Race Card Trumps Gender Card
Especially when one is classy enough not to play it:
“When we had a debate back in Iowa awhile back, we spent I think the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn’t come out and say: ‘Look, I’m being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage.'” — Barack Obama
The politics of victimhood are unpalatable. Even when people have made overtly racist attacks on Obama — Rush Limbaugh sang a song, don’t forget, Barack the Magic Negro, and Mitt Romney has tried to make Barack’s name mash up with Osama bin Laden’s — Obama never once said, ‘The Man is out to get me.’ Indeed, his candidacy is so revolutionary because he’s not running as a black candidate, he’s a candidate who happens to be black.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton is now suggesting that the “boy’s club” is ganging up on her, or rather, “piling on“. (You don’t have to have taken too many women’s studies classes to spot the veiled rape metaphor in there, do you?)
Are we really to believe that attacks Clinton drew in the debate Tuesday night had something to do with her gender — rather than her hawkishness toward Iran (with which she vowed not to prevent a war, but prevent a “rush to war”), her unwillingness to reveal the scope of her policy influence in the Clinton White House, or her seemingly reflexive inability to give a yes or no answer? To say nothing about her 20-plus point lead in the polls?
Clinton must have polling that says this kind of victimhood works for her. But I think she’s underestimating the value of the higher ground of grace and class she’s just yielded to Obama.