The power of unconscious bigotry

When the history of this presidential race is written, there will be much said about the influence of both sexism and racism on the outcome.

Already much being is being written and said about sexism in the media and how it may have negatively impacted Senator Clinton's campaign. Certainly, there were sexist comments on the cable shows, and in the blogs, but I'm not sure how much sexism factored into voting. I'm not sure we will ever know, in that the media has not focused on polls that tried to measure the effect of gender on voting. By way of contrast, they have looked at polls that asked primary voters whether race was a factor in their vote.

In one CBS poll of voting in Pennsylvania, voters were asked about both race and gender as possible factors in their voting. The findings:

About one in five voters said the race of the candidates was among the top factors in their vote. About as many said that about the candidates' gender. White voters who said race was a factor supported Clinton over Obama by 3-to-1, while whites who said race wasn't a factor divided between Clinton and Obama more evenly. But race and gender played out as factors in very different ways, with Obama's race apparently a negative for him among white voters, while Clinton's gender was a positive factor for her among men and women who said it contributed to their votes. Those who said gender was a factor actually tended to favor Clinton, while Obama did better among those who said gender was not a factor.

So, according to this poll at least, gender was a strong reason why people voted for Clinton, while race was a strong factor in why white people voted against Obama.

The media, especially the cable outlets, certainly displayed some ugly sexist commentary, and much less (from my observation) blatant racism. But how this plays out in actual influence on voters seems to be a different story. Decent people were mostly repulsed by the sexism they saw on television and the internet, as they would have been, I believe, by blatant racist comments, had they occurred.

We did not see many overt racist comments, however, mainly because they are so swiftly identified and punished, as they were with Don Imus last year. There were, though, covert racist attacks against Obama. For example, the FOX News highlighting of Obama's middle name, and the huge coverage of the outrageous statements of Jeremiah Wright (in contrast to the much briefer coverage of the equally outrageous statements of pastors supporting Senator McCain), are covert ways of scaring voters into rejecting Obama. A black pastor was portrayed as scarier than a white pastor, and an Arabic middle name hinted that Obama must be a Muslim. Combine that rumor with assorted internet rumors about Obama's schooling and family, and the connection of Obama's pastor with Louis Farrakhan, and you are playing guilt by association, and portraying Obama as a black Muslim who is unacceptable to white America – all without ever uttering a racial slur or talking about Obama's skin color.

It seems to me that this kind of coded racist attack on Obama is far more damaging than any boorish sexist comments against Senator Clinton. The sexism of the media may actually have strengthened her image in the electorate, as many people rejected and criticized it. However, the coded attacks on Obama were not attacked as racist by the media or regular voters. Why? Because there are many voters who don't think there's anything unusual or odd about feeling uneasy about a black nominee for president. These people do not consider themselves racist or prejudiced in any way, yet there is something in them that sees African Americans as different, foreign, and not "one of us." Barack Obama spoke to this when he talked about his white grandmother wanting to cross the street when she saw a black man walking towards her.

My elderly mother, one of the kindest and caring people I know, a woman who would help anyone in need, asked me yesterday if I thought a presidential victory by Obama would mean "the blacks would take over everything."

After I picked myself up off the floor, I expressed complete horror at what she said, as I have never known her to express racial prejudice.

She said "Well, they were treated pretty badly by the white people. Maybe they would want to have power over them."

We didn't get into a discussion as we were getting ready to go to the doctor, but I have thought a lot about what she said and wondered whether it was indicative of what a lot of people of her generation are thinking.

I remember a few weeks ago, when Barack Obama was a guest on The Daily Show, John Stewart asked him the following tongue-in-cheek question: "Sir, if you become president will you enslave the white race?" The audience got a good laugh, but what if this is a real fear, not just a joke on The Daily Show?

If my mother is any indication, Barack Obama may have a real problem becoming president. While younger and more educated voters have little problem with Obama's race, older Americans, good and decent people like my mother, even those who would never say or do anything overtly racist, still harbor unconscious negative thoughts and feelings about African Americans that may make them unwilling to vote for Barack Obama.

So while it cannot be denied that overt sexist comments were used against Hillary Clinton, it is also true that covert racist campaigns are being waged against Obama. These campaigns work, in part, because unconscious, irrational fears and negative appraisals of African Americans still lurk in the psyches of many white Americans.

This election will, to some extent, be a test of whether there are enough young and enlightened voters to outnumber those who, whether consciously or only unconsciously, carry the last remnants of our nation's hideous history of racial bigotry.

