Can we cut the “Now, I’m no Hillary fan but…” crap?

Jeez, I see variations of this phrase all over the media and the blogs. Margery Eagan does it today in the Boston Herald as an example. It’s like you can’t say anything in Hillary’s defense without disclaiming it in the next sentence.

Group dynamics are pretty frickin’ powerful. I swear people never graduate from High School in their heads and the meanest popular kids go on to brilliant careers in pundit journalism. It’s probably because they know how to emotionally manipulate their audience to make them feel worthless if they don’t ascribe to the popular clique’s likes and dislikes. It’s so easy to make people feel left out, stupid, unattractive.

How many times in this election season have we heard Obama supporters described as “young”, “college educated”, “creative class”? They sound like Cancun during spring break or the bright young things that inhabit the fashionable millieu of “The Devil Wore Prada”. Every Obama supporter looks like Anne Hathaway in Dolce, latte in hand, Blackberry in the other, taking calls from very important people and sleeping with the pouting gorgeous thing in the Calvin Klein skivvies. And how many times have we heard Clinton supporters called “working class”, “women”, “older voters” or even better “older working class women”? What kind of image do you get from that? I see Rosy the waitress in the Bounty paper towels commercial or an aged version of Roseanne. Oooo, yeah! I wanna be like HER!

But then primaries come along and Hillary wins. How is it that all those “No Hillary Fans”, hereafter identified by the acronym, NHF’s are in such a minority? Why are there so few brilliant nubile Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and quarterbacks pushing the Obama button in the privacy of the voting booth? It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Or just MAYBE the whole thing is a media construct, enhanced by clever advertising and signed onto with great enthusiasm by the Obama campaign. Yeah, that just might be it. Obama understands the concept of a media image and that reality may have little in common with the concept. Obama is a golden, shimmering, irridescent bubble inflated by his handlers in the media and blogs who are slaves to their ad revenues. The more they push the sex and youth of Obama, the more money they rake in. But bubbles are fragile.

Here in the real world, Hillary supporters *are* young and smart and professional. And they are also women and asians and hispanics. And elderly and working class. We come in all shapes and sizes, ages and genders, degrees and non-degrees. Obama seems to forget, if he ever actually knew in the first place, that a lot of women Hillary’s age didn’t have a choice as far as education was concerned. Their parents may not have had the money to send them to college or what money there was sent their brothers instead. So, they were channeled into careers as secretaries and data entry clerks or marriage and children. Or, if they were lucky, went to nursing school or teacher’s colleges. This happened to every single one of my aunts. Only one ever went to college. And there was at least one who desperately wanted to go but couldn’t afford it.

These bright young women with capable and elastic minds became the “older working class and suburban women” that Obama spurns in order to appeal to the young Greek coeds. Or for the generation that came after them, we professional women with degrees and accomplishments have been prematurely aged and put out to pasture. No wonder there is a surplus of NHF’s running around. It’s almost like they’re desperately trying to prove their tits don’t sag yet and that they too could dance at a Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Party.

But in the cool quiet of the voting booth, cold logic prevails. And we stand there with the choices arrayed before us: a vote for Obama means another era of the stereotypes, fewer options at work, less mentoring, more of the same; a vote for Hillary could mean something completely different.

Only the young and foolish fail to see the real agent of change.