Hillary Rodham Clinton is demonized every day on a hundred or a thousand blogs and in a hundred or a thousand editorials as "Hitlery KKKlinton," the death-mongering anti-Christ of American politics. Where did this craziness come from?
It doesn't originate with Barack Obama. Whatever his real flaws as a candidate may be, including some surreptitious hanky-panky with the race card, his message is still relatively positive. Senator Obama may be vacuous, but it would be ridiculous to call him a hater.
It seems to me that two related factors have produced the unprecedented tsunami of hate-speech directed at Hillary Clinton:
1. Attacking Hillary Clinton is easier than praising Barack Obama.
Even the most committed Obama propagandists eventually get tired of repeating that Mr. Obama deserves to win because he's winning. "Our horse is ahead by a nose, so all the other horses should run back to the stable!"
The Democratic primaries are dominated by money and advertising, and Mr. Obama has outplayed Hillary Clinton at this game, but what are his other accomplishments? Three years ago, when he was still an unknown Illinois state legislator, Barack Obama sponsored a bill to require videotaping of some police interrogations. Hurrah! Obama for President!
It's a very thin résumé, and if Mr. Obama's supporters limited themselves to praising what there is to praise about Barack Obama, and stopped screaming about the imaginary crimes of Hillary Clinton, then thousands of diaries would suddenly disappear from Daily Kos, and an eerie silence would fall over the liberal blogosphere.
2. It's easy to pass yourself off as a hero of black liberation by screaming "racist" at other Democrats, and it's terribly difficult to improve the lives of the millions of black Americans who still live in poverty. Here at last in the never-never land of symbolic action we can find a little common ground between the mellow Mr. Obama and the internet haters who support him.
The election of Barack Obama would be an enormous symbolic victory for black Americans, but for overloaded case-workers, overcrowded classrooms, and underfunded agencies in the inner cities, the value of symbols is relatively small, and what they really need is money.
Republicans always oppose "throwing money at problems," but in the last seven years Republicans have been throwing trillions of dollars at themselves, and none of them has ever complained. It's only when money gets thrown at someone else that Republicans and the the tax-rebellion Democrats who sympathize with them express their "moral" outrage against traditional Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who have been responsible for funding every program that actually helped impoverished Americans in the history of the United States.
If the Democrats finally nominate Mr. Obama, then his over-privileged supporters in Connecticut and Oregon will congratulate themselves for their painless and tax-free racial heroism, and the liberal media will celebrate the "new face" of America. But the old problems won't magically disappear, and millions of black Americans who still live in poverty may have cause to bitterly regret that the Democrats nominated a symbol instead of a hard-nosed fighter for traditional Democratic values.
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