[Peace] Sunday Coffee with Frank Rich: Angry Clinton Women Love McCain? (w/my comment)

Sat Jun 14 21:38:14 EDT 2008

Before you read this, please understand this:  The ol' Bush-McCain GOP  is 
having coniption fits right now, and we will see it locally from now till  Nov. 
4. Earlier in my "google me" e-mail referring you to the nutty websites and  
blogs maniacally obsessed with every word written/spoken by yours truly, I  
directed you to read those rants at your leisure.  On one of them you will  see 
clear ties of our little Saturday "pro-war" group's alliance with the  
Republican Party.  We vigilers all fully realized that they appeared  on our West 
Chester corner very conveniently just before last November's  election....and a 
new election faces us again....and they're still there,  struttin' their stuff. 
I have long maintained that their motive has absolutely  nothing to do with 
"support the troops" or the crazy war that most of the  American public (even 
intelligent Republicans) has now repudiated.They have  never shown once ounce of 
real concern about "our troops." Their whole political  raison d'être has 
EVERYTHING to do with the Republican Party (when you  "google me," do a little 
"Where's Waldo?" and see if you can find the  photos of 2 of that group at a 
recent Republican meeting of some sort - oh, and  note that Congressman Curt 
Schroeder was out there with them today -  hmmmmmmmm....we get it.......). - KP

_http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion) 

Op-Ed Columnist  
Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain? 

By _FRANK RICH_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 
Published: June 15, 2008

TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience 
 with a _crude sexual joke_ 
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E6DD173CF932A15755C0A96E958260)  about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and  
Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when _a 
supporter asked_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/us/politics/14mccain.html)  
him on camera, “How do we beat the  bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just 
loves the women. 

(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion#secondParagraph)  
In his _televised address_ 
(http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/38121aa3-ad2d-41a6-b6e0-3e54247b4c2f.htm)  on Barack Obama’s victory night of 
 June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four 
 fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.”
  The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who _crooned_ 
(http://johnmccain.com/mccainreport/Read.aspx?guid=eb8dcdb7-88b9-4842-935c-51c3bb50cbe8)  
of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton  “here at McCain HQ” after she 
lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain  campaign hierarchy, Carly 
Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of  Mrs. Clinton and is 
_barnstorming_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061103854.html)  to win over Democratic women to her guy’s  cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a _fierce foe of 
abortion rights_ 
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/unmasking-mccain-his-reac_b_103580.html)  or that he voted to  terminate the federal 
family-planning program that provides breast-cancer  screenings. You’d never know that 
his new campaign blogger, recruited from The  Weekly Standard, had shown his 
genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this  year by _portraying_ 
(http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/03/hitchens_on_hillarys_lies.asp)  
her as a liar and whiner and by _piling on_ 
(http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/03/monstergate.asp)  with a locker-room jeer after she’d been  
called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.  
But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks  
for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most 
women  can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New 
polls  show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating 
Mr. McCain  by 13 percentage points in the _Gallup_ 
(http://www.gallup.com/poll/107806/Obama-Gains-Among-Women-After-Clinton-Exit.aspx)  and _Rasmussen polls_ 
(http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-06-11-womenvoters_N.h
tm)  and by 19 points in _the latest Wall  Street Journal-NBC News survey_ 
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25096620/) .  
How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by _only 
3 points_ 
(http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html) , Al Gore _by 11_ 
(http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/index.epolls.html) .  
The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously  
assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the  
brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama _lost 
only the oldest female voters_ 
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812050,00.html)  to Mrs. Clinton.  
But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign  
narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited  
incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the  way. 
Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such  
previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the  
innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate. 
Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to  
Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over _what role misogyny_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/us/politics/13women.html)  played in her defeat. A few 
female  Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on 
YouTube and  Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote 
for Mr.  McCain. 
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow 
 loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the 
evidence  of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not 
the  determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton  
supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the  
hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en 
 masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking 
heads  and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now 
peddling  this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence. 
The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is  
just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for  
months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided,  
and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the 
 loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer 
her  to Mr. Obama in the primaries. 
This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united 
 and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats. 
Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “_NBC  Nightly 
News_ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#25103734) ” and _The Wall Street 
Journal_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121322048693265737.html)  presented 
their new poll  results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they 
ignored their own  survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news 
organizations (and  NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “
problems with two key  groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 
percentage points to  Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 
6 points.  
Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but  
also a _7-point lead among white women_ 
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25096620/) , a 6-point deficit in  one sliver of the female pie is hardly a 
heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s  showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic 
presidential candidate,  including Bill Clinton, has _won a majority_ 
(http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/05/myths_about_the_white_male_vot
.html)  of that declining demographic since  1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men 
by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even  as he won the popular vote). 

