What the Pundits Are Missing...
Is that Hillary is basically running a campaign counting on the base democrat voter's admiration for her husband's stint during the "roaring 90's".
Beyond that, she is simply running as a woman.
She is a woman counting on the nostalgia of a nation for a time when things were simpler..when the stock market grew leaps and bounds beyond profits and the US was seeing a historic level of technological innovation. There is no doubt that the innovative growth that existed before the tech bubble burst reshaped the way the world worked in almost every way imaginable, including the latest "mortgage slump". That was a different time.
The US economy, and ultimately our general standing in the world, has stagnated to a lazy crawl lately. Her campaign's "hope" is that people believe that somehow old-school democratic wrangling can take us back to our generation's most recent golden age. This is completely unrealistic. So they have to rely on their failsafe:
She is a woman. A vicious, unwomanly villain...but a woman all the same.
Generally, most people would see that as a negative...but that isn't a bad place to come from when ALL of your voting edge, aside from your home state, is coming from registered women aged 45+. When you hear the woman pundits defending and rationalizing her actions on the television, you realize how much this has become a "sex race" to them...and they aren't being challenged when they start spouting off crazy woman-talk defense of her actions.
The most interesting thing about this contest, and this point of US history, is the bizarre sexual/racial tensions that makes it valid and interesting for a TV host to question the relevance of the black vote on the primaries (whether speaking with a black pundit or not)...but there is never that level of discussion about whether a woman can carry the vote (even when speaking to a woman pundit). Apparently, our culture is beyond sexism. Racism, on the other hand, is still relevant.
...and so, the massive number of woman voters over 45 years old is, by far, the most important voting block in the primaries.
I personally would expect that the south would much rather vote in a well-disciplined negro than they would some crazy batshit woman who reminds them of adultery, blowjobs, scandals, and hippies. The more she can distract them from those old legacies, the better her chances. The more she can remind men that this is a race based election, the better her chances.
The wonderful thing about Obama is that he is the perfect antidote to a woman candidate running a campaign based on history. He has turned the hook of the primaries to being
the first multi-racial president instead of
the first woman president. From being one in a line of inevitable "royal" families to being a fresh, new candidate who's existence wouldn't be possible without the old guard of dirty hippy democrats (LBJ?).
He ultimately represents the potential of a new brand of democrats...I just wish he'd run on a fiscally responsible platform (instead of baseless idealism, and I'll take that any day of the week over anybody except McCain), which would give him the potential of completely revolutionizing what it meant to be a democrat vs. a republican...if only Obama could embrace being fiscally conservative, isolationist, socially liberal, God loving (state specific abortion rights), and environmentally progressive...and he succeeded only a little bit, we'd actually see a demographic shift in voting trends in the future.
Hillary, though, is based on the old guard. She is also why the entire "race" element has come into play lately. It is exclusively a Clinton ploy in the hopes that the democratic primary is going to come down to a sex vote (much more than the shallow belief that they were trying to stir racial tensions in the south with Bill comparing Obama to Jess Jackson, etc).
They want people to worry about race. The more they do that, the more they encourage their base supporters. That is, woman aged 45+ who, for whatever reason, vote a shitload more than the rest of us. It is scary to think about their brittle bodies shuffling off to the voting booths, determining
my fate as they mark in their scan-trons, underarm flab flapping in the breeze.
These are just my drunken thoughts, though, and how I think Obama could win and make something interesting happen.
I vote McCain vs Hillary
I vote Paul in Obama vs McCain
I vote Paul in Obama vs Any Other Republican, except in a close race when I'll go with my dark horse...God help us with a Mormon or a Baptist.
SUPER TUESDAY!!!
Actually, I'm surprised that there aren't more banner ads like this on the web. Mezzo, please write me back into your will.
