Letters to the Editor
Carol Richards
Published Letters: 420
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Good Morning, Joan!
[Read the article: A new low in Clinton bashing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Joan, I wish your daughter was running for president of her next school and she was in Obama's shoes. In some ways she was Teflon and in in other ways she has been grilled pretty roughly. Her opponent has been around for a long time and generated a lot of distrust and a lot of big time fans. The word on the street before the election was that while your daughter was very talented and energetic, she had no chance against this established person who has been setting up for victory for such a long time.
The school paper is awful!!!! It focuses on crap and on bits and pieces of personality stories. Your daughter immediately begins to get a HUGE amount of support from a WIDE base. The establishment is shocked. The paper NEVER really focuses on why all these people are connecting to your daughter. The paper almost always speaks of your daughter in a ROCK STAR narrative and the pictures are mostly of people wide eyed expressions as they greet your daughter. Now, she has a website and MANY papers that go into the typical level of details that express her plans. But the paper NEVER mentions this. In fact, the story is that the established person is full of tiny details and massive experience. You and those of us who have looked into it can easily see that your daughter is not merely a good speaker, but a solid thinker who has demonstrated her skillfulness at making her ideals real.
take the analogy into the present circumstance. On campus each side has some asshole supporters. Your daughter is winning and so her assholes get the attention. They are clearly a small minority (if you look at the WHOLE; not just angry comment sections on the internet), but some big voices are using them to point to a very worrying indication about your daughter.....
My bet is that you would be more objective with her. You'd see the assholes and be concerned, but you'd be more than capable of seeing that your daughters opponent has the exact same type of revolting support. And you simply would not focus too much on it. Sure, you point to how gross it is, but you wouldn't call your daughter and tell her how worried you are that some awful people want her to win....
If things had happened just slightly differently and Obama had been in the position in which he clearly was not going to catch up, Joan, you would be worrying (and you know it is true)...YOu would be WORRYING so deeply about the effect of his constant claims that Hillary can't win, his constant efforts to convince superdelegates that they must vote against Clinton's wider support. And, Joan, you would be mad at him for any insinuations he makes that are unclear and sloppy. You would be mad at him especially when his attempts to clarify his comments were almost always filled with glaring factual errors.
If Obama was running from behind in such a manner (for months), if he was praying upon gender/racial apparent gaps in the primary voting and insinuating that Clinton's support wasn't really as significant as his (when SHE had one of the widest bases in history)....He'd bug the hell out of you. And you would not dare take the worst Hillary supporters as examples of her character or her campaigns failures. In fact, I guarantee that you would start by scratching your head at how vocal and angry his supporters were getting. You would write worried blogs sharing your concern that Obama's die hard supporters (who should really KNOW he can't win this thing) are tearing apart the democratic party. And you would be trying your best to shift focus to the practicalities and hope for a Clinton victory in Nov. And you would know she could lose as well. But my hunch is that you would accept that she can only do so much and you would realize that you and all democrats have a responsibility to point to significant reasons she should be voted for...It seems like you will spend much of this general election rooting for Obama but always making sure to point out when his imperfection is playing a role in a potential loss.
I'm voting for your daughter and I don't blame her awful supporters. I think your daughter's opponent is being treated unfairly (both are) but I also think that the smart and decent people who really don't like her have reasons to that can be well articulated. Just as people can reasonably object to your daughter. It is too easy to reduce what is happening to our most basic responses. We all need to step back and let it be much more complicated than we are. All of us. Because the fact is that what each of us is clutching onto right now is hardly taking enough into account. And it is the fierce clutching that will harm this party more than the content of what is being "discussed" or "healed". That is what worries me the most.
Anyway, good morning. Let’s see what people are clutching, who they know is wrong and what worries them most about what they know. And then let’s pretend that complicating our “view” and relaxing a bit would not be exactly what the party needs.
No. The truth is: Good Morning. I do hope more sexist democrats stop being sexist. And even though I doubt your form of dialog can help with that, I have no doubt that your heart and daily normalcy does make a big difference in that direction.