See, this is what pisses me off about the media and their analyzation and compartmentalizing of the “average, older, white, female Clinton supporter”.
This is a clip from an opinion piece in the Sunday Oregonian by Connie Schultz. http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/ore…
As with virtually every other demographic group except African Americans, who voted overwhelmingly for him, the support for Obama’s candidacy among white, working-class women fell along generational lines. Exit polls indicate that the majority of younger blue-collar voters were for him. Older white women went for Hillary, but that doesn’t mean they will automatically vote for the Democrat in the fall. They supported Hillary in large part because she did not push too hard against their comfort zone. She looked like them and, often, sounded like them, particularly when she talked about single mothers without health care and waitresses working two and three shifts just to get by.
They don’t feel respected, and so attacks against Clinton resonated with a lot of them. These are women who take care of their kids, their husbands and their parents and stretch household budgets from thin to translucent. But as soon as their breasts start to droop and their tummies poof out, they go from sex objects to invisible. From their perspective, they’ve worked harder than anybody had the right to expect, and now nobody has any use for them. But Hillary Clinton? Now, there was a postmenopausal woman who refused to disappear.
For a lot of these women, Obama is a challenge. They may be comfortable with his policy agenda, but he is one odd duck in their pond. Much of that has to do with age. Theirs, not his. Which means it’s really about race.
As one pollster who has made a career of studying working-class voters told me, “It really boils down to when you graduated from high school, whether you graduated before or after 1971. The question is: Did you go to an integrated high school? After 1971, the answer is likely yes, which is why so many young voters say, We’re not uptight about race. But here’s what you hear from older voters in focus groups all the time. They’ll say, I go back to my high school now and it’s all black. That usually means about a third are black, but these people went to high school when everybody was white. To them, everything has changed.”
Gee, if only we all could be young, hip, non-uptight, non-racists instead of working class, droopy-breasted, tummy pooching, post-menopausal racists married to emasculated men.
Front page
Notice what the writer snuck in...
Here it is:
Oh? Who said? Universal Health Care, not having that is something they’re comfortable with? A general agenda to make government work?
Oh, wait. Since they’re racists, it can’t be policy. Sorry.
Gee, I thought this nonsense would end with Hillary’s honor killing in the primaries. Guess not.
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
This article appeared in the Nation last week.
And I saw the “which means it’s really about race” non-sequitur then, and assumed that it was thrown in to make The Nation’s editors and readers happy. But it made no sense whatsoever.
So was I a racist before my breasts drooped?
And what happened between 1971 and 1972 and how did I miss out on it?
Oh, splendid
Another progressive source I’ve crossed off my list… Now I know why…
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
The drooping caused the racism... I think
What a nice new variation of the whole “women are controlled by their hormones and emotions” meme!
New bullshit, same as the old bullshit.
So THAT's how it works
I’d been wondering. And that clears up why none of the Boiz can possibly be racists.
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
This goes against
…the demographic breakdown of white voter support for Obama and McCain shown in the Cook Political Report and my subsequent post on it. In that report, white voters from April to June:
Obama trailed McCain by 9 points among both 18-to-34-year-old white voters and those 65 and older. He lagged by 10 points among 35-to-49-year-old whites. But among those 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent.
IOW, the current white voter gap by age is between those 50-64. Those over 65 (who also graduated before 1971) are supporting Obama at the same rate as younger white voters. Further, the writer doesn’t cite what exit polls she’s referring to but she does perpetuate a discredited myth regarding working class voters (working class white voters have contrary to myth remained democratic over the years whereas those who are wealthier are more apt to be swing voters). Also, working class white women are even more apt than men to vote democratic.
I could go on but I’m wasting a lot of bandwidth just to say that the author is full of shit and relying on the worst sorts of stereotypes regarding working class whites in order to turn off her readers’ higher cognitive functions and tell them a tale they’re comfortable hearing.
I've regretted giving my parents The Nation
for a long time now. I used to read it partly for entertainment - Cockburn and Hitchens were funny, if delusional, and partly for information. But there’s a lot of hating going on in that rag, and has been for a long time. I first saw the Mena, AK “story” there long before I had much idea who Bill Clinton was.
Now my parents are Obama voters, and I occasionally do the cryptic crossword, which isn’t as good as the Atlantic’s. Not what I call a fair exchange.
Prize Winner
What you all fail to understand is that Connie Schultz is a PULITZER PRIZE WINNER, and WIFE OF SENATOR SHERROD BROWN. Because of that she is both smarter, more astute AND cooler than all of us combined. So when she talks about Hillary’s dead-ending, old, droopy-breasted, beer-bellied racists needing to know how he treats the waitresses, she knows EXACTLY what she is talking about, and she is EXACTLY right goddammit!
How dare you all question a PULITZER PRIZE WINNING SENATOR’S WIFE?