“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama  
shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and  
outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt:  
independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence  that 
pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the  
evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28  
percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent  
of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain  
campaign _no longer lists_ 
(http://washingtonindependent.com/view/mccain-campaign)  its candidate’s home state of Arizona  as safe this fall. 
There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his  
6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is _higher than_ 
(http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/12/1135634.aspx)  Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) 
over Mr.  Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all 
the chatter to  the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’
s Democratic  constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). 
The same cannot be  said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base. 
That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan  
club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing  
refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested 
in.  Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive 
for a  tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo 
finish is  essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 
television  coverage. 
The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of  
Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the  
party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, _wrote this month_ 
(http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26814&s=rcmp)  that Mr. McCain is “incapable of  
energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality  
that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain _ditched_ 
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/22/mccain-rejects-hagee-endo_n_103143.html)  the preachers 
John Hagee and Rod Parsley after  learning that their endorsements 
antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he  ended up getting a whole new flock of 
evangelical Christians _furious_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801689.html)  at him too.  
The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The  
antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are _planning a large rally_ 
(http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/10/1129290.aspx)  for convention week in  Minneapolis. 
The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has _endorsed_ 
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/convictions/archive/2008/03/23/endorsing-obama.aspx)  Mr. 
Obama, as have both the economic adviser  to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With 
America,” _Lawrence Hunter_ 
(http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=46a816dc-f843-41ec-9fe4-fbeac17bcfca) , and the neocon historian _Francis  Fukuyama_ 
(http://au.news.yahoo.com/080527/21/170xi.html) . Rupert Murdoch is _publicly 
flirting_ 
(http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/30/murdoch_on_obama.html)  with the Democrat as well. Even Dick  Cheney emerged from his bunker this 
month to gratuitously _dismiss_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/02/AR2008060202328.html)  Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday 
proposal as “a  false notion” before the National Press Club. 
These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill _reported_ 
(http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/new-gang-of-14-wont-back-mccain-2008-06-11.html)  that at least 
14 Republican members of  Congress have refused to endorse or publicly 
support Mr. McCain. Congressional  Quarterly _found_ 
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20080610/pl_cq_politics/politics2892934)  that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out 
to Mr.  Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have 
contributed to  his putative successor.  
It was just this toxic stew of inadequate fund-raising and hostility from the 
 base — along with incompetent management — that capsized the McCain 
campaign  last summer. Now the management, at least, is said to be new and improved, 
but  the press is still so distracted by the “divided Democrats” it has yet 
to  uncover how that brilliant McCain team spent weeks choreographing the  
candidate’s slapstick collision with a green backdrop and self-immolating speech  
in prime time two weeks ago.  
The only figure in the McCain camp who has candidly acknowledged any glitches 
 is his mother, the marvelous 96-year-old Roberta McCain. Back in January she 
 said that she didn’t think her son had any support in the G.O.P. base and 
that  those voters would _only take him_ 
(http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/01/holding-their-n.html)  if “holding their nose.”  
The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up  
for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those  
same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and 
that  young people don’t turn up to  vote. 
 (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html) 

For when you need inspiration, need hope: 
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJvvMGoe7I_ 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJvvMGoe7I) 
"With God on Our Side" by Bob Dylan: 
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF92JKKlfRM_ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF92JKKlfRM) 
Peace  on earth & a heartfelt thanks for all you do! 
Karen Porter, Esq., Director CALL (800) 828-0498 for both  Senators/YOUR 
Congressional Rep.
The Chester County Peace  Movement, P.O. Box 1502, West Chester, PA 
19380-1502; ccpeacemovement at aol.com,  (610) 344-0228; check _www.ccpeace.org_ 
(http://www.ccpeace.org/)   (calendar) for upcoming events
Someday, when my  great-grandchildren ask, "Why didn't someone try to stop 
the madness?" 
I  hope my son and my grandchildren can answer, "Your great-grandmother 
tried, with  all her heart."
____________________________________________________________
_________________________________________
SEE Chester County Religious Campaign Against Torture  (CCRAT) 
_http://ccrcat.wordpress.com/_ (http://ccrcat.wordpress.com/) 
Progressive  Network of Southeast PA _http://www.progressivenetworksepa.org/_ 
(http://www.progressivenetworksepa.org/)  Your  Key to the Progressive 
Community!
______________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________

The woods are lovely, dark, and  deep;
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And  miles to go before I sleep.
-Robert Frost, "Stopping  by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

**************Vote for your city's best dining and nightlife. City's Best 
2008.      (http://citysbest.aol.com?ncid=aolacg00050000000102)
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