Gripe of the day

Over the past few months I have mostly written about the primary, which was exciting and maddening and made everything else seem less interesting.

I will still be writing mostly about politics, especially as we get closer to the general election, but I am going to resist the temptation to write only about it, and so will be introducing a handful of new features of the blog over the next few weeks.

Today I am introducing a feature in which I will spout off with a (non-political) "Gripe of the day."

Today's gripe: People using the expression "in regards to."

As a writer and former college instructor, this grates on me. Over the ten years I taught, I saw this expression used with increasing frequency in the papers my students wrote.

It amazes me how this phrase, which I rarely heard ten years ago, has creeped into common usage. Yesterday I got a recorded message from a bank soliciting my interest in signing up for a credit card and the message was: "This is _____calling in regards to _______."

I even hear politicians use this expression. When the Republicans controlled the Congress, I often heard Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, use the phrase in news interviews. In fact, he would often use it three or four times in a five minute interview. This is particularly humorous in that this statement appears in his biography on his website: "Following graduation from Kansas State University in 1958, Roberts served in the U.S. Marine Corps for four years, then worked as a reporter and editor for several Arizona newspapers." With his experience in the news business, shouldn't he know that the correct expression is either "as regards" or "with regard to?"

The case against Hillary (a final argument)

In addition to seeing Barack Obama as a magnificent candidate, promising to turn the page away from the hysteria of the sixties, and bringing an entirely new approach to politics and governing, I voted for him because I just didn't want the Clintons back in the White House.

I watched Hillary's speech yesterday and it was an admirable one, a gracious one, a historical one. It took grit, courage, dignity and great loyalty to her Party to be able to deliver it. I applaud her for it. If that was all I had ever seen of Hillary, and if she was the only candidate presenting a progressive platform, I would have been as enthusiastic about voting for her as many of her supporters.

But that is not all I know of Hillary, and so I could not support her.

It boiled down to this, really: I did not want the Clintons to return to the White House. I've written about this a lot, and most recently in great detail, but the bottom line is that the damage Bill Clinton did as president, in the long view of history, will be seen as far greater than the good he did.

Yes, he presided over a good economy. Yes, he kept us out of major wars. Yes, the nineties were, on the surface at least, good years. The Clinton administration, however, was supposed to move us away from the conservative hold on government during the previous 12 years, and it did not. Health care reform failed, largely because of Hillary Clinton's poor management of it, and Bill Clinton botched his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. As a result of the Clinton arrogance which resulted in this mismangagement, the Republicans took over Congress two years after Bill Clinton was inaugurated and held onto it for 12 years. Then we saw a sharp right turn, with welfare reform and NAFTA two of the highlights.

Bill Clinton's term was full of drama, intrigue, and conspiracy theories by both parties. The Republican noise machine tried desperately to find a scandal with which to tarnish Clinton and they finally did. And even as they discovered Monica's blue dress, Hillary was on television talking about the vast right wing conspiracy. The impeachment, fully the fault of Bill Clinton's libido, though at the time we blamed only the Republicans, cost the country the attention of the president and his party and ended the possibilility of any more help for the people. The Clinton drama also, in great measure, cost Al Gore the presidency as people turned to another Bush to "return dignity to the White House."

The great hope we liberals felt in 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, turned out to be false hope. After the destructive policies of Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton should have been able to begin a twenty year liberal dominance of government. But his personal character flaws, starting with his narcissism and recklessness, were at least partly responsible for the presidency of George W. Bush and all the horrors it has inflicted on this country.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of the three men most responsible for Hillary's loss is Bill Clinton himself (the other two are Mark Penn, failed strategist, and Barack Obama, who out campaigned her). With Bill's remarks after South Carolina, his angry outbursts and his attacks on the media, Bill did his wife no favors. He has not changed. He still causes trouble.

Hillary Clinton is a talented politician, a gifted and brilliant woman. But she is still married to the man who is responsible for allowing George W. Bush to inhabit the White House, end what should have been twenty or more years of a progressive hold on the White House, and destroy so much of our democracy, our reputation in the world, and our planet. And if elected president, she would bring that man back to the White House with all the risks that would present.

That was a risk I was unwilling to take.

