Shepherd Smith on FOX News reported (as did the Blog
POLITICO) today:
South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler sharply attacked Sarah Palin today, saying John McCain had chosen a running mate " whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” Palin is an opponent of abortion rights and gave birth to her fifth child, Trig, earlier this year after finding out during her pregnancy that the baby had Down syndrome.
Fowler told my colleague Alex Burns in an interview that the selection of an opponent of abortion rights would not boost McCain among many women. “Among Democratic women and even among independent women, I don’t think it helped him,” she said.
Told of McCain's boost in the new ABC/Washington Post among white women following the Palin pick, Fowler said: "Just anecdotally, I believe that those white women are Republican women anyway."
When the Democrat Convention began there was a hint of justice that hasn’t been much discussed even by political pundits. The Clintons rode into Washington almost 16 years ago. It doesn’t seem like a longtime ago, but it is the equivalent to when Barry Goldwater lost and Ronald Reagan won.
Further, favorite Political Pundit, Thomas D. Stamper reports:
It wasn’t enough for the Clintons to occupy the White House. They also needed to occupy the moral high ground. These children of the 1960s were going to right the wrongs of their parents and grandparents except when they were useful as some sort of prop so that Clinton could refer to himself as a child of WWII or the Depression or whatever real challenge his parents generation lived through, he skipped the hard road. His cabinet would look like America, meaning that he would scrape three deep to get a female Attorney General, going all the way to a Miami prosecutor. If you were a minority and a female, the staff of Clinton would refer to you as a "twofer." Jocelyn Elders was the most famous of the twofers according to Clinton insiders at the time. Realistically, it was Clinton’s right as President (according to the US Constitution) to pick who he wanted and let Congress decide if they were qualified, but it did no honor to those chosen to say they were considered for their looks. Isn’t that just what Gloria Steinem didn’t want?
The Clintons brought a lot of baggage into 2008. They probably didn’t think that their “looks like America” stance would be anything but a positive. After all, they were here to let you nominate the first female president. But what happened? Hilary has always been a smart political ideologue and she saw it as her strength. And she decided to run a campaign based on experience and the issues, two things decidedly not superficial. But along comes Barack Obama, a Charismatic, intelligent, and politically savvy candidate who just looks like he should be President according to the Clinton's own standard, which has become the standard of the political left. He’s warm and she’s cold. He’s new and she’d old. But even more important, he comes from a demographic background more victimized than hers, a background less represented in society.
How many times do you think during the debates that Hilary wanted to blurt out that Democrats were choosing symbols over substance? Yeah, and who taught them that? And when would Democrats ever get another chance after all these years of having the radical left spoiling things?
Hilary had her opportunity it 2004 and she skipped it hoping for a wide open race in 2008. She did everything right, even sending her operatives down to Iowa to get the dour Kerry nominated. You could make a case that Hilary’s pragmatic approach to the war could have beat Bush in 2004. She would have easily won the nomination in that crowd, but she ducked it.
The Clintons brought identity politics into the mainstream and finally poetic justice makes them a victim of it.
Now in the most ironic twist of all, the victim centered politics of the left is being used against them by the McCain campaign. Poor Barack Obama cannot even get a word in edge wise since Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated without charges of sexism. It is a shame. The American people would be better served if we would live up to our own ideals during campaigns and judge our potential future leaders not by the color of their skin (or their Gender) but by the content of their character.
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