Obama supporters unwise to attack Hillary Clinton [View All]

[MethuenProgressive]

The Seattle Times (WA): Obama supporters unwise to attack Hillary Clinton
By Froma Harrop
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004411946_harrop14.html

Obamites are throwing victory parties over the impending defeat of a fellow Democrat who has thus far pulled in more than 47 percent of their party's primary and caucus participants. Some take a more direct approach. In anticipation of the West Virginia primary, college students for Obama were hurling insults at farmers and truck drivers holding signs for Clinton.

Disrespecting the nearly 17 million who have supported Clinton is politically unwise, but turning them into "the enemy" is insane. Last week's enemy was working-class white people. The Democrats can win without a majority of white voters — as Obama strategists undiplomatically note — but they can't win without a strong showing among them. So Obama partisans do not help their cause by willfully misrepresenting Clinton's reference to "hard-working Americans, white Americans" as racist rather than as a poorly worded observation made in a state of utter exhaustion. The fervor of their outrage suggests that some regard the mere consideration of white people, particularly white men, as a demographic needing a special message is an act of bigotry. (That's as opposed to a thousand other racial and socio-economic groups that politicos routinely slice and dice.)

We now hear pained remarks from the Obama camp that many white men won't vote for any black. Oh really? No one was complaining during the early races in Iowa, Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin, when most of the white male participants backed Obama. That was before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ugliness became public. Weirdly, Obamite triumphalism seems to be merging with the festivities on the Republican side. You can understand why the right would welcome what it prays is "the end of the Clinton era." Bill Clinton presided over the longest peacetime expansion since World War II. His budget surpluses put his so-called conservative predecessors and successor to shame. Wouldn't a vow to build on the Clinton legacy, rather than dismantle it, be a better tack for the Obama campaign?

Obama can't beat John McCain without large chunks of Clinton's core constituency: women, Hispanics and the white working class. Dumping on their candidate is one step removed from dumping on them — and some of the Obama people don't even bother with that step. Rove must be enjoying the show.