On The Turning Away

This is also crossposted at the old blog.

Perhaps the specter of credit crunch has got into the heads of political pundits in the media, otherwise how can you explain the popularity of CDS, aka Clinton Derangement Syndrome? The US editor of UK’s New Statesman, Andrew Stephen, eviscerates media’s hideous Hillary coverage in the Dems primaries.

Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media – consciously or unconsciously – are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.

Not to mention maniacal Obama supporters who seem nonchalant at best, happy at worst, with the way Hillary was treated. Her any action, no matter how innocuous, was “proof of evil intent”. Paul Krugman, NYT columnist, believes that most of the “venom” in the campaign “is coming from supporters of Obama”.

Stephen also pins down Sen. Obama in his complicity in the attacks: “But Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January”, contrary to media allegation that it was Hillary who started the negative campaign. Money quote,

One of his female staff then distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists which alleged that a vaguely clumsy comment Hillary Clinton had made about Martin Luther King (“Dr King’s dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964″) and a reference her husband had made in passing to Nelson Mandela (“I’ve been blessed in my life to know some of the greatest figures of the last hundred years . . . but if I had to pick one person whom I know would never blink, who would never turn back, who would make great decisions . . . I would pick Hillary”) were deliberate racial taunts.

Another female staffer, Candice Tolliver – whose job it is to promote Obama to African Americans – then weighed in publicly, claiming that “a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements” and saying: “Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?” That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, an impression sealed when Bill Clinton later compared Obama’s victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 (even though Jackson himself, an Obama supporter, subsequently declared Clinton’s remarks to be entirely inoffensive).

The public Obama, characteristically, pronounced himself “unhappy” with the vilification carried out so methodically by his staff, but it worked like magic: Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings among African Americans plummeted from above 80 per cent to barely 7 per cent in a matter of days, and have hovered there since.

“African-American super-delegates [who are supporting Clinton] are being targeted, harassed and threatened,” says one of them, Representative Emanuel Cleaver. “This is the politics of the 1950s.” Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.

Rampant sexism may have triumphed only to make way for racism to rear its gruesome head in America yet again. By election day on 4 November, I suspect, the US media and their would-be-macho commentators may have a lot of soul-searching to do.