Besides, she is trying to be sympathetic to all of us droopy-breasted, fat-gutted, white, old, racist, segregated, 1970’s-graduating, “ok-with-Obama’s-policies-but- feeling-somehow-in-a-way-we-can’t-articulate- due-to-our-limited-intelligence-and-edumacation- but-she-can-do-it-for-us- because-she-is-a-PULITZER-PRIZE-WINNER- AND-SENATOR’S-WIFE-SO-SHE-KNOWS-MORE-THAN-YOU-RUBES- IN-RACIST-LAND-DAMMIT- NOW-WHERE-WAS-I-OH-YEAH”, so what are you complaining about this time, you sorry, racist sacks?
——————————————-
Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites
Connie Shultz can shove her Pulitzer where the sun don't shine
and not only will the national discourse improve but, likely, so will her marriage.
Self-importance is directly inverse to intelligent writing.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
How old is this woman?
Because she’s talking as if she first bled to the tunes of Depeche Mode and WHAM!
Unless she has a very, very good plastic surgeon, I think she might have a droop problem, too.
I mean, if she’s the Hep, Younger Generation, say so, but if she’s not, then how dare she categorize an entire generation of women upon whose shoulders she has grabbed achievement thus? When she’s part of the problem through her own projection of those icky busing days?
Oy fucking vey. The cavalcade of the ridiculous marches on.
I haven’t seen this level of farce from the famously free press since the televising of the airstrikes on Baghdad. I think terms like “kool-aid drinking” and “messiah loving” aren’t strong enough to describe these people. I’m guess I’m going to have to go with “clusterfuck”…that seems to sum it up.
I love this job!
Now that I think about it, "eating their own" is appropriate.
I love this job!
Hmm, I graduated from HS in '72 after witnessing busing
at it’s best. Ah, the sounds of teachers locking classroom doors while students, including myself, playfully hovered in corners listening to the screams of children rioting in the halls. Good times, good times.
Yeah, now that I look down, I am sagging, been sagging for a while and although my friends are black, brown, yellow and sometimes green I must hate every one them. Boy, I didn’t realize how horrible I am until now. Thank you, Connie. Let the healing begin.
I love this job!
I'd bet money I'm younger
…than her and I don’t think she has any right to categorize anyone. Each generation inherits it’s own problems and mine, the Hep Younger Generation, got a very good hand when it came to race relations. The reason we got it was because the older generations did the hard work — even the ones that couldn’t quite get rid of all of their bigotries for the most part acknowledged they were wrong, and cared enough about us not to pass on the problems. If they still struggled, they remained silent. I think not enough credit is given for that action because it was and is a project of personal transformation. It’s easy to be free from racial bigotry when you were taught everyone is equal and that racism and prejudice are awful things.
Some in my generation like to spend their time casting aspersions on the very people that cared enough to make sure we grew up mostly free from the ghosts that still haunted them but they don’t acknowledge what’s been achieved or the work that is ours to do. It hit home for me when I was lecturing at the university — neither of my parents have college degrees and they grew up in counties that are still classified as ’persistent poverty’ counties and where the dreams for young girls still largely consist of marrying well, maybe ’making a nurse’ or a school teacher. I was outside class talking with a student who was an older black lady and it dawned on me neither of us would’ve been allowed to be where we were when she was my age and that the circumstances of who we were and where we came from still meant that most of those that could be called our peers would never make it to where we were. We slipped through the cracks in the wall and made it in but it was people like her and people my parents age that made those cracks for us.
Yes, I’m young and though I was smart and well educated at my high school in formal subjects, the sad reality is that when Bill Clinton was President, I didn’t know how to fill out the forms to get into college — my manager at the time who was from Ohio did it for me. People of my generation and even the author’s would do well to remember that our job isn’t to sit back and froth at the righteousness of being born free from a lot of the old sins but to instead realize that it’s our job to tear down the walls completely. While we’re bleating about the past and patting ourselves on the back, kids of all colors and both genders are being locked out by the circumstances of their birth. And that’s a fact that too many young fauxgressives can’t bare to acknowledge.
Wow, thank you on behalf of my parents.
My father, now 84, and my mother, dead since 1961, are among those who struggled hard with the racism they were raised with and did everything they could to end it. As a college student in the ’40s my mother was warned by the local police chief not to be seen on the street with black men; while pregnant with my older brother she and my father were chased through the cornfields of North Carolina by white farmers angry that they were organizing credit unions for black farmers. At the very same time, according to my dad’s reminiscences, he had to struggle with the racist upbringing that made him feel physical discomfort at closeness with black people.
Thanks to their struggles with “the old sins” we have the opportunity to finish tearing down those walls, as you say.
(Update: yeah, that’s my father the Obama voter. In fairness, he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid; that’s my stepmother’s role.)
No, thank them
…it’s no easy thing to do what they did —especially when violence has been done to your own soul by a sick society and that same sick society is offering social rewards and punishments to go along with it. People like your parents need to be lauded.