Sexism and Misogyny in the Premature Canonization of Barack Obama

At regular intervals throughout the Democratic primary, party operatives have joined forces with the media in trying to force Hillary Clinton out of the race. Their latest effort came on the heels of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. Obama won big in North Carolina, but adding her win in Indiana to earlier victories in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, Clinton had just taken four of the last five primaries. Nevertheless, the good old boys intensified their calls for her and her supporters to sit down, shut up, and get with the program.

Clinton responded a few days later by mopping the floor with Obama in West Virginia. She’s expected to do the same in Kentucky next Tuesday, even though John Edwards, the twice-failed populist candidate with his $400 haircuts, has just endorsed Obama to help win a few votes from working class Americans.

In the meantime, the outrage among American women has finally come to a head led by Cynthia Ruccia’s group, Clinton Supporters Count Too. The group has put the Democratic party on notice for trying to force out Hillary Clinton, the better qualified candidate, in favor of a man that Gerard Baker in the Times Online this morning tells us is representative of a particular genre among Democratic candidates.

Baker explains:

You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week's Newsweek, which was entitled “The O Team”. This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama's campaign reads a little like a cross between Father Alban Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.”

Baker goes on to say:

“The idolatry of Mr Obama is a shame, really. The Illinois senator is indeed, an unusually talented, inspiring and charismatic figure. His very ethnicity offers an exciting departure. But he is not a saint. He is a smart and eloquent man with a personal history that is startlingly shallow set against the scale of the office he seeks to hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary, to scrutinise his past and infer what it might tell us about his beliefs, in the absence of the normal record of achievement expected in a presidential nominee.

“If the past 40 years have taught us anything they have surely taught that premature canonisation is an almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment.”

I disagree with several of Gerard Baker’s comments in this op-ed, but I think his take on Barack Obama is spot on.

Obviously, the Democratic party is ready once again to dive off the cliff in a presidential campaign by nominating the lesser qualified candidate. It’s no wonder Clinton Supporters Count Too are leading a women’s rebellion on the crest of growing outrage among women at the sexism and misogyny endured for months by Hillary Clinton.

A little reminder: women make up more than 50 percent of the Democratic party's membership.