I'm not sure. My gut tells me no. It's never enough when you're dealing with people who have become unhinged; people who have become so entwined with their grievances that they can't see straight. This is how we get women who can come up with the conclusion that the way to make a feminist statement is to vote for a misogynist who thinks jokes about wife-beating and rape are funny, whose wife seems to be injured a lot (just sayin'...) and with his support for overturning Roe v. Wade and his silence on the Bush Administration's upcoming HHS rule that would define many methods of contraception as abortion, WILL set women's rights back forty years. This is how we get people like Alex Jones, hardly a leftist, in Denver to stir up trouble by baiting another grievance-crazed nut, Michelle Malkin.
But some people are determined to cut off their noses to spite their faces no matter what, and I still believe that Hillary created this monster that has now spiralled out of her control. The speech was good, but I don't think she was emphatic enough that a) she is OVER IT; b) this election should NOT be about HER; and c) that she vehemently opposes so-called supporters who do not fall into line. She left just enough of a crack in the door for her own ego to sneak through, and that's enough to keep her grievance-crazed supporters foaming at the mouth. Today's New York Times is reporting that a number of Clinton fundraisers are still angry and unlikely to help Barack Obama. And check out one of the reasons why:
The lingering rancor between the sides appears to have intensified at the Democratic convention, with grousing from some Clinton fund-raisers about the way they are being treated by the Obama campaign in terms of hotel rooms, credentials and the like. Tensions were already high, particularly in the wake of revelations that Mr. Obama did not vet Mrs. Clinton or ask her advice on his vice-presidential pick.
Many major Clinton fund-raisers skipped the convention; others are leaving Wednesday, before Mr. Obama’s speech.
More broadly, a consensus appears to have emerged among many major Clinton donors that the Obama campaign did not do enough to enlist their support, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen Clinton fund-raisers.
“I’ve had more contact from the McCain campaign since the nomination than from the Obama campaign,” said Calvin Fayard, a New Orleans lawyer, major Clinton fund-raiser and longtime Democratic donor who is not in Denver this week.
Mr. Fayard said he was considering supporting Senator John McCain, the Republican, citing what he perceived as Mr. Obama’s inexperience.
With all due respect, Mr. Fayard, if you do this, then I would argue that not only should you turn in your Democratic credentials, but I would question whether you are smart enough to even vote. I mean, getting pissy about where your hotel rooms are? Is there anything more indicative of the screwed-up priorities of the so-called Feminism of Affluent White Women than thinking that the Obama campaign isn't bowing and scraping and genuflecting before you quite enough?
I remember early feminism. I remember the feminism of the affluent suburbs during the early 1970's, when women whose husbands had high-powered jobs or had inherited money, who in the stately colonials of Westfield, New Jersey, held consciousness-raising groups about how oppressed they were. Early-stage feminism had little common cause with the women slinging eggs over easy at the diner, or cleaning the bedpans in the hospitals and nursing homes, or the ones teaching their children. It was about restrictive country clubs and examining their own vaginas. You could almost understand this in the early stages of a movement. Those who need it the most are too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and don't have time for activism. But even after all this time, these women are willing to sell their daughters' right to control their own bodies and the lives of their sons who will become cannon fodder. They're willing to do this just because they're pissed off that an affluent white woman who was able to jump directly into the Senate without having to be so much as a County committeewoman because her husband was president; an affluent white woman who was humiliated by said husband on a national stage, isn't going to get to be president.
Clinton alluded to this disconnect last night, but I think she wasn't emphatic enough that these WATBs who are clinging to their anger as if it were the most cherished of possessions should just grow the hell up. She talked about the woman who adopted two autistic children and had no health insurance and was dealing with cancer. She talked about the young boy whose mother was on minimum wage. But she assumed that a bunch of people who think that they were dissed on their hotel rooms and to what lobbyist parties they were given passes, even care about these people. Because these Clinton fundraisers, and the PUMA crazies, and the rest of these self-involved, self-indulgent, narcissistic people, don't care about the woman working two part-time jobs with no health insurance. They don't care about the woman who goes into people's homes and takes care of the elderly and the sick, being paid minimum wage while the agencies for which they work charge the clients four and five times that. They don't care about the woman emptying the bedpans in the hospital, or the one cleaning the room in the very hotel where they're bitching about the rooms. They don't care about the fourteen-year-old impregnated by her father who can't get an abortion because that father would have to give permission. They don't care about the lunch lady at their child's school whose husband was just laid off in his fifties and they have a disabled adult child at home and continued health coverage under COBRA is $1200 a month -- which is almost her entire take-home pay.
No, all that matters is that they feel Hillary Clinton -- a woman who will be able to back to the Senate and perhaps be the successor to Ted Kennedy, who can go home weekends to her nice house in Chappaqua, who never really HAS to work again -- didn't get the nomination for president.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
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