Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Courting Women or Courting Disaster: Obama and the General Election

The Democratic primary contests ended last night with a little bit of a surprise when Hillary Clinton won South Dakota, a state that most people didn’t think she was likely to win. Obama, though, won Montana, as expected, and, more important, became the Democrats' presumptive nominee when about 30 uncommitted superdelegates declared for him after the close of both primaries. This is an exciting time for any Democrat but especially for black voters who helped elect Obama as the first black nominee of any major party in the history of this country.

As exciting and meaningful as this is, it has become patently clear over the last month or so of the campaign that another group of voters has poured their hopes and dreams into Hillary Clinton with the same passion, urgency, and sense of expectation that blacks have done with Obama.

They are women, of course, and especially older women. They’ve made their presence felt throughout the campaign as the largest bloc of voters and many have supported Clinton from the beginning of the campaign. But they have become particularly energized in recent weeks, not only turning out in droves to hear Clinton speak but to vote in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and, last night, South Dakota. The crowds have been huge, raucous, and there has been, late in the campaign, an energy that wasn’t there in the past. Increasingly, women voters also appear to be furious at the perception that Obama, the media, and the Democratic National Committee are conspiring to prevent Clinton from getting the Party’s nomination.

A lot of people, me included, have largely overlooked this phenomenon or at least the extent of women’s passion for Clinton and what it means for the general election, focusing more on a race, working class voters, Keith Olbermann’s hairpiece or something other than gender.

A recent example of Clinton supporters’ passion was on display at last Saturday’s meeting of the Democratic Party’s rules committee that seemed to me, at the time, just kind of curious and even silly.

As the committee heard arguments on seating the Florida and Michigan delegates that the DNC had stripped from each state’s slate as punishment for flouting the DNC’s primary calendar, many of Clinton’s supporters inside the DC hotel where the committee met frequently shouted and tried to interrupt when representatives for Obama argued against seating all delegates at full strength or said anything that did not recognize fully, or “fairly reflect,” in the apportioning of delegates HC’s vote totals in each state. Many others protested outside.

There was, thus, much hue and cry when the rules committee not only gave the “uncommitted” Michigan vote to Obama, who was not on the ballot in state, and, even worse, gave him an additional four delegates that were seemingly conjured out of the thin air of advance polls, eye of newt, and lord knows what else. During the day-long meeting there was at least one scuffle when a woman supporting Clinton pushed an Obama supporter. Others were led from the building when they became particularly loud and disruptive.

As I said, I didn’t give the hullabaloo much thought at the time. But not much later, when my wife, with whom I talk about all kinds of things and probably politics more than anything, became herself so furious at Hillary Clinton’s fate that she threw a plate of pasta across the room, shattering it in a million pieces, I took notice. Like many other women I have spoken with recently, my wife looks at Clinton as someone who had not only had to fight to be taken seriously because of her gender, or is frequently critiqued on her appearance, emotion or just about anything other than her abilities, but as someone who would both symbolically break through the glass ceiling thereby aiding others in getting through it as well. And, with the plate as testament, she, like a lot of other women, feels passionately about Clinton and what she represents, and to an extent that not even I was aware.

In other words, women’s reactions to Clinton’s candidacy are just as strong as many blacks’ feelings for Obama’s and based on similarly deep-seated experiences of discrimination, humiliation, and the knowledge that many avenues in life may be narrowed or closed altogether simply because of one’s race or gender . These two camps, while not at war exactly, have an awful lot vested in this election, aside from the specific political policies and changes each candidate would bring to Washington. They also have lot in common.

Because Obama is for all intents and purposes the nominee now, it is he, though, who will have to deal with the passion of women voters scorned and it is he who will have to make clear how much Democrats have in common, whether they are Clinton or Obama supporters. He certainly seems exactly the man to get people to step out of their own skins some and, indeed, the foundation of his campaign is all about bringing disparate groups together. So where better to start than the Democratic party?

More concretely, Obama simply cannot afford to lose especially those women voters over 40. If he does he will have no chance of winning the election. Because I believe that Obama is keenly aware of this and, more important, very aware of both his strengths and weaknesses with voters in other demographic groups he will have to acquire in the general election, I think he will move very soon to make Hillary Clinton his choice for vice president.

It won’t be a popular move for most Clinton supporters or Obama supporters at first, but just as Obama was way ahead of the curve in assessing both potential voters and the ins and outs of the Democratic primary obstacle course, it will be the right move, and the one most likely to draw together the powerful but fractured constituencies that are so crucial to a Democratic victory in November.

Consider it one of his first tests of the general election.

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