An astrophysicist makes a final argument for Hillary

Neil Degrasse Tyson is a scientist and host of PBS's Nova Science Now. I have enjoyed his program immensely. However, I was quite disappointed in his op-ed in the New York Times today in which he intimates that Democratic voters are choosing the wrong candidate in Barack Obama. His reason: Statistical analysis and computer modeling of polling data show that if the election were held today Hillary Clinton would win the general election against John McCain and Barack Obama would lose.

The computer model of polling data Tyson refers to was created by two astrophysicists, using data they gathered prior to the 2004 general election. What Tyson, also an astrophysicist, does is apply this model to the primary election. He uses a complicated system which involves the use of polls in states where they are available, and the use of the 2004 election results when there are no polls available.

His premise, analysis, conclusion and question are so absurd that I have to refute each one of them, not from the perspective of an astrophysicist, which I am not, or from the perspective of a political scientist, which none of us are, but from the perspective of an expert in human behavior, which they are not and I am.

Tyson says: "One of the tasks of scientists is to clarify the apparent complexity of the universe by using the language of mathematics." This may be true in the hard sciences, but not the soft sciences, like psychology and political science, where the unpredictability of events and human emotion have profound effects. While some human behavior is predictable, much of it is not, and in politics, as we have observed, unexpected things happen that change a voter's opinion over the months preceding a general election.

Tyson's premise is that we can use statistical analysis of past events to predict future events, not of how the stars and planets behave, but of how humans behave. Since human behavior is always changing, and events humans must respond to are always in flux, this is a false premise.

Tyson's analysis is flawed in that he analyzes data preceding a primary election with a computer model that has been developed for and used prior to a general election. Not only is there a time difference here, in that many events can intervene to affect voters' minds between the primary and the general election, but there is also a different level of attention. Many more people are paying attention to the candidates prior to the general election than they are prior to the primary elections. Furthermore, it is absurd to think that a model used to explain what happened prior to a general election, based on polls preceding that election, can be used to explain what will happen in a future general election, based on polls taken before a primary election. Dr. Tyson is not only comparing apples and oranges, he is taking information about this year's apples and applying it to next year's oranges.

Tyson used "the simple rules established by Professor Gott and Dr. Colley: in states in which a poll has not been taken, you give that state to the party that won it in 2004. You do the same for states where the median poll is a tie." Here there is a flawed assumption, an assumption that nothing much changes in states between elections. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue. Political observers are already seeing a change in the electorate as they characterize more and more states as "purple," meaning more states are up for grabs than ever before. You cannot use the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps and expect that it will be repeated with any certainly, especially considering the work Howard Dean has done in the interim, implementing a 50 state strategy, and the work Obama has done in making inroads into formerly red states.

Finally, with respect to Tyson's analysis, there are factors in this race that have never existed before. We have never seen a president with a 25% approval rating, nor 81% of voters who believe the country is on the wrong track. Nor have we ever had a major party nominee other than a white male. Surely, these factors could confound the results of any computer model.

Since Tyson's premise and analysis are flawed, it stands to reason that his conclusion is flawed. Hillary Clinton would win the election if it were held today, he says. I don't think his mathematical model comes close to proving that, but even if it did, so what? It says absolutely nothing about who will win five months from now, when the public has gotten to know the candidates better. And herein lies another problem with Tyson's analysis. The voters are far more familiar with Clinton and McCain than they are with Obama. That will be different in five months.

What will also be different in five months is how the Republican smear machine will or will not have hurt the Democratic candidate, or will have backfired. Tyson may think the smear machine against Obama would only make a Clinton victory more likely, but he is not considering the smear machine the Republicans would gin up against Clinton. Can he possibly forget the ugliness of the impeachment proceedings against her husband? Can he honestly think the Republicans would not use this against Clinton? Is he unaware of Bill's secret business dealings and undisclosed contributions to his presidential library? The Clintons have baggage, and there is no doubt in my mind that McCain's team would unload on her, lessening her chances for victory.

And while this may seem out of the question to Tyson, it is possible that the more people get to know about McCain's voting record and policy positions, the less they will like him. This long Democratic campaign season has kept the focus off of McCain. Now that we have a Democratic nominee, it is likely the press will finally give some attention to McCain, and the multiple mistakes he has made that have stayed under the radar will start coming to light. McCain's higher poll numbers against Obama are in part a result of his not having much press scrutiny to date. That, of course, will change.

