Obama Using Sexist Language? (1 Viewer)

[SaintsFan11]

Is Obama Using Sexist Language?

Earlier this month, speaking at Tulane University, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said this about the attacks coming his way from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY:

"You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out," Obama said.

The CLAWS come out? Really?

Then yesterday Obama told reporters who had asked about Clinton's latest attack ad, "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal."

That prompted some female TV reporters to question the language he was using.


http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/02/is-obama-using.html



It's getting a little ridiculous when people are upset by the word periodically, as if that is some kind of a sexist subliminal message. These women reporters who are offended need to put their claws away.

 

[saintcool13]

:bored2: :00000665:

 

[Saintman2884]

Saintfan11, I would say a smart allecky comment at any other moment directed at Clinton but I feel that for once Obama said his mind and he said it pretty well on the spot. I must say Obama really defies the explanations. He really dares to be original IMHO. He has the touch of a JFK like candidate but at the same time he really breaks down barriers. He is a pro's pro. Has his opinions but at the same time is very likable, he does remind me a bit of Reagan in his early days in the late 70's when he was running for office. Really has the common touch I must say.

 

[Shawn]

Wow.

 

[SaintsFan11]

Maybe I'm sexist and missing the picture here, but could it be that these women are are somewhat upset that the woman who would be President has been getting in trouble because her campaign tried to paint Obama as the black candidate and it backfired. He got sympathy for it and he has the "movement" behind him while the female candidate is looked at as less groundbreaking. I think a lot of women who tend to be more proactively feminist feel that a woman President is long-overdue (and they have a point, but having a woman President because she is a woman isn't my idea of progress) and it must be hard to see her tarnished for not being politically correct when she is trying to break through the "glass-ceiling".

From a cynical perspective, these are MSNBC people who might be trying to win back some viewers after "pimp-gate" caused a stir.

At any rate, Obama would have nothing to gain by playing the "gender card" (whatever the hell that is) and alienating over half of the electorate.

 

[Scorpius the Allfather]

Why is it that claws are representative of women instead of anyone who decides to fight back hard? To me it's sexist to think only women have claws.

 

[Saint by the Bay]

Maybe I'm sexist and missing the picture here, but could it be that these women are are somewhat upset that the woman who would be President has been getting in trouble

I think that's exactly it. I think we've seen some of that here on the EE.

That being said I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for Hillary. The reality is SHE has run a very good campaign. She's won every debate really and has had a strong positive message and it has shown in the national polls before SC where she was expanding her lead and crushing Obama.

Then came Bill.

Bill has ruined her campaign time and time again. Now this weekend he gets into it with a heckler and it's plastered all over the media this morning with him getting chided for it. He's absolutely killing her. Were it not for Billy Boy this campaign would probably be over by now. Hillary has been good, much better than I thought she'd be. Heck it it weren't for 28 years of the Clinton - Bush turnstile I might consider her, I'm just tired of the Tudors - Stewart's like rotation on the throne.

In 1992 Bill really highlighted Hillary and ran as a duo. Hillary was actually a great help for his campaign and aided him in getting into the White House (as the agent of change vs. experience I might remind you). She was awesome for him in 92. Hillary has tried to do the same this year and Bill has absolutely destroyed her.

 

[kennydfresh]

Weak/Reaching = Get the heck outta here!

Saints Master has spoken.........................................

 

[SaintsFan11]

I think that's exactly it. I think we've seen some of that here on the EE.

That being said I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for Hillary. The reality is SHE has run a very good campaign. She's won every debate really and has had a strong positive message and it has shown in the national polls before SC where she was expanding her lead and crushing Obama.

Then came Bill.

Bill has ruined her campaign time and time again. Now this weekend he gets into it with a heckler and it's plastered all over the media this morning with him getting chided for it. He's absolutely killing her. Were it not for Billy Boy this campaign would probably be over by now. Hillary has been good, much better than I thought she'd be. Heck it it weren't for 28 years of the Clinton - Bush turnstile I might consider her, I'm just tired of the Tudors - Stewart's like rotation on the throne.

