Sunday: Patti Davis cries for MOMMY!

I want it and I want it NOW!!

Some days, the posts just write themselves.  Yesterday, Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, wrote a cringeworthy letter that was printed in Newsweek titled, What Hillary Should Say Now.  Oh, she was probably sincere when she wrote it but by the time I’m through critiquing this baby, she’s going to wish she had hit the unsend button.

First, let’s look at the subtitle.  “An Open Letter to an Almost Nominee”.  Well, there you go.  There’s the problem right there.  Before you get to the first sentence, you already know ahead of time that this writing exercise was pointless. Where does Patti get off telling an “Almost Nominee” to say anything?  She is an “Almost Nominee” because her own party hit her over the head with a blunt object.  The party made it extraordinarily clear in no uncertain terms that in spite of the fact that Obama and Hillary were virtually tied in pledged delegates, they were going to humiliate her and set the bar so high for her nomination that it would be unattainable for her. They wanted to strip her of any power and make her go away. They were quite open and nasty about it.   Fine.  She’s not the nominee.  But this isn’t a game of horseshoes.  She doesn’t “almost” count.

What Patti doesn’t seem to understand is that she already *has* a nominee.  His name is Barack Obama.  He’s not my choice.  He’s got glaring weaknesses.  Not only is he inexperienced but his inexperience has caused him to make some pretty stupid strategic errors.  Joseph Cannon found this comment on The Confluence by Janis and at the risk of sounding like an echo chamber I am reprinting it as summing up perfectly why Obama should have never been allowed to run this year:

…this preposterous charge, constantly repeated, that Hillary’s primary campaign was a total shambles, a complete disaster, and that Obama out maneuvered her with his “brilliant” scorched-earth attack campaign.

That attack campaign is what’s dooming him now, you stupid fucking Obots. There is a reason that primaries are historically softball — and must be. If you come out guns blazing in the primaries, you lose the general. More to the point, your party loses the general. A scorched-earth PRIMARY campaign leaves half the dead bodies on the field wearing your uniform.

Obama’s campaign was “brilliant?” Hillary “didn’t fight back hard enough?” Okay, let’s accept that. Obama fought like a cornered weasel against Hillary Clinton. Where does ti get him and his party now? The bots were always guilty of forgetting that there were two elections to be won. They sunk everything they had into the primary, and forgot about the general. Their candidate came out in full-on attack mode against his own party members, while playing softball with the other guys, expressing admiration for them, practically fellating Reagan’s dead body. Did he forget who wore what uniform? Did his brainless, koolaid-addled, foamy-mouthed followers?

Hillary’s campaign didn’t hit back hard because, if she had, she would have been in precisely the position that Obama’s in now … with the other side going after her gunz blazing, and half her own voters abandoning her. She lost, but there is a reason that primary campaigns are waged the way she waged them. Unfortunately, she was up against a stupid, out-of-control neophyte who decided that he was going to win the less important election at the cost of the most important one by deliberately immolating half his party.

Well, that’s the end of the critique.  It stopped at the subtitle.  You can read the rest for your amusement.  It’s full of the fearmongering trope about Roe v Wade.  Funny thing about Roe.  When I was looking through the ActBlue pages yesterday of all of the candidates, I found precious few that even mentioned reproductive rights on their sites.  According to Gloria Allred and Patti Davis and Gloria Steinem, Roe is THE issue.  It is life and death itself.  And yet, you’d never know it from the Democratic candidate’s websites as a whole.  Not only is Roe not mentioned but there is no mention of contraceptives either.  It almost looks as if some Democratic consultant gave these candidates a list of issues to push and told them to take reproductive rights off in case it annoyed the evangelicals who they were hoping to court.  Those are the very same voters that McCain got back when he nominated Sarah Palin.  So, it looks like a couple of months ago when the websites were developed, Roe *wasn’t* the be all and end all of the campaign.  It has suddenly become important because the wimmin aren’t coming home and now the Republicans that the Obama campaign was hoping to replace us with are gone as well.

But that’s OK.  Mommy Hillary will come and save all those stupid women who flocked to Obama in droves, mesmerized by his hope and change, bedazzled by their entry into the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Models with PhDs in Architecture Club. Back then, it was soooo much more important to be transcendent and to feel superior to all of the rest of the ignorant hicks in the Democratic base.  It was taken for granted that, as the young bright things they are, we would immediately sacrifice all that we hold dear in order to make them happy.  These lovely Veruca Salt’s wanted it and didn’t think about their rights enough to fight for them when the Obama campaign was quietly erasing them from websites.  It’s only now that another woman poses a threat that they want mommy to rescue them after they sass mouthed and disrespected her.

Too late now.  Obama is the one you’ve got.  There’s nothing Hillary can do to change it.  It’s his battle to fight.  The DNC invested HIM as its champion.  Hillary has done everything she could at this point.  She doesn’t have the power to do more because she is NOT the nominee.   Almost doesn’t count.  She’s entitled to work for the downticket Dems now who will be left holding the bag.

But No, a mother’s job is never done.  Patti wants her to rescue Obama from his mistakes, pick up after his messes, cover up for his bad behavior so he can get ahead without really trying.  It’s Mommy’s fault if he fails.

Really, Patti, you’re 55 years old.  Grow up already.

More good stuff to read:

• Anglachel and Willi Brown admire Palin’s playfulness if not her politics.  Yep, the Dems royally screwed themselves with women.
• The Centrality of Character in Political Leadership by Heidi Li.