Now to Tyson's question. He asks "what does it say of the Democratic delegate selection system when its winner would lose the presidency if an election were held today, yet its loser would win it?" I can hardly express how ridiculous I believe this question to be, and how inappropriate it is to ask it after the nominee has already been chosen. I have to say it makes the good professor sound like a die-hard Clinton supporter who is disgruntled that the young Obama defeated her. Nevertheless, I am going to attempt to answer his question.

"What does it say"?" It says that Democratic voters cast their ballots on the basis of something other than mathematical models. It says that Democratic voters look at the candidates and vote for the one they want to see in the White House. It says that Democratic voters this year decided they wanted the change candidate more than the candidate who already spent eight years in the White House, married to a man who shamed the Party and the nation. It says that Democratic voters have hope, and believe in the ability of a gifted young politician to win over voters before the general election, just as he had won over voters in all the states in which he vigorously campaigned.

Four years ago, a majority of Democratic voters decided to vote with their heads rather than their hearts. While there was tremendous enthusiasm for both John Edwards and Howard Dean in 2003 and early 2004, by the first caucus in Iowa voters had decided to go with the candidate that they thought could defeat Bush, even though he didn't excite them. They may not have had a statistical model to guide them, but they were sure Kerry's Vietnam War hero bona fides would ensure his victory over Bush, who had been AWOL during part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard, which daddy Bush got him into so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. They picked the man they thought was a sure winner, just as Tyson is sure Clinton would be a sure winner. And as we all know, Kerry lost.

This year, the Democrats had two strong candidates, a woman and an African American. Both are the first candidates of their gender and race to get this far, and the candidacy of either one of them, because of that, would confound pollsters and statistical models.

This is a different year. People are looking at an entirely different kind of race than the fifty-four previous ones. We have no idea what might happen. But some of us, those who voted for Obama, are convinced he can overcome the misinformation about him, the prejudice against him, the old red-state, blue-state divide, and the conventional wisdom which guides pundits and even, apparently, astrophysicists.

Would Dr. Tyson really have us vote as robots, using computer models to determine our vote, or would he rather allow this to proceed as a real contest for the hearts and minds of the American people, a process that has a great deal of suspense and uncertainty associated with it? If Democracy means anything at all, it means that we choose our candidates on a number of factors, that we expect our candidates to have a conversation with us to help us choose, and that we are able to make up our own minds. We have five months ahead of us for this process to unfold.

If Dr. Tyson cares at all about this country, he might start by encouraging people to pay attention to the issues as well as the skills of the presidential candidates and not lament that the Democrats did not use a statistical model to choose their nominee. And were he to study disciplines other than astrophysics, he might learn that on this planet, and in human behavior, nothing stays the same. There are unpredictable forces that always upset mathematical models, and one of them is the human will.

The night I became a Democrat

On this, the fortieth anniversary of the death of Bobby Kennedy, I remember the night I became a Democrat:

From my 2007 essay:

I began my journey towards the Democratic Party in the early morning hours of June 6th, 1968, two weeks before my twenty-first birthday. Although I didn't register as a Democrat until many years later, that morning as I listened to the commentary surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, I began to hear things I had not heard from my Republican family.

I had been married six months, and my husband and I were both in college. We were paying $100 a month for a tiny one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, furnished with some hand-me-down furniture from my parents and a rented refrigerator. Although Bobby Kennedy was shot in the early morning of June 5th, after winning the California primary, because we could afford neither a telephone nor television, I only heard the news of the shooting when I went to class later that morning. And while I hadn't really followed Bobby Kennedy's campaign, I knew immediately that this event had enormous significance to the country.

Robert Kennedy was gunned down just five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated, and just two months after the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. You could not deny the reality that something was terribly wrong in our country. It was a time of war, of civil unrest, and of enormous challenges to the country, and many voices for change were tragically being silenced. So I interrupted my studies, stayed up all night listening to the radio, and got an education I might otherwise never have gotten.

Throughout the night of June 5th, as the young Senator lingered near death, his words, replayed by radio stations around the country, filled my tiny apartment. I heard the words Kennedy used to calm a crowd after Martin Luther King's death, and learned that he promoted private-public partnerships rather than welfare as the most dignified way to bring people out of poverty, that he sympathized with the plight of low paid farm workers in California, that he had a passionate desire to bring about racial justice and to insert a new idealism into the political discourse.

(Read the rest here)

Why Obama is the one

In the bizarre and obsessed relationship between Hillary Clinton and the media over the last two news cycles, the earth shaking reality of the first African American being nominated for president has been somewhat underplayed.

