I think Obama has the potential to trandform politics, BUT ONLY if he begins to fight for Democratic values.

HE has been quite a disappointment.

We often had a one=parent home since both parents did work that involved being away for weeks at a time.

Mom's the one who, in family meetings where we had to resolve a family crisis, would say about the most seemingly unresolveable problem, "C'mon, use your brains, use your skill. We can do this. We're women."

I'm disgusted that the Dem braintrust not only permit sexism but promote it. They not only blame women -- esp. on the issues of medical privacy and moral choice -- for cynical persecution from the right, but actively court anti=abortion and anti-contraception no-choice deadbeats who'll use our funds, our contribution, our efforts and our skill to disenfranchise us ... yet have THEIR choice to strip women of inalienable constitutional protection revered as spiritual rather than what it is: misogynistic, medieval, cruel and as likely to be causing as many deaths among women, children and young people as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When solicited by the Dem for the bux and activism I've provided in the past, I suggested they get it from the nearest no-choice deadbeats, foetuses or unsentient females being kept alive for 10+ years by machine, since I'm a non-person in the party's eyes.

The intra-party sexism being levelled at HRC is enough to keep me looking more towards her rather than Obama, whose team has said they won't vote for HRC (and doesn't THAT speak volumes about the depth of commitment to this alleged "change".)

I'm pissed enough at this point to keep open the option of writing in a prez/vp as protest, as having Dem majorities in congress hasn't accomplished much.

I agree that there has been a lot of unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton in this campaign, by forces in the media, as well as in the party.  I also believe that there are people who support Obama that have and continue to say terrible things about Senator Clinton, and that this is wrong.

However, many of these things have been reciprocated back towards the Obama campaign by some of the ardent Clinton supporters. Hell, reading through the comments here and on Tayor Marsh's site, you'd think that Barack Obama was a child-molesting vampire who loves nothing more than drinking the blood of newborn female children.

If the Clinton campaign can't compete against the relatively benign environment of a Democratic primary, whose fault is that? It's her fault. Nobody made her choose to run her campaign in the way that she has. No one made her hold positions that other people feel are not desirable as a Democratic presidential candidate.

She's had to run as her own woman, good and bad. If she loses in the end, is it because Barack Obama has voodoo powers of mind-control and has enthralled the majority of Democrats? Of course not, it's because he was able to be more persuasive that he was the person that we want to have in the White House. If his positions aren't yours, you should have had a stronger candidate.

What makes it so much more frustrating for me is that I cannot understand how this happened.

We're producing two historical figures. Yet, for some reason, the Party has deemed it acceptable that one of those historical candidates may be treated so inhumanely.

Remember what she said last night.  After all she has been through, Clinton has not given up.  I think we owe it to her to keep marching alongside her.  The crap we are seeing on the so-called left blogosphere is idiotic and painful and I am with the folks who are heartbroken about this, and feel abandoned by the party, but even though the party has abandoned us, this is not the time for us to abandon Hillary Clinton.

Lookit, folks, let's shake off this melancholy and phone bank and rally and donate and do whatever we can to make sure that we give our girl a fighting chance.  She is less than 2% behind in the delegate count.  She can still get the popular vote.  She can still make her case as the best choice for the party, even though the upper echelon has chosen their man.

Onwards!!!

Or, it's a kind of superstitious mentality equal to modern scapegoating. This was supposed to "cleanse" --- unite?? -- a sinful society by pinning all past sins on a goat and sending the poor creature away to die quiety somewhere.

Ridiculous criticism #1 -- She's "ambitious" merely for having turned up in the primary at all, which is BAD, because of the ambition of competing for a job for which she believes herself qualified. All of the other candidates are "fighters", or good or bad candidates based on their personalities, records, etc. etc.

