Recommended reading

Sara Robinson at Orcinus has written hands-down one of the best blog posts on race, gender, and the 2008 election to date.

Especially this passage:

Let's be clear on this: the whole blacks-versus-women frame was a false one from the get go. You could hardly design something more exquisitely calculated to split the party along its most crucial faultline than that breathless "Blacks or Women? Who Gets To Make History?" narrative that dominated the political season for six straight months. It was set up to absolutely guarantee that one of the party's two most important constituencies would inevitably end up with hurt feelings, and might even withhold support as a result.

And damned if it didn't work. Ugly things got said all around that left everybody with bad blood --- let's please be grownups and admit that it wasn't just one side, and nobody gets to be the Bigger Victim here -- and played hell with party unity. I'm sure Karl Rove is happier than Chris Matthews sucking down ribs at a John McCain barbecue about all this; but we need to take note of what happened here and make sure we don't let ourselves be played this way again.

We would have done well to understand that frame earlier, question it harder, and search out its proponents more carefully. Patching things up is going to take a long time. Worse: it's going to slow us down at a time when we need to moving faster and more cohesively than we ever have.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tell us something we don't already know

The MTA is clueless. Man, if you need a place to vent or learn the full story behind mass transit horror stories, check out Gothamist. The MTA admitted that the service was not acceptable on many accounts, from the flooding to the fact that the MTA's website was overwhelmed. Then there's also the fact that the MTA was urging people not to take the subways and opt for a bus instead, only for buses to be (A) few and far between and (B) crowded as anything. They forgot to mention "(C) fucking slow." Don't the people at the MTA feel really stupid when they say shit like this? MTA CEO Lee Sander said, "We really are sorry about the inconvenience that New Yorkers had to deal with. In terms of how it happened, we had three inches of rain in an hour. The system is designed to handle 1.5 inches." This isn't quite as appalling as last year's 9-day Queens blackout--you know, the one where Con Ed lied about the number of places without power--but it still in
Read more

We're the ones we've been waiting for, and all that

Via Blue Wave News , Van Jones' speech at the Campus Progress National Conference, which rang true to this cautiously optimistic liberal. More from Mr. Jones, via HuffPo: We are trying to build a pro-democracy movement in a country that, at least for eight years, was run by [inaudible] authoritarians. And it is not going to be easy. But I tell you, the most important thing I can say is... We feed the fearmongers. We feed the politics of division, by giving it so much attention and letting it fill up the space in our mind. We have to feed the hope. This country is an extraordinary -- I get choked up -- this is an incredible, beautiful country... That little idiot box off in the corner trying to depress you and make you feel like this is a horrible country and everybody believes evil things about the president... it is just not true. Cut it off, just cut it off and walk down the street and talk to real people in this country. They are sophisticated. They are wise. They don't kno
Read more