In 1992 Bill really highlighted Hillary and ran as a duo. Hillary was actually a great help for his campaign and aided him in getting into the White House (as the agent of change vs. experience I might remind you). She was awesome for him in 92. Hillary has tried to do the same this year and Bill has absolutely destroyed her.

She has run a terrible campaign full of miscalculations.

First of all, there have been several messages from Hillary. Her campaign theme has changed several times (we're currently in the solutions phase). She had no idea that she would have a race on her hands, and she got trounced in fundraising. Then, she blew through all of the money she had. It has also been noted that she hired most of her advisers and top campaign people out of loyalty rather than on merit.

Then there are quotes of her talking about how the race would be over on Feb. 5th, and this was a month ago. She didn't compete at all in the post 2/5 caucus states, ceding them to Obama.

Finally, the latest show of incompetence is that her Texas "firewall" has very strange rules where turnout in the last election sets delegate apportionment for the congressional districts. The Hispanic areas she has been focusing on had low turnout, while the black areas had uncharacteristically high turnout. So she could win by a few points and still lose the delegate race.

...and her campaign JUST figured this out. Two weeks after essentially ceding everything to Obama to move into Texas and Ohio, her campaign is just figuring out the rules of the Texas primary.

As for Bill, that's also her problem. She dispatched him to be her attack dog. He was only doing what the campaign decided had been effective in New Hampshire.


Even if Hillary wins, this will have been one of the most ineffective campaigns in history. She should have had this thing won a long time ago with all of the advantages she had.

 

[Saint by the Bay]

Yeah, I guess saying she ran a good campaign was a mistake. What I really mean is she wasn't the person, directly, to cause the momentum shifts. Nobody can deny the momentum in this campaign shifted when Bill spent a week injecting race into the discussion and wagging his finger at reporters in South Carolina. Were it not for that Hillary may have had a strong enough showing Super Tuesday to at least secure her as the front runner and give her the momentum. Instead it sling shotted Obama down the stretch.

I'm not so sure that the campaign unleashed Bill. In some cases it looked like he was really losing his temper. In others it seemed off the cuff. Even if they sent him out as their attack dog I doubt they scripted things like the fairy tale comment and the Jackson comparison that angered people.

The fund raising issue I think she can be forgiven for. They were pretty sure this thing would be over after Super Tuesday, as was nearly every pundit and prognosticator, and they funded the campaign accordingly. It turned out to be an error but it's a common tactic for someone that's an odds on primary favorite. Either way I still think it's Bill that doomed the campaign by shifting the momentum when she had a 20 pt. lead in the polls. My guess is at this point Obama will win the delegation and she will drive a nail in the coffin of her political career by fighting tooth and nail to back door this thing with the Florida and Michigan delegates.

 

[DMaestro]

That being said I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for Hillary. The reality is SHE has run a very good campaign. She's won every debate really and has had a strong positive message and it has shown in the national polls before SC where she was expanding her lead and crushing Obama.

Then came Bill.

Bill has ruined her campaign time and time again.

Have to disagree here, as I think it is a vast oversimplification casting Bill as the villain. Examining the primary campaign state-by-state, many trends were disfavoring Hillary. The 3rd-place finish in Iowa was bad enough. After polling badly in New Hampshire she managed to pull out a narrow win on the strength of white women..... and then Obama proceeded to have his best single night of fundraising ever.

Going into Nevada, Obama pulled a major endorsement in a state whose demographics didn't favor him. Hillary got another close win -- this time courtesy of Latinos with whom she has a longstanding history -- but Obama won a wider demographic and the delegate count. The groundswell of support for him was clearly in place.

Enter South Carolina. Supposedly this is where Bill snatched the rug from under his wife and turned popular sentiment against her. I'm gonna be a tad cynical here and say that the blacks in SC would've gone heavily for Obama no matter what Billary did, because by this point Obama had obtained the one key element black voters would've been looking for: unprecedented legitimacy.

