i actually ’followed’ all of that.

scary : )

(scary that i followed it.)

lol

Women aren’t defined by their husbands, but if Hillary’s last name was “Smith”, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Yes. We all know that a woman as smart and ambitious and politically active as Hillary Clinton could never have achieved anything on her own. I mean, she’s not a male with good speaking skills backed by the Chicago political machine who got his start by showing up without warning to challenge ballot signatures and get everyone else thrown off the ballot so he can run unopposed in a Democratic primary in a State Senate district where the Democratic nomination is the equivalent of getting elected.

She’s not someone who could ever get the backing of a Chicago political machine, and would never be lucky enough to have all his opposition implode in various sex/drug scandals when he ran for US Senate.

Because we all know that only the most deserving and accomplished people ever succeed in politics, and certainly ever get a chance to be the Democratic nominee for President.

And there is just no way that a woman like Hillary Clinton could ever have accomplished much of anything on her own.

thanks (I think). ;-)

I saw that over in the other thread, but by that time I was in a sort of a “watching a phenomenon unfold” mode — i wasn’t watching it like it was about “me”, but “impartially”, because the only way to handle that kind of stuff is to separate yourself from it.

I mean, how else do you handle being called a “Taylor Marsh shill?” Now, I happen to like Taylor a lot, and have a great deal of respect for her, but I have no problem saying that she goes overboard — a lot of late. And I don’t criticize her for it, because what she is doing is voicing the frustration that a whole lot of people feel — she’s functioning as our public “Id” in some ways. (See, we’re all ‘bitter’, and “clinging to our belief in Hillary” and its all our fault that we are too stupid to recieve the enlightment that Obama offers…. ;) )

But me? A shill for Taylor Marsh? Seriously?

its been really interesting. A lot of it is because i function in two different capacities — there is the “opinionated jerk” side who says what he thinks in comments sections and doesn’t care who it pisses off, and then there is the “scrupulously honest research guy” side, who finds something interesting that no one else seems to have noticed, and examines it from a detached perspective as possible, and if its worth writing about, guest posts in a blog somewhere

Lot of stuff never gets published because I can’t “prove” what is intuitively obvious, or what I wanted to prove — this whole sexism/misogyny thing actually happened because of something I wound up not writing — I wanted to see if I could use the SUSA data to do another “Count Whose Vote” piece, which is a series that challenges the assumption underlying the arguments made by Obama supporters that he “deserves” the nomination. I don’t say he doesn’t, I just point out that the argument are pretty bogus. But I couldn’t make the argument I’d hoped using the SUSA data in an intellectually honest fashion — I could have spun the hell out of it, but what’s the point? — so I dropped that project.

But while looking at the state by state data, I noticed what seemed to be a clear and obvious differences in the way that men and women were “voting”… the “male” and “female” crosstabs are right next to the “all” (i.e. overall margin) data, and it was so glaring that I don’t think anyone who was actually looking at the data would miss it.

So, I began checking it out. And not only was what I think I saw there, but it was there with a vengeance, and there was really only one way to interpret it — the data was a manifestation of sexism.

And everything that has shown up here at FDL (the 4th part of the series) started out as a footnote to a piece that I never intended to write (part 3), but was written after someone asked a question in response part 2, which I’d never intended to write, but was written after reading a comment about Part 1, which wasn’t part 1, because this was never intended as a “series”, just as a one-off noting the obvious prevalence of sexism in the male electorate. And that piece was never planned.

Nobody gets that. Everyone assumes that because what I write somehow challenges their narrow political agendas, that I’m doing it to advance my own narrow political agenda. There is a broad “political agenda” of course — providing tangible evidence of something that everyone knows exists (sexism) but is usually hard to quantify. And I thought that broader political agenda was shared with the entire progressive blogosphere.

