theory of politics, which essentially holds that as long as there is a radical in the race, the whole field shifts left. But the relevant pole after February 5th is, sad to say, not we progressive anti-racist pointyhead types, but the fairly undifferentiated mass of voters "out there" that the punditocracy/pollstocracy says is concerned about Obama's alleged "lack of experience", Frank Rich notwithstanding.

In other words, assuming Obama is there in Denver, and let me clear my throat here and make a shocking prediction:

OBAMA. WILL. LOSE. SOUTH CAROLINA.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I doubt it.

Back to the point I was gonna make, if Obama's there in Denver, he's not sliding left on his VP pick. Not Edwards. Not Kucinich. He's selecting a hoary old white male party mainliner. All you fam who are floating away on his beautiful prose like I often do, I'm sorry to have popped your balloon. Mine popped Monday night.

So I think you'd agree that the worst thing right now would be for Edwards to drop out. (Which he won't, I'm sure because if he plays close he might play broker in Denver.) I think Obama needs Edwards to keep him honest on health care and poverty, the same way Hillary needs the other two to make her gender pitch sound good to progressive feminists.

BTW when will Obama's campaign hire you as speechwriter? They need some brilliance up in there to match their candidate...and hell, a little color wouldn't hurt either!

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, barack obama, Hillary

Hillary, no matter how symbolically potent, runs the risk of being seen as a Second Wave candidate. She's one of the first women to gain power and access, and may be one of the first with power and access to ignore the criticisms of women of color, progressive men, and many young women, all of whom have been sending clear messages to Second Wave feminist leadership for well over a decade.

Messages like:

Women are not only victims, but active participants in the shaping of their lives. It's not Hillary's gender that may keep her from winning this election, it's her lack of preparation. If she had an inter-generational, multi-racial, digitally savvy, globally inclined machine behind her, crafting electrifying rhetoric like The Audacity of Hope and The Power of Now, she'd be swept into the White House by a landslide. Hillary wasn't forced into the number two position in Iowa, she made decisions that put her there. New Hampshire is a case in point; she made different decisions and got different results.

Racism and classism are as definitive as sexism. Did Steinem insinuate that Barack's gender, and not his talent, put him in the top spot? I thought black men were capable of performing at his level without an irrationally granted advantage. And the idea that black men always reach the Promised Land before white women? Forty per cent of black men don't finish high school in America, and one in four are incarcerated. Hillary, and her feminist supporters, are not going to win this election by glossing over the realities of African-American men...

Labels: 2008 elections, barack obama, gloria steinem, Hillary

Labels: 2008 elections, barack obama, bill clinton, Hillary, hip-hop activism

Labels: barack obama, ethan brown, Hillary, mandatory minimums

In Iowa last Tuesday, a man--a good friend and a brilliant professor named Kembrew McLeod, actually--dressed up as a robot--yes, a robot--to heckle Bill Clinton on, of all things, the infamous 1992 Sister Souljah incident.

You may remember that one: at a crucial moment in his presidential campaign, Clinton seized on a decontextualized quote by the rapper about the Los Angeles riots to reassure white voters that he was solidly on their team. (Then he went on Arsenio Hall to play a disastrous sax solo.)

So against the round booing of 400 FOBs--none of whom, it may be safely presumed, had ever been forcibly detained like Wen Ho Lee--my-friend-the-robot dropped a club promoter's amount worth of flyers that detailed Clinton's disservices to racial justice while, at the top of his lungs, demanding on behalf of all robots that the Great Triangulator apologize to Souljah.

It's true that a lot has changed since then. A rap group even won an Academy Award. And I'm still not sure why my man needed to be in a robot suit. But he had a point.

The resentments that made it possible for Bill Clinton to summon race, class, and generation divides to scold youths of color into behaving properly towards nice middle-of-the-road voters haven't disappeared. Think of how the Don Imus firing turned into a referendum on rap earlier this year. (And think of how much money Imus received to return to the airwaves.) Think of the 50 noose incidents in the two months since the march on Jena in September.

The culture wars have never really ended...


Click here to read the whole thang.

Labels: barack obama, culture wars, Hillary, the clips

Labels: Hillary, presidential elections