It was a Waterloo for Billary in more ways than one. The scope and breadth of the defeat was bad enough, but the timing of the Caroline Kennedy endorsement rendered the evening as almost mythical. With Ted's ensuing vote-of-confidence, suddenly voters are thinking "Hey, this is a contest. Who IS this Obama guy?"

Mind you, all of this happened after Obama had perhaps his worse debate performance to date, flailing overaggressively at Hillary for her Reagan criticisms. Didn't matter.

Going into Super Tuesday, recent events had done much to erode Hillary's national lead. But Hillary exacerbated the problems by running a strategically poor campaign. She was low on cash, she'd done little to attract the more engaged caucus voters, and Obama had already put a big enough dent in her Inevitability Armor to be viable in the big states that she so cherished.

In addition to running a short-sighted primary campaign, Hillary has had problems with her message. On the one hand she's assumed the mantle of experience. But while trumpeting her "35 years" may sound impressive, it also invites voters to take a hard look at what those 35 years entailed. This is where Bill comes in. Unfortunately for Hillary, she cannot piggyback off Bill's accomplishments without saddling up some of his baggage. While I do agree that Bill's campaign performance has been less-than-stellar, let's face it: he would have to be utterly flawless not to have caused at least some of his old skeletons to be dug up. He is who he is.

But let's not give Hillary a pass here. Challenging Obama on his Reagan comments was a miscalculated blunder. She didn't exactly come across as graceful and presidential in the SC debate herself, proclaiming that she was "just getting warmed up" before diving gleefully into the mud. She did everything necessary to reinforce the notion that a Hillary presidency would be about political warfare. Which pretty much undermines her attempts to show her softer side (she's far more convincing in a combative stance), which reinforces the notion that she's disingenuous, which.....you get the picture.

So the "experience" angle has its shortcomings. What about "change"? Well, she got to that one a little too late. Sure, she's change from W's policies, but so is he --- and he's younger, fresher, more charismatic, less politically encumbered, and he has a happy message. She wants to clean up Bush's mess; he wants to change the political landscape. That's been his message for the past year, and I don't think it's in Hillary's best interests to take him on in that arena.

What about the woman thing? Not getting as much penetration as Hillary would like. Yes, she's a woman, but she's a woman we're all familiar with and have formed opinions about. And the more she touts the "first woman president" thing, the more she turns off men, just as Obama would turn off white voters if he dared to harp on becoming the "first black president." No one likes to be excluded.

In short, while Bill has done his part in hurting Hillary's campaign, I don't think he's been the time bomb the media would love him to be. Hillary -- like everyone else -- has her flaws, and she's fallen victim to just about every one of them.

 

[SaintsFan11]

I will reiterate that this is Hillary's campaign, and if Bill says something that causes a firestorm (fairy tale) then can you honestly be suprised when he goes to South Carolina and does it again? One faux pas can be forgiven, but there's an old saying in Texas, probably in Tennessee too: 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, you can't get fooled again.' The buck stops at the top, and you can blame Bill but there was a pattern among her surrogates in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

 

[Saint by the Bay]

All good points SF and DM. Both of your analysis of the campaign is keen. I still can't help but look at how quickly the polls shifted after Bill went nuts but yeah, there was certainly much more to it than that.

 

[V Chip]

but there's an old saying in Texas, probably in Tennessee too: 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, you can't get fooled again.'

 

[Shawn]

All good points, interesting thread.

To me, she started with an air of inevitability that was annoying and seemed arrogant. Her campaign--or actually maybe just supporters outside of her campaign like NOW, made allegations of sexism that might--just might--have stuck were there not a black man running against her.

And her message has seemed to change, followed by what appears to be blatant attempts to manipulate the political machine--courting the SuperDelegates, complaining about the non-seating of Florida and Michigan delegates.

How much of this comers from her, and how much comes from the people she surrounded herself with? How do you separate the two?

I'm a big believer that either the people below you represent the character of the machine as a whole; otherwise you are simply a pawn, subservient to the machinations of those hiding beneath you. Either scenario is bad...and it's the same analysis I use to judge President Bush.