Ridiculous criticism #2 == was cap'd here by BTD (with a h/t to Taylor Marsh). It was a quote by the WaPo's Eugene Robinson, who is black:

Is sexism in the coverage of the Clinton campaign excusable? No, and we deserve to be called on it. But it wasn't the media that decided she should take for granted all those states that Barack Obama has been winning.

and I wondered:

Let's see, if -- perhaps when, since no campaign is perfect -- Team Obama makes a misstep, will Robinson declare it open season for the media to refer to Obama, relentlessly and in letter and spirit, in egregiously racist terms?

The Hell???

It's continually astounding to me to hear this kind of naked bigotry from people who have had MY support over the years.

And let me make this clear, I do not blame Obama. He was running his campaign and trying to win.

That is what campaigns do.

Are they doing this on their own or is there like a drive to flood the blogs and spew Hillary-hate.

She does not deserve it.  In fact I agree with Kos when he said---that the more people see of Hillary the better they like her.  And they will wonder why they hate her.  Hillary should be more visible and have more interviews because she is very likeable.

I am fairly new to the whole blogging thing, and am not sure of proper protocol, like listing the link to it.  So, if anyone could help me out on that, and would like to read some pro-Hillary pieces, I'll provide the link.

And while I am here - first, let me THANK everyone for writing what you have in terms of the incredibly blatant sexist, and MISOGYNISTIC, attacks on Clinton.  Frankly, it has been staggering.  I just cannot believe the level of vitriol being spewed from people I used to respect.  I was a faithful listener of Stephanie Miller until her show became one long commercial for Obama, and her attacks on Clinton were sexist in their very nature (one mild example, like her voice, for instance - that is just code.  Of COURSE she doesn't have a voice like a man's - she's a WOMAN, and her voice is higher!).  I was a FAITHFUL viewer of Keith Olbermann, and thought he was the Edward R Murrow of our day.  Now I see that he is just like the Fox Noise people he mocks, only on the left side of things.  

And I DO blame Obama for a lot of this rhetoric.  Just last night, he's smiling at her, and shaking her hand while she's talking abt how in the end, they'll be fine, then he ATTACKS her this morning, claiming SHE'S plagarizing Edwards!  Like NO ONE has ever said "Whatev rhappens, we'll be fine" besides Edwards! He sends out these mailers filled with false info on her, he attacks her in EVERY SINGLE SPEECH he gives, brings up how he's a "Uniter" and she's "Divisive," and people think he's a freakin' saint!  He has made sexist comments - only a few feminists have mentioned it, for te most part, but not the MSM, no way, no how.  They are too busy keeping people in their ranks who call her a pimp and her daughter a whore.  Or allowing a Republican operative who started an anti-Clitnon 527 to come on MSNBC twice in the past couple of weeks to promote his group, the acronym of which begins with a C, and is 4 letters long.  You do the math.  I just had a feeling that was coming, and sure enough, there it was.  My heart just breaks at all of this hatred toward women, and the DEMOCRATIC PARTY not stepping up and saying it is unacceptable, even if Obama won't.  And if Clinton says anything about the rampant sexism, she's just ripped for being "too sensitve," another sexist remark.  

All of that is to say, I do not know that I can vote for this arrogant, pompous, sexist man who stumped FOR Joe Lieberman AGAINST the Anti-War Dem. in CT, and has the audacity to patronize Clinton on HER judgment, who has nothing but rhetoric unless he steals Clinton's work (some he has repeated word for word), and reminds me way, way, WAY too much of Bush.  

I wouldn't call them, as you do, "the left side of the blogosphere" -- I'd call them the OTHER SIDE of the blogosphere.  Whatever I call them, they had absolutely no issue with the Kerry/Kennedy endorsements.  Instead, they swooned.

However, Hillary will never be forgiven for her war vote....

And as a side issue, people (myself included) were outraged about Bill O'Reilly's 'verbal lynching' comment...

Then I realized, Hillary is verbally Lynched every day in the "progressive" blogosphere, "liberal" talk radio, and the media and we're the only ones who seem to mind...It's sick....

