FLORIDA PRIMARY DATE WAS ANOTHER REPUBLICAN DIRTY TRICK

One thing I do not hear Hillary Clinton or any commentator saying is that REPUBLICAN LEGISLATURE IN FLORIDA is responsible for disenfranchising us Democrats in our primary.

It was the REPUBLICAN LEGISLATURE that set the primary date so that it broke Democratic Party rules. This is just another dirty trick by Republicans. It is making my blood boil that no one -- NO ONE -- has noticed this.

Clinton Must Concede for Democratic Party Unity

I started writing about the competition for the Democratic Party campaign nomination when Ted and Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama. That sealed the fate of Hillary Clinton, I was sure.

Now, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson – former appointee of President Bill Clinton who putatively owes them political fealty – has endorsed Obama. Pundits now wonder what effect this may have on the Hispanic vote, a stronghold of Clinton support.

Neither candidate can win enough delegates in primary contents to earn the Democratic Party nomination, according to news reporters. Clinton, trailing Obama in the popular vote, cannot catch up and can only get the nomination if the super-delegates – party office-holders and appointees who represent influential voting blocs – back Hillary. Overturning the popular vote would, however, create party dissent that would undermine chances of victory against Republican Party putative nominee, John McCain.

Even though I prefer Hillary Clinton because she is the more experienced candidate and, as usual, I see a highly competent female overlooked in favor of a male, I concede:

Hillary Dillary Dock

Time’s run out the clock.

It’s time to go,

To leave the show,

Concede Obama is a lock.

Democratic Presidential Candidates Sound like Kids Squabbling in the Backseat of the Car

“Mom, he hit me.”
“She called me a name first.”
“He’s lying. I didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t do nothing. Leave me alone.”

First, there was Hillary Clinton accusing the press of ganging up on her in the Ohio debate. Her reference to a Saturday Night Live skit fell flat.

Then, a member of Barack Obama’s campaign was fired for calling Clinton a “monster.”

Next, feminist party venerable Geraldine Ferrara, the first woman to run for vice president of the United States as a major party candidate on the Mondale ticket in 1984, claims that Obama has only received recognition because he’s black, not in spite of it.

In the wake of this media tempest, Ferrara resigns from Clinton’s fundraising committee, amidst charges that she was racist. Meanwhile, black males accuse Clinton’s “Is your family safe at 3 a.m.?” ad of playing on ancient racist fears of black men threatening the safety and security of sleeping white women and their children, shades of the Ku Klux Klan.

As the cherry on top, the media unearth videotapes of Obama’s pastor and, in the senator’s own words spiritual mentor, giving a black separatist sermon accusing the U.S. of having provoked the 911 attack by its foreign policies. This is interpreted as blaming the victims by the press. The minister’s words damning America are as unseemly for a potential future president, so a new cycle of renunciation-denunciation is in effect.

Meanwhile, John McCain is busy solidifying his image with the Republican Party and abroad.

The Democratic Party, famous for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, is well on its way. Chris Matthews, on last night’s Crossfire, said the back-and-forth over whose surrogate campaign spokesperson said what was starting to sound like the Inquisition. “Do you recant fully and completely?” sounds too much like a page out of old playbooks that required public denunciation for crimes real and imagined.

If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don’t stop that fighting, the country is liable to turn this car around and let your father – John McCain – give you a good licking. I’ve already got the inside word from a scion of a famous political family telling me that John McCain “will be hard to beat.”

Barack Disses and Dismisses Hillary with Male Disdain

Barack Obama resorted to male dismissal last night in the debate. He would never tell John McCain or John Edwards or a male candidate that a point they raised was "just silly. It’s silly season in politics."

But it’s still all right to dismiss an accomplished woman’s legitimate concern in this way in a public forum. Not a single political pundit noticed it. In fact, Hillary is being berated for bringing up the legitimate charge of plagiarism for having made a misstep.

The double standard has been in effect throughout the campaign. Obama, the flavor of the month, was hailed for being greeted by “rock star crowds,” fixing his celebrity status as a rock star. Hillary, on the other hand, never has a moment of peace from characterizations of her as cold, divisive, and the “b” word.

John Edwards was almost completely ignored by the media. The media have made the front-runners in the Democratic primary.