In the months to come, however, even as Barack Obama wants to run a campaign that rises above race, the reality of Barack's ancestry and how it factors into his success will be looked at from many different directions. So before all the big hitters write stories in the WSJ and the NYT, I want to put in my two cents.

It is no small thing that Barack Obama is not an African American in the sense that we usually define African Americans in this country. Nor is it a mere side issue that he is bi-racial.

Barack is not called "African American" because he is the descendent of slaves who were kidnapped and brought by white men to America from Africa. Barack does not have ancestors who were slaves. Barack is the son of a free black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. Barack was raised, except for a brief time in Indonesia, by a white mother and white grandparents, mainly in Hawaii. Until his college years and especially his time in the South side of Chicago, Barack has little connection to the black American community. In fact, it can be and has been argued that Barack's membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ was, in part, a deliberate attempt to educate himself in black culture so that he could understand a part of America, a part that people saw reflected in his skin color but that had not been part of his upbringing or personal history.

Previous black candidates in the presidential primaries have been African Americans in the traditional sense. Born in this country to black parents, descendents of slaves, and steeped in the culture of the black community and the civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton could not identify with the white community and vice versa. Their presidential runs were important and helpful to the black community and to the cause of equality and justice, but each knew they would not win without the white vote, which they could not get for many reasons, one of which is that they had never been part of the white community.

Barack has been part of that community. It was his earliest community, and while he has made the choice to see himself as black, he embodies and to some extent understands both races. This is the real psychological key to his ability to unify people. He had to unify the reality of two races within himself, in much the same way we hope he can help unify the two races within the country. It was a personal struggle for him, and he understands that it will be a struggle within the country. It is not, however, a struggle he shies away from.

Barack says he is something of a rorschach test; people see in him what they want to see. Blacks see a man who understands them and their struggles. Because of his skin color, he has experienced racism. Because of his participation in Trinity United Church, he can identify with the fear and anger of black members, even as he rejects some of the more outrageous statements and views of the church leadership.

While some whites reject Obama out of the fear, ignorance, and resentment that fuels racism, other whites embrace him because he seems to understand them. He doesn't resent them, nor see them as oppressors nor relate to them as anything but equals. Even his joke about "my cousin Dick Cheney" which he rattles off to amuse his audience, is seen as funny not because Cheney is white and he is black, but because Cheney is a neocon, a Republican, and Obama is anti-war and a Democrat. Race has nothing to do with why we laugh.

Obama often says "we are the ones we have been waiting for" because he knows all of us must renew America. But in a very real sense, Obama is the one - the first potential black president - we have been waiting for. Obama's very identity and heritage - as half black and half white - has at least been partly responsible for his rise to power. Each one of us can see something of ourselves in him and know he can identify with us, regardless of our race. And that makes him, in this year and this time, more electable than someone like Jesse Jackson.

My hope is that this is merely a step towards the day when someone who is considered 100 percent black (I say "considered" because DNA studies are teaching us that none of us is 100 percent anything), or Hispanic, or Asian, or Native American, will be able to rise to the presidency, because race and identity is no longer an issue in a country where everyone is truly equal to everyone else and racism and prejudice no longer exist.

But in the meantime, hopefully, we will have President Barack Obama.

The two men who defeated Hillary

An interesting article on what went wrong in the Clinton campaign. The WSJ says Clinton's loss was largely the result of the power of two men - Bill Clinton and Mark Penn - who vetoed some of the better ideas and caused some of the biggest problems.

Every candidate is different, of course, and needs to run his or her own kind of race, but what Hillary's campaign may teach us is that if a woman wants to run successfully for president, she shouldn't rely primarily on men and male psychology.

Ultimately, it may be two men who are responsible for Hillary's loss, and one of those men is not named Barack Obama.

Healing the family feud

The primary season is finally over and we must move forward and do everything we can to defeat John McCain and put a Democrat back in the White House.

This is where the really hard work begins.

Those of us who argued and fought over who would make the better Democratic candidate were able to argue as family members who know each other too well.

Obama supprters and Clinton supporters remained loyal to their preferred candidate for largely personal reasons that had very little to do with the candidates' policies. We knew these candidates - especially Clinton - and decided we liked them or didn't like them personally. We saw them as symbols, got angry when they competed a little too vigorously or - in our minds - unfairly, and threatened to leave the family if the other one became the favorite. We fought as family members fought - about heirarchy and taking one's turn and being the favorite. We got much more personal than we get with those outside our Party.

