Christine O’Donnell, the Sarah Palin and Tea Party backed candidate, dealt a stunning blow to the Republican establishment Tuesday night, defeating the moderate, party-favorite veteran Rep. Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP senate primary.
“Don’t ever underestimate the power of we the people. We the people will have our voice heard in Washington once again,” a jubilant O’Donnell told her supporters at a rally in Dover.
With 100 percent of precincts reporting, O’Donnell won 53.1 percent of the vote to Castle’s 46.9 percent.
The GOP establishment threw everything including the kitchen sink at O’Donnell and Palin, and it wasn’t even close. Of course the conventional media wisdom is this helps the . . . Democrats? WTF?
The path to a Republican Senate takeover narrowed to the point of vanishing Tuesday night, as marketing consultant Christine O’Donnell upset Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Senate primary and likely dashed the GOP’s hopes of capturing the seat in the process.
Though six other states and the District of Columbia voted in primary elections Tuesday night, the outcome in Delaware had by far the most profound implications for the fall campaign. While Castle was comfortably on track to capture Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate seat, O’Donnell will enter the general election at a wide disadvantage to the presumptive Democratic nominee, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons.
All I know is if I were a GOPer office holder I would think long and hard about upsetting Mama Grizzly.
As if we want to be reminded of the 2008 election, Rebecca Traister has just written a book expressing her desire for a “Sarah Palin of the Left” and letting us in on the fact that Hillary Clinton’s run for the Presidency was historic, she was the first woman to win a presidential primary, and she won more primary votes than any other presidential candidate in history, man or woman. OMG, no way! The book is called Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women.
According to Jezebel, this is the book we’ve been waiting for.
Rebecca Traister: As often happened at lunches about Hillary, within moments there was a furious conflagration about how young women didn’t know anything about feminism. I found that the election offered a sort of match that lit what was already pretty dry tinder. It wasn’t so much that Hillary made different generations of women angry at each other. It’s that Hillary gave them the excuse to have the fight they’d been spoiling to have for a very long time.
Cat Fight! Whooooop! Let’s watch the ladies get crazy!
Traisier goes on to spout the usual propoganda about Hillary’s bad campaign, Mark Penn, Raycists, Obama was more inspiring and blah blah blah, and then finally gets to the root of the problem as to why Hillary and her supporters were such epic losers.
You could go back and hear the same conversations around the foundation of the feminist and lefty blogosphere and hear young women saying, ‘Well, the women of the traditional feminist organizations aren’t listening to us, so we’re moving into our own realms.” Some of the older women — I’m using older women and young women very broadly, I don’t meant to be talking in derisive generalizations — you could hear them say, “These young women don’t take their rights seriously, they blog all day, they’re not activists.”
So in the end, Hillary lost because of a giant cat fight between third wavers, who are bratty and didn’t want to listen to their mommies and old second wave crustaceans who just wanted to call their daughters unappreciative of the rights they got for them.
Wow. I was under the impression that Hillary lost because delegates were stolen from her and the party refused to have a fair nominating process because they wanted a race baiting empty suit that would allow them to keep lining their pockets with cash from the pharmaceutical and financial industries. But apparently it’s much more complex than that. Actually, it has much more to do with my relationship with my mother.
I should use this opportunity to tell you something about my mom. She had me when she was thirty three. Hillary was the same age when she had Chelsea. I love my mother to death. I’m crazy about her and she’s crazy about me, but I was only partly raised by her. She has bipolar depression and severe anxiety and when I was six and she and my father had been divorced for a couple of years, she had a nervous breakdown and checked into the loony bin. My brothers and sister and I were almost put into foster care, but instead we went to live with my father and step mother (Foster care would have preferable), and from then on, we only saw her periodically on visitation.
I suppose I could be categorized as having very bad “mommy issues.” That has nothing to do with anything, but since we’ve all ready delved so deep into trashy Freudian psychobabble, I can say with absolute certainty that Traister is talking out of her ass. I find myself seeking out the approval and affection of older women more because of my complicated relationship with my mom.
Traister is simplistic and conformist in her musings, and while she is quick to put blame on young women, she has high praise for young men.
At the time, I wrote about what I perceived as a complicated misogynist vibe coming from some of the young male Obama devotees in the last stages of the primary cycle. I think one of the reasons that I was so struck by it — and this is not to give some pass to all younger men — is that there is such a marked generational change among men. There’s more of an awareness of gender, they’re often raised by feminist moms and working moms. Men who are [at least] used to the idea of equally splitting domestic duties; they’re active fathers.
I had actually come to expect much more from young men. We’re very lucky to live with a new generation of men, and I think our kids will be luckier still. But this was an instance in which some old attitudes seemed to bubble up among younger men.
See? The next generation of kids will be so lucky to be raised by Obots.
Dig it: What if young women who supported Obama weren’t trying to thumb their nose at their mothers? What if they were seeking the approval of their fathers? When I was small I would sometimes pretend to dislike Hillary and other assertive women. I thought my dad might give me a hug if I pretended to agree with him about stuff.
But no, we women “asked for it.” Traister blames women for blaming other women for what happened to the Secretary of State. She falls into the timeless “divide and conquer” trap that the Patriarchy sets up for us. Instead of uniting over our common interest: equality, feminists and more specifically mothers and daughters are pitted against one another over things like choice and porn and made to believe that we are our own worst enemy. I am constantly lurking on threads, on Clinton friendly threads no less, that have plenty to say about the lack of authenticity of “young feminists.”