I know one conspiracy-theorist who thinks the media seeded a women and an African-American as the Democratic front-runners so that a weak Republican prospect, John McCain, would steal the white, male, under-$50K-a-year vote and maintain the Republican presidency. They will not vote for a woman or a black man and will cross party lines to vote white male.

Even though I teach media and know all about interlocking directorates and the heavily conservative bias of corporate news organizations, I discounted this theory.

It’s too bad females are not able to so clearly identify their own best interests with having a female in the White House and breaking the final glass ceiling. Clinton will work hard, but Obama will be fluff. He is likely to make the same naïve mistakes as Jack Kennedy, who had Nikita Krushchev tap-dancing at our Miami doorstep with his missile sites in Cuba. Let’s not forget, either, than it was Lyndon Johnson who got important civil rights legislation passed, drawing on his decades of experience as a congressional deal-maker.

But young women are out, dancing to mindless slogans, suckered by yet another charismatic male who promises hope and change – whatever that means – while offering the same old dismissal of an accomplished woman’s argument as silly. And that’s why a woman supporting Obama is as silly as hen buying stock in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

A black male can fit through the eye of the public more easily than a woman can break the ultimate glass ceiling.

The Obama Juggernaut

The Obama juggernaut, aided by pack journalism, moves forward, its momentum seeming unstoppable. According to the MSN Encarta Dictionary, “It used to be said, apocryphally, that worshipers of Krishna threw themselves under the wheels of the Juggernaut wagon in an access of religious ecstasy, so juggernaut came to be used metaphorically in English for an irresistible crushing force.”

Last week, I predicted that Senator Barack Obama will win the general election. Then, overwhelmed by the bandwagon effect of his campaign, I flew away from mob-think to endorse Hillary Clinton. I do not believe that she will win the nomination, but she is the thinking-woman’s candidate.

Obama is now cast by the media as the magician, the one who will bring change out of hope, or perhaps I should write: change out of hype.

According to Eclectic Tarot, the Magician of the Tarot “is someone with a magnetic personality, someone who can convince people of almost anything. For better or worse, his words are magic."

The Senator fits the image of “a regal figure, powerful, graceful, and confident - able to make things happen, and even move mountains. The Magician Tarot card meaning deals with the ability to utilize every resource we have available to us,” according to Tarot Teachings.

I see the triumph of surface over substance, one that is challenging to articulate because to express the idea immediately is transformed into a statement of racial prejudice.

Obama is charming, a word with ancient roots that means to put observers under a spell. But in the end, magic is merely an illusory feat that appears to be supernatural only to naïve observers (Princeton wordnet).

Last night, a TV pundit noted that Nikita Kruschev ran rings around Jack Kennedy’s naïve diplomacy, and our naïve – albeit charismatic – president led us to the edge of nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis as the wily Russian leader demonstrated brinksmanship.

It’s not out of the question, either, that Obama will be assassinated, like JFK. Racial hatred runs deep in some portions of the U.S. The heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, with their ignorant theory of mud people, will not shy from violence to halt what they will see as a great degradation. So all these comparisons of Obama with Kennedy may turn out more parallel than the Senator’s supporters’ desire.

As president, Obama will not achieve much, and a Republican will be back in the White House four years later.

Hillary for President: Obama Is All Surface, Little Substance

The more my fellow Americans jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon, the greater grows my respect for Hillary Clinton and my desire to see a woman in the White House.

“Hope and change, change and hope,” I hear in endless sound loops of Obama rallies. I see the slogan posters bobbing up and down, and I feel as if I’m living in an Orwellian nightmare. What kind of change, exactly?

The more Obama talks, the more he sounds like an intellectual lightweight. Hillary, as her political fortunes sag anew in the Chesapeake primaries last night, emerges as a polished leader down in Texas. She has indeed found her voice, firing up Hispanic voters, in a hoarse voice. The political pundits, white men with their overfed bellies, are pronouncing her campaign all but dead, but this 60-year-old woman is out there facing down the naysayers -- again -- with a smile on her face.Now, that's bravery.

