THE VIEW OF THE WORLD FROM 9th AVENUE: One fun element of Democrat presidential primaries? Reading how much leftwing elites truly despise the base of Democrat voters. As John Nolte writes today at Big Government, “Prominent Hillary Clinton Supporter Smears Working Class Dems as Racist:”
Obviously frustrated by Hillary Clinton’s collapsing presidential campaign (her second in a row!), The Nation’s Joan Walsh, a frequent MSNBC contributor and high-profile Hillary supporter, took to her verified Twitter account Thursday to attack working class Democrats as racists.
“I wonder if Clinton’s troubles with white working class,” Walsh mused, “which she carried in ’08, have anything to do with the president she served[.]”
The insinuation isn’t at all subtle. Walsh is suggesting that white working class Democrats have moved away from Hillary because she served in the cabinet of a black president.
This is a bizarre strategy from Team Hillary, especially after the catastrophic results from New Hampshire Tuesday night, where Hillary lost the woman vote to 195 year-old socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
It may be bizarre, but this is what Democrat elites do; in April of 2008, in the midst of Pennsylvania primary season, Obama-supporting screenwriter-director Nora Ephron (who passed away in 2012) took to the pages of the Huffington Post to write a nasty screed titled “White Men:”
This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)
To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal.
If Hillary pulls it out in Pennsylvania, and she could, and if she follows it up in Indiana, she can make a credible case that she deserves to be the candidate; these last primaries will show which of the two Democratic candidates is better at overcoming the bias of a vast chunk of the population that has never in its history had to vote for anyone but a candidate who could have been their father or their brother or their son, and who has never had to think of the president of the United States as anyone other than someone they might have been had circumstances been just slightly different.
Hillary’s case is not an attractive one, because what she’ll essentially be saying (and has been saying, although very carefully) is that she can attract more racist white male voters than Obama can. Nonetheless, and as I said, she has a case.
Classy stuff — which also reveals much about what Ephron thought about the people who paid to see her movies. In her column today (at Salon, where Joan Walsh served as editor for many years, ironically enough), Camille Paglia spots another leftist dowager (her word) lashing out at the base:
Despite emergency efforts by Gloria Steinem, the crafty dowager empress of feminism, to push a faltering Hillary over the finish line, Sanders overwhelmingly won women’s votes in every category except senior citizens. Last week, when she told TV host Bill Maher that young women supporting the Sanders campaign are just in it to meet boys, Steinem managed not only to insult the intelligence and idealism of the young but to vaporize every lesbian Sanders fan into a spectral non-person.
Steinem’s polished humanitarian mask had slipped, revealing the mummified fascist within. I’m sure that my delight was shared by other dissident feminists everywhere. Never before has the general public, here or abroad, more clearly seen the arrogance and amoral manipulativeness of the power elite who hijacked and stunted second-wave feminism.
Oh I don’t know – that sort of arrogance is on rather prominent display every four years. It’s as if Democrat elites believe that their base care for little more than clinging to their racism, sexism, guns and religion. (Obama’s infamous crack in 2008 was in the context of trying to win the same Pennsylvania Democratic primary that inspired Ephron’s racist “White Men” screed above.)
So why all the anger from leftist elites directed at their base? Perhaps it’s because, as Ace of Spades noted in 2011, “Our elites are fixated on how disappointed they are with the tawdry public precisely because that allows them to avoid examining their own colossal failures.”