And really, what is that? Plenty of young women supported Hillary and plenty of older women supported Obama. I’m twenty years old. I like doing my hair and getting my nails done and tanning, and I’m a feminist because I believe in equality. I am not a “third wave” feminist. I’m a feminist. I’m not a “fun feminist.” I’m a feminist. I’m not a white feminist. I’m a feminist. I’m not a pro choice feminist, I’m a feminist. I’m not a liberal feminist. I’m a feminist. I’m not a feminist Democrat. Honestly, I’m just a fricking feminist. That’s my only MO.
Every woman, old or young, is a feminist deep down, even if she doesn’t know it, because she is a human being. Feminism is about humanity. “Humanist” is a more appropriate term, but feminist is the one we have. Let’s stop putting labels on women. Let’s stop questioning each other’s choices. Let’s stop being so cruel to one another, and instead start working together.
In 50 years it could be a magnificent miniseries or something. What are some examples of big stories that people either don’t remember or weren’t even aware of at the time?
Here’s a thing that I didn’t know at the time. When Hillary won New Hampshire, she became the first woman in American history to win a primary. I mean, I sort of knew that, of course, what she was doing was historic. But this was a massive thing, a change in 220 years of presidential history. I didn’t know, and it was my job to know.
And I went back and looked at the New York Times article that sort of summed up the events the next day: Hillary Clinton and McCain win New Hampshire. The article goes into great detail about her crying and all that. But it doesn’t mention that this was the first time in American history that a woman had won a presidential primary.
There were lots of smaller things, too. When I tell people about the NPR producer who compared Hillary to Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” people would say “What?! Somebody said that?!”
[…]
A lot of the misogyny, as well as the racism. A lot of that stuff on television, because there were so many channels going at the same time, and we were all struggling to keep up, we missed so many of the things that were being said.
[…]
I actually assumed that anti-Hillary misogyny would take the form that it did in the beginning, the Hillary nutcrackers and the “two fat thighs and a left wing” jokes. This loutish, mostly right wing anti-Hillary spew that we have gotten for decades.
The thing that had a radicalizing impact on me began after [Hillary lost in] Iowa. Because there was this pile-on, and to me it was mind-bending. It was coming often from people on the left. It was like something they had been keeping inside as they bit their tongues and covered this woman who had the gall to be the front-runner and the “inevitable” candidate, which was the word that they threw out there. And finally she had shown weakness, and they were just going nuts.
I wrote a piece for Salon about how, despite the fact that I was not a Hillary supporter, had I lived in New Hampshire I would have voted for her that week, because I was so pissed off. I didn’t know it at the time, but Rachel Maddow said something very similar about feeling like she wanted to defend her on air. There was a video made by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, just laughing, sneering at Hillary for giving a rally where she answered all the voters’ questions and it went on for a long time. Showing these voters yawning and saying, “Whoa, she’s such a snooze.” I began to see in this very active, palpable way how she was being talked about as Tracy Flick, or Margaret from Dennis the Menace, or Hermione Granger — you know, the know it all girl. And that’s when I began to switch.
[…]
Well I was no fan of Hillary going in. For a long time, prior to her campaign, my feelings were negligible. In fact, I felt a kind of embarrassment that women were expected to have such strong feelings about Hillary. I admired her from a distance, but politically I had less and less in common with her as she moved to the center.
I was one of those few, proud, now deeply embarrassed John Edwards supporters. So when it came to super Tuesday I had to choose between her and Obama, about whom I felt roughly equivalent. I wound up almost flipping a coin and voting for Hillary, but I was still completely ambivalent about her.
Eventually I became a lot more aware of the ways in which not only Hillary but also her supporters were being talked about. I became increasingly sensitive to the scorn directed at her, and it built and built as she continued to fight, and it drove me nuts. Because I thought her continuing to fight was awesome and hilarious. I thought it was completely redefining how we view women and our expectations for them in public and political life. She would not comply. She would not give in. She would not do what the pundits wanted her to do, what her opponents wanted her to do, what reporters were insisting that she do, what everyone was telling her was the smart thing to do or, in one case, the classy thing to do. She just kept going.
But the more she did that, the more anger — biting anger — I began to see, both in the media and amongst the people I knew, and amongst Obama supporters, and that was what began to radicalize me in my support for Clinton, so that by the end I was an ardent Hillary supporter. That does not mean that I did not still find fault with her. I did, and I do. And there were a lot of terrible missteps she made during that campaign. But I was a devoted Hillary supporter by the end, so much so that I, with much humiliation, actually wound up crying after she conceded. I was in the [National Building Museum covering the story for Salon], and I had to run out of the press area, and I was trying to find a place behind a column, and I’m, like, choking out sobs, and I realize I’m standing next to Matt Drudge.
Except for the “terrible missteps” that’s pretty much how I saw it at the time, and still do. If you think everyone saw it the same way as us, think again. From the comments at Salon:
Ugh, seriously?
Hillary’s supporters spent the entire campaign season after Iowa complaining that anyone and everyone who won’t vote for her is actually not voting for her because she’s a woman. Don’t say “That didn’t happen”, because I, as an Obama supporter who thought Hillary was ok and would be a good president, got that thrown in my face continuously from January to June. Meanwhile, the Obama camp got a ton of racism thrown their way (often from the Hillary camp itself!) and let most of it go unless it was some serious shit. Guess which one won? The one whose campaign slogan wasn’t “You’re getting in the way of a historical moment, Asshole”.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of people who didn’t vote for her for being a woman. I’m not saying there weren’t a LOT of people on the 24 hour news stations making fun of her for being a woman. I’m saying there’s a lot of us Democrats who didn’t vote for her because she wasn’t the best of the two choices given to us. Get over it.
—bffoley
Yeppers, we even started our own blogs so we could host virtual cross-burnings while throwing bogus accusations of sexism into the faces of those poor, mistreated Obama supporters.
The Confluence 