And its not — well that’s not really true. What is true is that sexism goes way down the list of priorities, when acknowledging it is inconsistent with the pursuit of a narrow political agenda. We all agree that Chris Matthews is a sexist jerk. Matthews says something stupid, and everybody blogs about it. No controversy.

But the minute the very thought is raised, even indirectly and completely unitentionally, that Barack Obama has benefitted from sexism, lots of his supporters immediately go into “attack the messenger” mode. I mean, of course Obama has “benefitted” from sexism. Hillary Clinton has “benefitted” from racism — and both Obama and Clinton have benefitted from “positive identification” voting. I don’t think that either Obama or Hillary ever set out to benefit from sexism/racism, it just happens.

But apparently, at least in the case of Obama, you can’t even suggest that.

The funny thing is, I didn’t ask for this — I forwarded a draft of Part IV to someone to review because as I white guy writing about race, I wanted to make sure that before I guest-posted it over at Corrente I didn’t say anything boneheadedly racially insensitive. It wound up here because the draft got forwarded here, and FDL thought was worthwhile, and I said “sure” when I was asked if they could cross-post it. Anyone can cross post anything I write — as far as I’m concerned, the only value my “intellectual property” has is as an imaginary write off.

So I show up here when it starts getting published, and I’m in “honest researcher” mode, and its glaringly obvious what the reaction is among Obama supporters, and they start pushing buttons, and “opinionated jerk commenter” mode kicks in — because there was a whole lot less “honest inquiry” and a whole lot more “agenda pushing” in the comments.

And I’ve apologized to the people who I needed to apologize to, and haven’t to the people who don’t deserve an apology.

So thanks for the defense. It was noticed, and appreciated.

i remember waht vg was referring to—i remember back when your style and tone and direct ’hits’ comments insulted the hell out of a few people, oh well, yep, one of them was me, a couple of times, i knew what you were trying to do, and frankly, a few times you were right, a FEW, lol, so i got over it……didn’t take away from what you were trying to do HERE. this time…

any way you wrote it, would have been the same thing in the comments, you’ve been around longer than i have, look at the feeding frenzy and look at all of the fine contributors/commenter’s names that are now missing in the comments section that used to be here……i’ll leave it at that.

i posted this in the next thread last night and wanted you to see it,..

dmac April 14th, 2008 at 6:05 pm

166

snowbird says–”

We spent a whole thread looking for a reason why Hillary lies. We got no answer.”

==============

yep, that’s what was done the whole entire fucking thread, however, that’s not what the post was about…..and the other four.

i’m amazed that noone here remembers who the hell he is. and what he has done in his life.

i am so pissed and disgusted i don’t even know what to type first.

you trashed what you THOUGHT he said, then when he tries to tell you no, you keep it up and dig it deeper, and throw more shitty crap at him, when he’s not even saying that in the first place..one after the other on and on..he threw it back and people called him shitty…….man oh man. i have never used this word, but what a CLUSTERFUCK.

a pile-on to a man to whom we owe a lot.

AND he is not a taylor marsh shrill. least i don’t THINK he is, i don’t know of him from there.

i hope when you figure out who he is and all he has done FOR ALL OF US, that you have to run for the toilet when you realize how he was treated here.

cuz it’s sure makin’ me barf my guts out.

adios.

Hillary Clinton is the wife of a former president. She goes by a different standard than Michelle Obama at this point, because as the wife of a former president, you’d expect her to not be lying about her “accomplishments” to the American people and you’d expect her to have some cooth for crying out loud!

So, we now have this distinct category call WIVES of former presidents. And we have a set of expectations that they are expected to meet because of who they were married to.

Its like you are so caught up in your own political agenda, so obsessed with justifying your own political prejudices, that even when the subject is sexism, you can’t stop yourself from transmitting sexist bullshit about the appropriate role of wives in our culture, and how they have certain “expectations” that are supposed to be met because of who they are married to.

Repeat after me.

