Breaking Bitch
Joepistole said:
Another conspiracy theory with absolutely no evidence ....
Actually, I think the big problem is the craven pursuit of Clinton as quarry. To wit, when the question involves
superdelegates and
press, the natural inclination is to
blame Hillary Clinton.
While it is true that blaming the opponent for everything is standard political fare, we should bear two points in mind: (1) Sanders supporters can't deal with
accurate criticism of their candidate, and (2) the bigotry is just getting sickening:
In colloquial terms, a woman has to be twice as good to be taken half as seriously. Which is why Sanders's behavior in recent weeks is so troubling. Clinton has won, fair and square. She has more votes. She has more pledged delegates. She has more superdelegates. She has more voters. Even if you tweaked the rules, she is the winner. Every "what if" scenario―what if we got rid of the superdelegates? what if the Democrats used Republican rules? what if there were more open primaries?―Clinton still wins. There is no rational reason for Sanders and his supporters to act like he is somehow more deserving of this than Clinton.
And yet, Sanders is carrying on as if it's obvious that he deserves to win, and just a little more pressure will cause everyone to finally see it and give him what he clearly believes is his due. Thus all the chatter about how the system is "rigged."
Whatever is in his heart, Sanders is coasting on male privilege right now, namely the male privilege of being assumed to be more competent and more worthy than a female competitor, even if she has demonstrated her value by all objective measures.
This problem isn't unique to Sanders. On the contrary, it's common as dirt. When a woman or person of color has shown great success, people in the dominant group often argue that they can't have done this on their own, but had to have gotten there by cheating. You see that every time conservatives gripe about "affirmative action," assuming that people of color who get into college somehow are edging out more deserving white people by doing so. You see it with Donald Trump arguing that Clinton is only winning by playing the "woman card," a blatant expression of the belief that women can only win by cheating ....
.... If Clinton was a man, the notion that it's self-evident that Sanders is somehow the "true" winner would be a much harder sell. It would make him a laughingstock, in fact. But the notion that a woman who does so well must be an imposter has a lot of emotional salience in our culture. Whether it's enough to help boost Sanders to a convention fight even after Clinton gains a clean majority of pledged delegates, however, remains to be seen.
Here's a conundrum:
Amanda Marcotte↱ spent sixteen paragraphs on an article;
thirteen could go into the above quote. That bit about "even if you tweaked the rules", for instance, would eat up three or four paragraphs, and there are two more about sexism specifically setting up the citation, and there are two clarifying paragraphs struck under the ellipsis.
This is one of those extraordinary cycles in which we're supposed to believe every striking coincidence is mere accident. And it's kind of like the bit with AP's delegate count and superdelegate commitments; as
I wrote elsewhere↱:
This really can work out to an accident of circumstance; indeed, that would be the strongest presumption. Nonetheless, there really is a reason why this prickles. That is to say, Really? On the eve of American history itself, we find a way to bungle this up with a cloud of controversy?
Or, as Marcotte puts it:
While it's currently hip to sneer at every suggestion that sexism might be playing a role in the stubbornness of the Sanders camp, the contradictory, grasping nature of Sanders' arguments sure makes it harder to pull off the "no sexism to see here" shenanigans.
Sanders' weak responses to controversial behavior in his larger movement has grown tremendous frustration among Democrats, leading up to what seems the turning point, the Nevada convention. To a certain degree the press has had it, but the Democratic Party is, in that once-upon-a-time political tradition, mincing around in order to not tell Mr. Sanders, straight up, to go fuck himself.
But early among those weak responses was the question of the #BernieBros, and I can remember essentially two points from that: First is that Bernie Sanders cannot be held responsible for other people's actions; second is that someone in Hillary's camp said something a Bernie supporter didn't like, so the supporter didn't want to back Hillary in the general. In other words, the #BernieBros question just kept simmering, unaddressed.
Mr. Sanders has also spent a good amount of effort aiming to delegitimize Hillary Clinton's success, attacking black voters along the way and telling women to stop moaning about misogyny. Some of his supporters have even slipped into the myth of wishing Bernie was a woman so he could enjoy all the unfair advantages they have.
But in the context of "no sexism to see here", we find ourselves again saying, sure, this
can be an accident of circumstnace, but come on, at some point we question the boundaries of what describes an accident. It's the sort of "accident" I could claim in my twenties; you know, I'm not
trying to be misogynist, just, you know, attending the traditional expectations of my society. That is, there comes a point where accident of circumstance simply means one is unable to recognize they are doing anything wrong.
So let's take a moment to entertain a
Sanders supporter's petulant fantasy↱ about the FBI arresting Hillary Clinton. And let us pretend this happened last year. And so Martin O'Malley starts racking up votes among Democrats more attuned to supportable policy platforms, and by this time Bernie Sanders is left trying to delegitimize black voters, legitimize misogyny, and complain that his three million vote deficit something, something, convoluted logic, superdelegates should overturn the will of voters now that it's what Bernie needs, &c.,
ad nauseam.
Marcotte proposes, "If Clinton was a man, the notion that it's self-evident that Sanders is somehow the 'true' winner would be a much harder sell. It would make him a laughingstock, in fact."
And it seems rather quite hard to argue against that point.
Within that framework? Yes, it absolutely makes sense: If the question involves
superdelegates and
press, then the natural inclination is to
blame Hillary Clinton.
But run the obvious objection to earth:
Why would the campaign want this?
Blaming Clinton and her campaign for decisions of superdelegates and Associated Press is pathetic. Here's the logic we're required to believe: On the eve of winning at the ballot box enough votes to push Hillary Clinton over the pledged threshold, thus making her the apparent first female presidential nominee from a major political party in the United States of America, the campaign coordinates or colludes with superdelegates and a press agency to give her that bump a day early in such a fashion as to surely move Sanders supporters to delegitimize her victory.
This is how stupid we need to believe that evil bitch really is.
But think about it. In the end it fits well enough with what I've been hearing from the Sanders movement: After all, if Hillary Clinton has survived the challenges of the American political arena, it can only be because she is corrupt and enjoys too many advantages traditionally given to women.
Because
nobody who is so stupid as to behave as the logic we are required to believe in order to blame Hillary Clinton for the latest superdelegates to announce and the AP's coverage thereof can actually navigate these shark-infested, tumultuous waters and survive on their own merit.
We can believe this all comes together by accident; it's not a particularly extraordinary proposition. To the other, though, that accident would describe a larger problem. Furthermore, the pattern is possibly reflected again in the general tenor of the Democratic campaign. This is a cycle in which a traditional outlook on Democratic civil rights prizes are as near to grasp as I have witnessed; naturally, the thing to do is walk away from those goals in order to pursue another platform, and it turns out the chief advocate just hasn't given it a whole lot of thought. That is, I easily could have suggested, at the outset, that society would do everything short of outright saying, "No, because you're a woman!" in order to challenge the rise of our first female president. To the other, these months later, while it is easy enough hem and haw, part of the problem is the continued appearance.
The Associated Press rains on Hillary Clinton's parade simply by not holding a headline on the latest delegate count after some undeclared superdelegates declare, and we are supposed to blame Hillary Clinton.
We can't get much more straightforward than that.
Something about a harder sell goes here. And a laughingstock.
(Edit: [7 June 2016, 10.11 PDT] Multiple corrections, typo & syntax, for clarification.)
