Too Much At Stake To Personalize

Froma Harrop of The Providence Journal provides the names here of some of the Hillary Clinton supporters who, as of this moment, are unequivocally opposed to Barack Obama’s candidacy for president.

"Obama will NOT get my vote, and one step more," Ellen Thorp, a 59-year-old flight attendant from Houston told me. "I have been a Democrat for 38 years. As of today, I am registering as an independent. Yee Haw!"

A new Pew Research Center poll points to a surging tide of fury, especially among white women. As recently as April, this group preferred Obama over the presumptive Republican John McCain by three percentage points. By May, McCain enjoyed an eight-point lead among white women.

What's dangerous for the Democratic Party is that, for many women, the eye of the storm has moved beyond Hillary or anything she does at this point. The offense has turned personal.

…

Remember Peggy Agar? The women do. They can't stop talking about the Detroit TV reporter who asked Obama a serious question at a Chrysler factory — "How are you going to help American autoworkers?" — to which he answered, "Hold on a second, sweetie."

The women are angry at the ludicrous charges of racism leveled against Clinton by the Obama camp — amplified in the supposedly respectable media — and projected onto themselves.

Oh, so the Obama response to Clinton’s comparison of Hillary’s opponent to Jesse Jackson and his ’84 and ’88 campaigns in South Carolina was “ludicrous,” Ms. Harrop? What about all of Hillary’s outrageous “hard-working white people” rhetoric, then? And “supposedly respectable media”? Gee, just a bit of editorial license there, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, I will grant you that Obama’s “sweetie” reference was dumb (as well as a remark I read somewhere that one of Obama's people referred to Clinton as "the senator from Punjab" or something like that because of her Indian donor support; the Obama campaign quickly repudiated that). But because of the "sweetie" thing you’re going to side with John W. McBush?

Fortunately, Arianna Huffington wrote this post recently in which she tells us, among other things, that…

Over half of all women in (the 16 “battleground” states in this country) have no idea what McCain's positions are on reproductive health. Forty-nine percent of women in battleground states who currently favor McCain are pro-choice. Twenty-three percent of them believe McCain agrees with them on choice.

The good news is, 36 percent of pro-choice McCain supporters are less likely to vote for him after learning that McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and favors making most abortions illegal. That number hits 38 percent when those voters learn that McCain has also consistently voted against expanding access to programs that reduce pregnancy and the need for abortion, consistently voted in favor of abstinence-only programs, and against legislation requiring insurance companies to cover birth control.

The poll's encouraging conclusion:

The simple arithmetic of these findings suggests that just filling in McCain's actual voting record and his publicly stated positions on a handful of key issues has the potential to diminish his total vote share among battleground women voters by about 17 to 20 percentage points.

Yes, supporters of Hillary Clinton should be allowed to vent and express outrage at this moment; I can appreciate that (I once supported John Edwards, remember). But the fact is that Obama ran a more disciplined campaign that was attuned to the message the voters of this country have been sending for years telling anyone who will listen that this country is on the wrong track. And never, ever underestimate the fact that Obama opposed the Iraq war, which really “sealed the deal,” and Hillary could not counter the fact that she voted for the AUMF in 2002 and ended up supporting it.

But any Democrat who opposes Obama for personality reasons simply must understand that there are too many important issues we face (the ones Arianna noted and many more) to trust this country to someone who will offer nothing but a continuation of our present misery (whether he calls you “sweetie” or not).