WOMEN ARE NOT DEFINED BY THEIR HUSBANDS. THEY ARE COMPLETE AND WHOLE INDIVIDUALS WHO DEFINE THEMSELVES, AND ANYTIME I SUGGEST OTHERWISE, I’M SIMPLY TRANSMITTING MISOGYNISTIC BULLSHIT.

Really, being snitty to commenters who have honest questions is not something that a front-pager should do, and is not in the FDL spirit of open discussion.

Hi VG. First off, I was here well before the Libby trial. In fact, by the time the Libby trial happened, I’d already left, and came back because of the coverage of the trial — (for me, there comes a point where a blog gets too big for me to enjoy participating in the comments — and that’s not meant as a criticism of FDL, simply an observation about the nature of a comments section.)

As to you actual point, I beg to differ. I was remarkably patient with people trying to superimpose their own political agenda on what I wrote, and after three or four days of that crap, it gets really old. So I reacted, and in an least one case apologized because I’d misinterpreted that person’s intent in asking questions.

But please don’t try and tell me that people are trying to understand what I’ve written when they repeat the same point about how this is based on a poll from February that showed Obama as a better candidate for November than Clinton. It didn’t matter how many times I said “this is not about Obama v Clinton”. And I don’t care how “intelligent” the questions are framed, because anyone with any actual “intelligence” knows that February general election polls have absolute no predictive value for a November election. This was not intellectual honesty, it was agenda pushing, and I got sick of it.

Another person had the nerve to question my methodology, which is based on publicly available data from a poll with about 30,000 responses, because the issue of sexism clearly makes her uncomfortable — as it does a whole lot of Obama supporters, who know full well that a nice chunk of their candidate’s success can be attributed to the pervasive sexism of this culture, and the fact that when it comes to Hillary Clinton, its perfectly okay to be as sexist as you want. And its one thing to question my methods — but when you turn around, and heap enormous praise on the author of a book who agrees with your own political agenda, and it turns out that the “research” done for the book is a joke — when the level of hyocrisy is a tad much.

Seriously — the author came up with a premise. Then created a polll clearly designed to confirm that premise. Then interviewed a grand total of 400 African Americans, including all of 58 in the 18-24 year old age cohort, in only two cities. Then writes a book in which she claims to have identified an African American “Hip Hop Generation” that is profoundly different from their parents, and speaks authoritatively about their concerns. Remember — sweeping statements about an entire generation of African Americans, based on 58 responses to a self-designed survey. And to make matters worse, her “conclusions” were that this generation is no longer “monolithic” like their parents were — excuse me, but if you are going to make a claim like that, you had better get a much bigger sample of the generation than 58 people in two cities, because there are tens of millions of African Americans in the northeast, and the rural south, and throughout the country, who might not conform to your theory. And you don’t make claim about how different one generation is from their parents when the differences in the responses are either within the margin of error (which, given the sample size, in considerable) or very close to it.

In other words, don’t pretend that you’re some kind of intellectually curious unbiased observer who is merely interested in making sure that my conclusions are sound, then turn around and give unreserved praise to someone who employs research methods that any impartial observer will immediately recognise go well beyond “unsound” into “self-serving and unethical”. Because if you do that, I WILL call you on your bullshit.

So please don’t lecture me on how I respond to comments, because I’ll call you on your bullshit too.

So there. *sticking tongue out*

If Laura Bush decided to run for the presidency in the future, she’d get the same scrutiny, especially if she was using Rovian tactics like Hillary is to win. Don’t you see that? How come you can’t?

As pointed out, Claire McCaskill would be a fine female choice for the presidency and most of us would be behind her….not because she’s a woman, but because she has class. The End.

Hillary has not done herself justice. Any record of accomplishment has been squashed and she has herself, her husband, and her campaign’s tactics to blame. I’ve written her off and it has nothing to do with her gender. It has to do WITH WHO SHE IS TODAY and today she is “ugly”. What she is doing with her campaign is exactly the kind of bullshit I’ve been sick of over the last decade.