What do you really make of it all?

This may be an off-the-wall question but something I have wondered is this:  would you say that black women see themselves as black first and women second?  I really didn't use to think so and thought there was strong evidence against the racial ID for black women at the Howard U debate when the women in the audience gave Hillary a standing ovation.  But now...I dunno.

As a white woman, I would say we see ourselves as women first...identify with women (and mothers) of all races before we identify ourselves as caucasian.

I encourage EVERY Hillary supporter to do the same--to do everything they can.

If she is to lose, I hope that before it happens all her supporters stand up and make visible just how MUCH we support her. That, in the face of all this hatred, we're there to face it.

Interesting that we're asked to realize that sexism exists, and is shameful, and then told it's time to let the hatred go.

I don't hate anybody.  I'm profoundly disappointed in a great many people.  I had come to expect hatred aimed at Hillary Clinton from the right; I didn't expect for one second that it would turn my favorite blogs into swamps.

Here, you accuse BTD of covertly supporting Clinton while overly supporting Obama.

Me, I take BTD at his word. Just because he has criticisms of Obama doesn't mean be can't support him.

Understand that a BIG part of the resentment of the Clinton camp this time was the position they took all last year that Hillary was the presumptive nominee and that everybody else was some sort of usurper.  

However, people in the party would prefer to have been consulted.  You know, democracy and all that.  It's why we have primaries.  I know Hillary was not personally responsible for (all of) this, it was a strategy.  But she decided to place her trust in Mark Penn and his ilk.  A bad move, and frankly, one of the bases on which we can judge our candidates.

And I do not see this as a requiem for Clinton's run, either - I have donated to her 3 times this week and made phone calls for her.  I WANT her to get this nomination more than anything.  BUT - it is important to have a place to give voice to the anger, pain, and sadness over the horrible treatment she has received.  It is deplorable.  So again, thanks for the space to do that.

Before 1972, party elders, such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Charlie Buckley, the boss of The Bronx who helped John Kennedy clinch the 1960 nomination, wielded inordinate power.

But in early 1970's, the party's rules were reformed to open the process to grass-roots activists, women, and ethnic minorities.

Sen. George McGovern, the leading anti-Vietnam war liberal, won the 1972 nomination. McGovern turned out to be a disaster as a presidential candidate, winning only one state and the District of Columbia.

So without reverting to the days of party bosses like Buckley, the Democrats decided to guarantee that elected officials would have a bigger voice in the nomination.

"There was a belief that they would not want candidates who were dramatically out of sync with the rest of the party -- particularly if these were people who were going to have to run on the same ticket with them," says Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer, who has written extensively on the nomination process.

There were, Mayer says, two motives in giving elected officials a big voice in the nomination.

"One was not to get (ideologically) extreme candidates; the other was to avoid the Jimmy Carter phenomenon -- where you had a guy who was not very experienced and not very well regarded by most of his fellow governors, but nevertheless managed to win the party's nomination," Mayer said.

The point that comments like yours seem to miss is that to achieve results in politics you have to know how to work the system according to the rules of that system. During the Democratic primary, the only rules that count are those by which the Democratic Party actually operates -- not some other idealized set of rules by which you imagine it ought to operate.

So it is completely wrong to criticize Hillary for wanting to work within the Party's mechanisms to get decisions in her favor. If she's doing that, it's a GOOD thing, not a failing. This primary is a real race, not a beauty contest -- so why expect that the contestants not to do everything possible to win, within the rules of the contest? If she were not able to do that, she would be a less competent and less qualified candidate.

For every Obama supporter you can show me who is alienated as a result of this supposedly negative primary, I expect I can show you two similarly alienated Clinton supporters.  The main difference is that Clinton supporters tend to be the people without microphones who we can pretend don't exist.  But just because they don't throw tantrums about Obama tearing the party apart doesn't mean they don't feel that way.

Too bad Hillary won't go away quietly - she has every right to remain a candidate.