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Revenge Voting

By Bud White on August 31, 2008 at 12:00 PM in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Misogyny, Race Card, Sarah Palin, White Guilt, Women

I’m going to be blunt: John McCain respects women, Obama does not. This can be taken as a purely political comment from a pro-Hillary activist. But I can say this from the vantage point of male privilege: I know that weak men fear strong women.

This didn’t occur to me until McCain selected Palin. I knew that Obama benefited from and encouraged the misogynistic narrative against Hillary. However, McCain’s nod to Hillary’s voters was exactly what Obama should have done but for which he is psychologically incapable. It shows a level of respect for our grief at the way Hillary was treated and it’s a tacit acknowledgment that Hillary should have been on the ticket. Riverdaughter writes:

McCain is only pandering to you wimmin. Truth: Yup. And??? You think we’re too stupid to realize this? Of course he’s pandering to us. He’s a f%*(ing politician. That’s what successful politicians do. They reach out to voting blocs and offer them something.

Why is Obama so afraid of Hillary that he wouldn’t even vet her for VP? What is so scary about this brilliant and beautiful woman who works 10X harder than him and who won the popular vote?

Much like George W. Bush, I think it’s Obama’s massive but fragile ego. Obama believes the press reports about his greatness, he drinks in the adulation from his adoring fans, and he sees himself as near-divine. Any crack to this facade threatens the whole construct; it would be the death of his ego. The faux presidential seal IS the Mission Accomplished banner. It’s no accident, of course, that the McCain campaign has skewered Obama for his narcissism, comparing him to celebrities and Charlton Heston’s Moses. Team McCain has done their homework. I have no doubt that they have dossier on Obama, not just on his friends, but on his habit of choices.

In a brilliant 12-part series on this issue, blogger Valentine Bonnaire, discusses Obama’s ego in detail. She sees his choices being made out of narcissism. A narcissist will

stop at nothing? Just to bask in the reflected glow of adoration, But really, the followers mean absolutely NOTHING to the narcissist. They are only a means to an end? And, the narcissist is consumed with “winning” except, once having “won” what they are after? It’s on to the next challenge…

Sam Copeland, writing in these pages, asks:

Why did Obama have to select a lower tier candidate – a candidate who has twice left the Presidential sweepstakes (in 1988 and 2008) in early rounds?

One answer that is often given is what we can politely term Obama’s ego. Top talent candidates such as Clinton and Clark would threaten his self-image as a one man crusader – the star of his own Saturday morning action-adventure cartoon series. A big ego can be a serious liability in making political decisions. It prevents one from seeing the world through the eyes of others, and that lack of realism and perspective-taking undoubtedly leads to political blunders.

And make no mistake, bypassing Hillary for the conventional Biden was a political blunder of Titanic proportions. First, of course, it further alienated Hillary supporters. Second, it made McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin that much more damaging to Obama. On the Left, it gives Hillary supporters the opportunity, in good conscience, to exact revenge on Obama and the DNC by actually pulling the lever for McCain. It neutralizes Obama’s insulting but effective race-baiting (“you’re a racist if you don’t for me”) narrative, allowing independents, women, and conservative Democrats a moral redoubt (I’m not voting against a black man, I’m voting for a woman). Lastly, by choosing Biden, Obama undercut his message of Change by choosing a man who has spent his entire life in Washington.

Hillary was Obama’s last chance to bring many of her supporters into the fold. The always astute Anglachel writes:

The real elephant (ahem) in the middle of the room is the unacknowledged fact that the DNC and their selected candidate abused the intelligence and trust of the party base and subjected the base’s preferred candidate to outrageous abuse month after month in the primaries. The blogosphere’s hysterical overreaction to the Palin selection reveals the fear that their hate-filled, explicitly misogynist tactics will backfire on them and that a significant enough percentage of this disaffected base will do more than sit out the election in November, but will actively cast a protest vote.

Obama’s narcissistic drive for power unleashed a politics so ugly that millions of committed progressives are seriously considering voting for his opponent. Palin is McCain’s love letter to Hillary’s supporters. Revenge is a bitch, baby.