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• Friday, August 22, 2008 04:27 PM

  @ kathyt1

  The reason that Obama supporters keep trashing Clinton supporters in nasty, infantilizing, or stereotypical terms is that so many of them like their sexism better than they like their candidate. They clutch that sexism to their chests because it makes the world comprehensible to them. Many of them want to take us back to a time when women had no political clout or shrank from using it. Clinton candidacy and the sexist way that she was treated changed all that.

  I know some people voted for Obama in part because he is black and because they saw the historical importance of breaking that barrier. I don't blame them for that. Yet many Obama supporters have refused to see that the desire to have a woman in the presidency is every bit as legitimate, because they see the goals and the dreams and the future of women as less legitimate.

  Discuss sexism and you are dismissed. Discuss racism and liberals at least will at least give your viewpoint a listen.

  I didn't actually vote for Clinton because she was a woman. Instead, I was avid for that health care plan. However, over the course of the election, the sexism of some so-called liberal Obama supporters changed my view of the liberal/progressive paradigm. If there is no room for feminism as an important progressive value in the Democatic Party, I am willing to take my support elsewhere.

  Obama supporters would like to know what they can do to win over Clinton supporters who are not in Obama's column. The answer is actually simpler than they might like to hear: Acknowledge the sexism. Most of them won't do that. They cling to their sexism the way those "hillbillies" cling to religion and guns.

  —AKA Smith Read AKA Smith's other letters
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