Damozel at The Moderate Voice writes:

“Meanwhile, those of us who have supported Hillary have done so for exactly the reasons that Obama’s fan base derides her. She is tough, a bit battered by hard experience, hardened to being disliked, a little soiled by her mistakes, persistent, politically astute, intellectually flexible, wary, wiley, and all the things that her critics take for insults but which are really the constituents of the ability to make realistic judgments and politic (as opposed to popular) decisions.“

Hillary is called hard-edged because the patriarchy makes feminine success, by definition, hard-edged. It just isn’t womanly to be that doggone accomplished. It just isn't womanly to beat the boys at their own games. Of course, she is found wanting in the womanly arts department. That, my friends, is patriarchy at work.

The criticism is being raised that it isn’t good for democracy for the presidency to be passed between two dynasties – Bush and Clinton. Oddly, the danger of dynasties didn’t come up when Son-of-a-Bush was anointed by the Supreme Court. What I remember is the conservatives gloating that Jeb Bush would be next up to bat, wishing on America a 24-year reign of narrow-minded, right wing cultural restriction and unfettered business exploitation of working people. Dynasty was just fine with everyone back then.

As for Obama’s vaunted charisma, Damozel is spot-on about that, too:

“True, Hillary doesn’t have Obama’s much-touted ‘charisma.’ I don’t care. I distrust charisma. It’s an aura, a glamour, a trick of the light, too often taken for the outward and visible sign for an inner and invisible grace. Those who compare his candidacy, apparently unconscious of the irony, with JFK’s and Reagan’s have got it exactly right.”

If charisma was all it takes to be a good president, Mick Jagger should have been elected long ago.

Bruce Miroff debunks the Kennedy mythology at The History News Network . As it turns out, Kennedy wasn't much better than Obama at getting down to particulars of policy and governance. Miroff writes:

"John F. Kennedy evoked an era of public service and participation in the most famous line from his Inaugural Address, but when asked to supply specifics to go with the soaring rhetoric, apart from the Peace Corps he was reduced to suggesting such public sacrifices as a curb upon expense accounts and an acceptance of higher postal rates. The later image of "Camelot" was unwittingly apt in capturing the royalist air of the Kennedy regime."

Senator Clinton is, after all, heir to the greatest policy-wonk presidency of contemporary times. She is better prepared on every issue than Obama, because she is a woman and she has to be. She has done the research. She has been working to extend health care to all Americans since her husband’s administration. She is still fighting.

Senator Clinton, with her clear complexion and tireless campaigning, reminds me of a warrior mother, an ancient goddess from matriarchal times, who embodies both strength and protection. What is Obama, one of the newest members of the Senate with just two years under his belt, but just another pretty new face?

He needs seasoning, and what a great word that is. He needs to experience the waxing and waning of the political seasons and the seasons of life before he is prepared to lead our nation in these perilous times. The movement of the electorate toward Obama is yet another illustration of the U.S. population’s preference for surfaces over substances: pretty words, beloved, but what lies beneath?

At 46, Obama can use eight years productively to learn the arts of governance and the wisdom of the years. If elected, his will be one of least effective presidencies ever. He may delight crowds with his so-called rock-star charisma at least for a while, but it is Hillary who has proven that she has the intelligence, the political resiliency, the wit and the guts to clean up the Bush mess.

Hillary vs. The Patriarchy by Erica Jong

In my last entry, I went out on a limb and predicted that Barack Obama will win the Democratic Party presidential nomination. I also expressed my own preference for Hillary Clinton for president.

Erica Jong, writer and seer for women of my generation, has expressed my feelings so much more clearly than I have in an article for the Washington Post,Hillary vs. The Patriarchy.

So long as troglodytes such as Bill Kristol can get away with saying, “White women are a problem. We all know that,” women are still – as John Lennon said so long ago – “the niggers of the world.” Bill Kristol would be excoriated for referring to African-Americans as “a problem,” but it’s just fine to say it about white women.

Ronni Bennett, in her always informative Times Goes By blog, takes the press to task to reducing complex issue debates to race and gender. She is right, of course. I left newspaper journalism a long time ago because it had devolved into idiocy of which I wanted no further part.

As long as journalists distract Americans with simplistic views and the entertainments of blood and circuses on television, democracy will be a sham of one candidate beholden to corporations battling like a gladiator another just as beholden to corporate interests.

Obama most probably will win because it is easier for males to see another man in the White House, even if he is “half-black,” than it is to see a female running the show. If Hillary doesn’t win the nomination and the election, I do not think that another woman will have as good a shot at it during my lifetime.