Sexist Racist Democrats

An amusing article at Captain’s Quarters, today….

Susan Estrich either wants to build credibility as a satirist, or her latest column provides a long-overdue look in the mirror for Democrats. Detecting more a whiff of the so-called Bradley Effect in primaries where Barack Obama holds solid polling leads only to mysteriously fall short of Hillary Clinton, Estrich diagnoses a latent racism in her party.

No kidding!

But, the fact is that there is a long pattern of what we in California call the “Bradley problem” in polling, after the former Los Angeles mayor who was elected governor in every poll, including the exits, except that he lost at the ballot box. Did I mention that he was African-American?That was, according to the pollsters, the problem: about 10 percent of the electorate claimed that they were going to vote for him, and in many cases even told pollsters that they did, but they lied. …

Doug Wilder, who wasn’t elected to the Senate from Virginia, faced the same problem. We who are Democrats would like to believe that race is not a factor in the polling of our party members, but maybe we’re wrong.

No one doubts, or at least no one who is honest does, that both racism and sexism come into play as people decide between Clinton and Obama, but could it be that people are more willing to admit that they won’t vote for the woman than that they won’t vote for the black?

If this is happening even among us good Democrats, what does that say about Obama’s strength in a general election? Not pretty questions. Not a fair world.

I’m not sure why this comes as such a surprise. This is the party, after all, that routinely creates new victim classes along ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, and income lines. Their candidates spend entire campaigns talking about “two Americas” — heck, on bad days, it could be fourteen or fifteen Americas.

Republicans argue for equality of treatment rather than creation of victim classes. The GOP’s factions may be pulling it apart, but the factions exist along policy lines, not ethnic divisions.

And there’s the meat of it; The sexual and racial identity politics that the Democrats have been making votes with for the last three generations, are both fostering and using the bigotry inherent among Democrats.  If they ever solved racism and sexism, they’d lose their power over voters. If they ever overcame those negatives among their voters, by actually changing minds, they’d not have the election power they once did… and they can’t afford to lose that power.

Do you suppose those groups will eventually wake up and recognize the fools they’ve been played for all these years, and recognize that the party that’s anti-minority is in fact the Democrats?

Nah.

Frankly, I don’t either.  At the least, though, we will have the joy of watching the cognitive dissonance and the resulting dance routines. The irony of all this is that it took Hillary Clinton and her excesses to reveal all of this.  Sadly, Susan Estrich and her discovery will be forgotten by day after tomorrow. Unless of course the Clintons start a smear campaign against her…. the content of which would be further revealing of this racism/sexism.