The White Male Vote Swung the Democratic Race

The 16-month Hillary-palooza has finally gone bust. Her website bravely instructs us to “Support Senator Obama Today.” Mrs. Clinton’s staff has been pared down to a skeleton crew. And she’s finally getting around to paying off the health insurance bills.

But Hillary’s campaign wasn’t a presidential nomination effort in the usual sense. It was a massive exercise in feminist consciousness-raising foisted on an unsuspecting American public.

Take Clinton’s June 7 concession speech that was billed as an endorsement of rival Barack Obama. In reality it was a neo-Marxist rant lightly disguised as a feminist pep talk.

Hillary regurgitated her demand that women receive “equal pay” — slyly omitting the words “even though they choose to work fewer hours at jobs that are less likely to maim and kill.” Mrs. Clinton also saw fit to blame her defeat on “unconscious” sex biases that had created the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

That hard-edged rhetoric is one of the reasons why Hillary lost the race.

Let’s look at the votes. While Barack Obama had a lock on the African-American vote, Hillary Clinton rallied the support of white women. The Black and white female vote basically offset each other.

So which group was the tie-breaker?

In states with exit polls, Barack Obama enjoyed 17 primary victories. In only four states did a plurality of white female voters support him: Iowa, Illinois, Vermont, and Oregon. [www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21660890]

But in 10 states, Mr. Obama took the white male vote: Iowa, Illinois, Vermont, and Oregon, plus Virginia, Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut, Utah, and Georgia.

The significance of that result is amplified by the fact that white men represent a smaller fraction of the electorate. For example in Illinois, white males compose 23% of the Democratic electorate, compared to 34% who are white females.

So in nearly 60% of Obama’s victories, the smaller number of white men, weary of Hillary’s girl-power riffs, came together to overcome the larger but splintered female vote.

After she conceded the race, the true-believers in the feminist Nirvana came out to genuflect at Mrs. Clinton’s altar, lauding how her campaign had shattered gender myths and barriers. But in truth, Mrs. Clinton only crystallized the worst stereotypes about the Sisterhood:

1. Feminists are devious. Long-time Clinton confidante Dick Morris once wrote, “Bill lies about sex, Hillary lies about everything.” From her fairytale that “women were routinely excluded from major clinical trials” to the bullets-in-Bosnia brouhaha, Hillary Clinton has a nearly congenital tendency to disregard the truth.

2. Feminists love to blame men. When her defeat became undeniable, Hillary cast about for explanations, eventually deriding the nation’s alleged epidemic of sexism as “deeply offensive to millions of women.” But what about Hillary’s sexist caricatures of men?

3. Feminists don’t accept responsibility for their failures. How many times do you remember Mrs. Clinton saying, “I’m sorry” over the past year and a half? If you scan Hillary’s June 8 endorsement speech, she never hints at the many miscalculations and missteps of her campaign.

4. Feminists are arrogant. Recall Hillary’s famous promise, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good”? Remember the aura of inevitability that she exuded during the early months of her campaign?

5. Feminists are self-possessed narcissists. As a college student, Hillary once confided that she had “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star,” adding that as a child she used to “pretend there were heavenly movie cameras watching my every move.” Does anyone doubt that Hillary believes her rightful place in the world is at the center of the universe?

6. Feminists can become very abusive. I have previously documented Hillary’s foul ways: www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/070408 . On the day that Bill was inaugurated as President, Hillary was informed she wouldn’t be moving into the vice-president’s office, prompting this rebuke: “G*d d*mn it, Bill, you promised me that office!”

Once again, Hillary didn’t get her way. Heaven help us from a candidate scorned.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 73 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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