Letters to the Editor
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@doloresflower
I support the TNR article because it puts into words things that I have been feeling for a long time. Obama has used race to gain votes. He has personally encouraged the idea that the Clinton's are using racist tactics, when they are not. He could have run on his qualifications alone, but he didn't. He would probably have lost a fair election, because he really is quite young and inexperienced compared to Clinton. But he would have come back in 8 years with more experience and won and he could have really been an amazing president. But he showed his character when he was down, as did Clinton. When she was down, she started showing her feelings (which is not easy for professional women to do in public and involved some risk) and she attacked Obama harder on his qualifications. Obama started going negative with subtle, untrue personal attacks on Clinton.
It is inevitable that race and gender would be part of this campaign. But racism and sexism did not need to be. I can't think of examples when Clinton suggested that Obama was sexist, and I have been looking. Perhaps you can. I can provide several examples of Obama suggesting that Clinton supports racism. There is nothing wrong with Obama or Clinton talking about what their race and gender bring to their campaign, but there is something very wrong with tarring your opponent with one of the most hateful brushes available in America today in order to win an election. Obama has shown with his actions that there is no limit to how far he will stoop to win this election. A vote for him is a vote for the kind of hateful politics exercised by the right.
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@lateagain
Thank you. Nicely put.
(And to everyone: as fierce as the debate has been it's been far more pleasant with no more anonymous flamers, eh?)
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@Persiia
I think the one thing we can all agree on is that Salon is far more civilized without a hundred Anons fanning flames. I'm sure that the trolls will find a way around the new system, they love that kind of thing, but for the time being we can actually hold "conversations" without having to wonder which "Anonymous" we are debating - a well-intentioned one or a troll.
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As a matter of fact
The Bradley Effect was not promoted by Obama and supporters. It was clearly pushed by the pollsters themselves. They were the biggest names on the talk circuit the day/week after NH. Zogby himself was on John Stewart, and reps from all the pollsters came out in full force on TV and in newspapers (There was a prominent editorial indicting the good people of NH in my Plain Dealer the next day, written by one of the pollsters himself--forgot which one). We all know why, don't we? They needed some rationalization for their bogus results. Their otherwise best-case scenario, and the probable truth, that many voters made up their minds at the last minute, COMPLETELY UNDERMINES their worth. Why would anybody use polls in the future if they aren't any good until the second the voting is done? Then we might as well just use exit polls, which is just a tiny percentage of their business?
As an Obama supporter, I was horrified at the Bradley effect talking point. It did not in any way, in terms of strategy, help him out. It marginalized him as the "black candidate" and brought up the whole racism thing, an angle Obama and supporters had been actively resisting. There's no question his approach to run as something other than a black candidate has worked for him. The Bradley effect would have thoroughly undermined the entire premise of his candidacy. I bring this up as just one example of an assumption by Wilentz that is suspect. He does it all over the place. For a little insight into the mind of an Obama voter, I wondered for a tiny little bit if it wasn't the Hillary camp that was promoting the Bradley effect. I rejected it out of hand when I saw it was the pollsters themselves pushing it and realized why, but I say that to demonstrate how completely nonhelpful it was to Obama's campaign.
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Hold on now
"Obama supporters are accused of not reading Walentz's article. When they do and provide a point-by-point refutation, they're mocked for their parsing and overanalysis."
The rest of your post was fair but the above is a bit much. Despite the pretention of the author, the long-winded posts were not a "point-by-point refutaion". At best, they were a rebuttal, in "Point and Counterpoint" fashion and, frankly, they deserved to be mocked for their dubious parsing and slanted over"analysis".
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confession to KStone
You might be right on that one. They were way too long, so I didn't read them! (insert "chagrin" emoticon here). :)
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@lateagain
LOL! ;-)
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@ KStone
I read Wilentz's original article. And I read X's very long rebuttal. And I find X is right; Wilentz has pretty much no leg to stand on. He really should reconsider going into that level of minutae in a letters section, fine, but he does in fact illustrate pretty thoroughly how bold faced a smear job WIlentz is engaging in.
The one point that is clearest that X made repeatedly and I saw myself clearly is the Wilentz seems to suggest that everything said against Hillary is some kind of concerted attack planned by Obama's campaign, whereas Shaheen in NH and others like him were some kind of loose cannons. He even grabbed things said by people not affiliated with Obama's campaign and tried to imply they were plants of some kind. The only one that stuck at all was Jackson Jr., but he's always been a bit of a nut and everyone knows it. That on top of the selective quoting and memory of the last few months and his really weak sophistry on Bill Clinton's SC race baiting comment (sorry, it was race baiting, no other way to see it) and there really is nothing left to take seriously.
It's a hit job, and not a very good one. I truly do not understand how anyone who has actually been paying any attention at all can take it seriously. If you don't like Obama, that's one thing, stick to issues, but don't go down this delusional road of trying to rewrite recent history to try to pretend that Hillary has not in fact ran the worst campaign of the last thirty five years.