George Will makes the obnoxious argument that if Democrats were serious about winning in 2016, they'd nominate Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown over Hillary Clinton, but they won't because he's a white guy, and Democrats hate white guys.
If Ohio’s senior senator were named Sharon Brown instead of Sherrod Brown, progressives would have a plausible political pin-up and a serious alternative to the tawdry boredom of Hillary Clinton’s joyless plod toward her party’s presidential nomination. Drop one of Brown’s consonants and change another and a vowel, and we might be spared the infatuation of what Howard Dean called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” for Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Sherrod Brown won’t be considered because the Democratic Party’s activist core is incurably devoted to identity politics — the proposition that people are whatever their gender is (or their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or whatever seems stupendously important at the moment). And the party’s base seems determined to nominate and elect a woman, thereby proving that what has occurred in Britain, Germany, Israel, India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and other nations can happen here. Feel the excitement.
This is classic projection here, as George Will assumes Democrats have the same thought processes as Republicans would in the same situation. Of course Republicans would nominate the white guy, and of course Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren are only being considered because they are women.
Will proceeds to rattle off Brown's pretty decent record as a progressive, and then ends with this:
Are progressives so preoccupied with gender that they prefer Clinton’s risk-averse careerism, or Warren’s astonished tantrums about the obvious dynamics of big government, to Brown’s authentic progressivism? Yes.
See, if Democrats don't nominate the clearly more qualified white guy, it's because of affirmative action or something. It's almost like Will knows nothing about the party, or politics, or anything.
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3 comments:
The folks pushing for a Warren candidacy are the same relentless enthusiasts who in their minds built up candidate Obama as the Great Lefty Savior who was going to wave his magic wand and fix everything in an instant, as if the great betrayal of the Nader/Green spoiler campaign had never put Bush into the White House for eight years. When cruel reality intruded and President Obama failed to materialize their fantasies (because he Didn't. Even. Try. to govern as a liberal) they turned on him like a pack of rabid hyenas. My senator is way too smart to walk into that particular trap, but that doesn't stop the sweethearts from prattling on that I AM NOT RUNNING! is actually code for "I am not running now but have decided to announce in January." To all appearances, only a message on the lines of I WILL NEVER RUN FOR PRESIDENT YOU FUCKING MORONS LEAVE ME ALONE! has any hope of being clear enough to penetrate their skulls.
That said, I'm not terribly happy about Clinton being president but I am realist enough to see nobody of comparable stature is on the horizon. Much can change in two years and all that, but I am perfectly willing to go along with a Clinton candidacy while I devote my efforts to growing the farm team here in a safely blue state.
In closing, more than thirty have passed since anyone cared what George F Will thought about baseball; he needs to stuff a corked bat in his pie hole and let his intern publish under his own name.
I'm an extremely feminist woman and I would be thrilled if our nominee was Sherrod Brown. Will's premise just shows how insane conservatives become when the white male stranglehold on power is disrupted in any way. According to his premise, Dems would NEVER nominate a white man for president... Even though, prior to Obama, that's all Dems had ever nominated. And who was playing identity politics when Palin was picked for VP? It's not that the GOP doesn't play identity politics, it's just that they do an abysmal job of it.
It's only Identity Politics when your enemies do it, just like that legacy admission to Yale for W was not Affirmative Action for Rich White Kids.
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