I'm referring to women who normally vote Democratic and now say they won’t vote for Senator Obama.
The Providence Journal’s Froma Harrop tells us about them - - -
The woman who shouted "McCain in '08" at the Democratic rules committee was speaking for a multitude.
After mounting for months, female anger over the choreographed dumping on Hillary Clinton and her supporters has exploded -- and party loyalty be damned. That the women are beginning to have a good time is an especially bad sign for Barack Obama's campaign.
"Obama will NOT get my vote, and one step more," Ellen Thorp, a 59-year-old flight attendant from Houston told me. "I have been a Democrat for 38 years. As of today, I am registering as an independent. Yee Haw!"
A new Pew Research Center poll points to a surging tide of fury, especially among white women. As recently as April, this group preferred Obama over the presumptive Republican John McCain by three percentage points. By May, McCain enjoyed an eight-point lead among white women.
What's dangerous for the Democratic Party is that, for many women, the eye of the storm has moved beyond Hillary or anything she does at this point. The offense has turned personal. (emphasis added)
They are now in their own orbit, having abandoned popular Democratic Websites that reveled in crude anti-Hillary outpourings -- and established new ones on which they trade stories of the Obama people's nastiness.
But worse than the online malice has been the affronts to their faces.
Tara Wooters, a 39-year-old mother from Portland, Ore., told me that wearing a Hillary sticker around town has become an act of defiance. She recalls one young man telling her, "I'd rather vote for a black man than a menopausal woman."
"We don't hurl insulting, berating remarks at Obama supporters, or at Obama himself or his family," Debbie Head, a 40-year-old from Austin, Texas, complained to me.
Remember Peggy Agar? The women do. They can't stop talking about the Detroit TV reporter who asked Obama a serious question at a Chrysler factory -- "How are you going to help American autoworkers?" -- to which he answered, "Hold on a second, sweetie."
The women are angry at the ludicrous charges of racism leveled against Clinton by the Obama camp -- amplified in the supposedly respectable media -- and projected onto themselves.
Jean B. Grillo, an "over 50" writer in lower Manhattan, was pretty straightforward: "I am so tired as a white, ultra-liberal, McGovern-voting, civil-rights marching, anti-war fighting highly educated professional woman who totally supports Hillary Clinton to be attacked and vilified as racist and or dumb." . . .
The women talk of being taken for granted by a party leadership that never spoke out on some of the outrageous Hillary bashing -- and despite the close race, joined the early rush to crown Obama. . . .
Passions can change, one supposes, but the women I hear from do not see the rampant sexism, particularly toward older women, as isolated gaffes but as a systemic dismissal of them -- an enormous voting bloc that has been reliably Democratic. . . .
Harrop’s entire column is here.
Comments:
We keep hearing the Dems’ leadership is confident most of the women Harrop is writing about “will come back to us.”
Hmm.
Could that be just one more manifestation of a sexist attitude that takes those women for granted?
4 comments:
The women quoted in this post are SLOWLY learning the lesson that I learned in the 90's. I'm a white male, I registered as a Democrat in 1960 in order to vote for John Kennedy. Over the years I watched as my party, driven by the Baby Boomers, built the huge entitlement establishment that threatens to bankrupt us, lost all its common sense in foreign policy and gave us the only candidate among the Democratic possibles (John Kerry) who couldn't beat George Bush. The parties treatment of Joe Lieberman was the last straw. I'll never be a Democrat again
It's a long time until November and, as we have witnessed in the lengthy primary season, plenty of time to watch Obama continue his self destruction. This, in addition to the Republicans simply presenting his voting record, his associations and his resume, which could be written on the back of his drivers license, should make for a long, hot summer for B.O.
"I am so tired as a white, ultra-liberal, McGovern-voting, civil-rights marching, anti-war fighting highly educated professional woman who totally supports Hillary Clinton to be attacked and vilified as racist and or dumb." . . .
That's Jean P. Grillo talking, showing off all her PC credentials and suddenly discovering that lotsa Democrats are far from erudite, thoughtful debaters when you're not part of the conventional wisdom of the insiders, which she herself must have once been a part of.
Now, Ms. Grillo, would you care to take a stab at explaining why cheap ad hominem (hmm, ad feminem?) polemics are beneficial to the governing of the country? And pray, how many times in the past have you used them, with full approval of your peers, against those horrible Republicans and their oh-so-neanderthal President?
And would you care to furnish some remarks why Ms. Hillary would provide superior policies to those proposed - in excruciatingly vague, but in such a glamorous, manner - by Mr. Obama?
John -
Let's see how long that feminine anger lasts before we start counting chickens (or electoral votes).
In any event, this is what the Democrat party has brought us to: the Lebanonization of American politics. There's got be a women here, a black there, an Hispanic over there, etc., etc.
In America, it should not matter what the chromosomal identity of the individual is, or the color of the skin is or the land to which he/she was a native of, and other such irrelevancies. What should matter is ability to be a President plus a well thought out political program that attracts a majority of the voters.
In a democratic republic such as ours, we voters get the government we elect (not necessarily want). Let's see what happens come November.
Jack in Silver Spring
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