{"id":2080,"date":"2007-02-14T09:51:50","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T16:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/02\/14\/obama-and-clinton-race-and-gender-part-deux-of-a-series-that-will-stretch-through-2008\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T09:51:50","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T16:51:50","slug":"obama-and-clinton-race-and-gender-part-deux-of-a-series-that-will-stretch-through-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/02\/14\/obama-and-clinton-race-and-gender-part-deux-of-a-series-that-will-stretch-through-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama and Clinton — Race and Gender Part Deux of a series that will stretch through 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Ron Guzenburger<\/a>, we get this bit of news:<\/p>\n

Two prominent black elected officials in South Carolina — State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson — endorsed US Senator Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. The influential duo told the AP they were courted by Senator Obama<\/font>, but decided to endorse Clinton because they want the Democrats to win in November. “I love Obama, but I’m not going to kill myself … Everybody else on the ballot is doomed [if Obama wins the nomination]. Every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because [Obama] is black and he’s at the top of the ticket — we’d lose the House, the Senate and the Governors and everything,” said Ford. Just imagine the backlash if a white politician had made those same remarks.<\/i> <\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Well.\u00c2\u00a0 I have a gut feeling that\u00c2\u00a0 Ford and Jackson may be projecting their experiences with racism on to what White America is going to think of Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not so much that they are “under-estimating” White America as they may fail to see how we’ve latched onto Barack Obama because he soothes us of our lily-white guilt.<\/p>\n

Or maybe I’m not properly framing myself into South Carolina.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s easy for me to make that statement, sitting here in goddamned Portland, Oregon.\u00c2\u00a0 But, recently Harold Ford, Jr’s election loss tracked closely with the polls, which is in direct opposition to the “Doug Wilder Effect” which had the black Wilder winning the Virginia Governorship by a wide margin in the polls leading up to the election, and then… squeaking it out… the people were afraid to tell the pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a black man.\u00c2\u00a0 Which tells us that we as a nation made progress to the point where we will state an opinion on Barack Obama — and not hide from it, so we can take the current adulation of Barack Obama at face value.
\nThe one good thing about both both Hillary Clinton’s presidency and Barack Obama’s presidency is that it forces us to confront both our assumptions of race and gender and, somewhat more importantly, what we think the public’s assumptions of race and gender are in trying to assuage what they would vote for, which doubles right back on ourselves. Parenthetically, the bad thing about Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidency is slicing away those concerns we’re back to the question of: Do we really want either of these two to be president, and if we balk at them (the Democratic electorate deciding they’re not in tune with Clinton for her war stance and DLC positioning, the nation deeming her a flip-flopper and opportunist, the nation deciding that Obama is just a little too green) does that really say anything about anything here?
\nFor example, Hillary Clinton is said to have more support amongst black Americans than Barack Obama because of how the Clintons connected with the black community in their White House.\u00c2\u00a0 This comes from the odd fact that Bill Clinton, coming from a relatively poor background in Arkansas, has in many ways a more relatable experience to them than Barack Obama — who is quite literally an African American (father is from Kenya, mother is from America), and whose formative experiences took him to Hawaii (not a racial, in terms of black and white, hotbed) and the upper berth in Kenya.\u00c2\u00a0 This does raise the interesting question about Hillary: last I checked, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n

As for gender:\u00c2\u00a0 Hillary Clinton’s voice is just grating.\u00c2\u00a0 Is that some weird gender bias, which is that when she yells she sounds shrill — like Nancy Pelosi can (but she can get away with it, because she’s not running for president and — Her Voice is not going to be taken as, for good or bad, a strangely sanctioned “Voice of America”.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Ron Guzenburger, we get this bit of news: Two prominent black elected officials in South Carolina — State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson — endorsed US Senator Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. The influential duo told the AP they were courted by Senator Obama, but decided to endorse Clinton because they want the Democrats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}