That, hopefully, is nearing an end. In time, I hope Clinton's many supporters will decide to stay in the family and realize that no matter how bitter the fight became (and no fights can be more ugly than family fights) this is the family that has always nurtured them and will continue to nurture them.

Now we must adopt a different strategy. We must now turn our attention to John McCain, the real opponent of Senator Obama, and in my opinion, the real opponent of what is best for this country. We must use our influence and powers of persuasion to help Americans see that a McCain presidency would be as much of a disaster as the Bush presidency has been. This will require much more investigation of policy matters, stuff that isn't as easy as simply attacking someone's style or behavior or even identity.

But it is going to require something else as well. This election will require us all to combat the racism that remains in this country, racism that will come in the form of racially coded, dog whistle attacks on Barack Obama by the Republicans. These attacks will include a renewed focus on his former minister and former church, attempts to portray his wife as a scary and aggressive woman, attempts to define him as a foreigner, a Muslim, or not "one of us."

This is one of the reasons why so many of us wanted Senator Clinton to immediately concede on Tuesday night and endorse Obama. Senator Clinton has often said she does not think Obama can be elected, and had hinted that part of the reason she feels this way is because she understands the amount of prejudice that still exists in our nation. However, we Obama supporters don't need Senator Clinton to remind us of this. We are well aware of the racism that remains in certain parts of the country. We don't support Obama because we are naive and think the days of racism are gone. We know the task ahead. We know the odds. We know it will be difficult to overcome the mindset that still exists within too many citizens. We simply think the fight is winnable, and ultimately worth it. We believe the American people can be convinced. We think they can, one by one, overcome their reservations once they a) really get to know Barack Obama and b)remember what John McCain represents - four more years of failed policies.

We also know that the primary campaign, while in many ways a good testing ground for Obama, also wounded him, and Hillary Clinton did some of the wounding. We wanted her to concede, not because we wanted to humiliate her or her supporters, or lord it over her, but because we know how powerful she is, and how crucial her support is to a November victory. We also know there is no time to waste.

Hillary Clinton can do a great deal to help Obama win the election. Her words, if chosen very carefully and delivered sincerely and forcefully, will help her supporters see the importance of letting go of their disappointment and anger. Her actions will be an example for her supporters, who see her as a role model.

It will be a tough fight to elect the nation's first black president. It was tough to elect the first black nominee. He almost lost at the end, partly because of the latent racism that emerged after the Jeremiah Wright controversy. It will take all of us to help him win this campaign.

So it's time to let go of anger and resentment. I am letting go of mine, but know it will be harder for others to let go of theirs. Perhaps it will help to look at what has gone on these past five months as an ugly family feud that now needs to end. I hope Senator Clinton will find the right words to help bring it to an end.

For five months Hillary Clinton has identified herself as a fighter, and she definitely has proven herself to be that. Now she has a different role. Now she must be a healer. Soon, the Party will call on her fighting abilities again, but on Saturday, she needs to put down her sword and her shield and speak the words of reconciliation. With the enormous power she wields, what she does and what she says on Saturday can be as important as anything Barack Obama does or says over the next five months.

I hope her supporters take comfort in the fact that she is now the most powerful woman in the country, even though she is not the nominee for president. And she will remain the most powerful woman in the country, whether or not she becomes the vice presidential nominee. No one can take that away from her.

Random thoughts about winning and losing

Well it seems Hillary is finally going to concede - not today, not tomorrow, not Friday, but on Saturday.

I really hope she gives one hell of a speech because she owes that to Obama, and she certainly has time to write it. She has had the media focused totally on her for 36 hours now, from yesterday morning when it leaked out that she might concede that night, until this evening when she finally was forced to announce that she would concede - after conference calls from Democratic Senators and Representatives. All this media focus took away from the historic victory of Barack Obama, the first ever nomination of an African American for the presidency of the United States.

Everyone knows it's easier to win than to lose, and so we know it was hard for Clinton to admit defeat. But it is even more difficult when you have been living a delusion for months. Ever since Texas and Ohio, when Clinton could not pull off big enough victories to enable her to catch up in delegates, experts have been telling her she did not have the math on her side. It was nearly impossible to win, they said over and over. Yet her supporters, who often accuse Obama supporters of drinking the Kool-Aid, had apparently drunk their own potion, because they would not believe reality.

And thus we read articles like this today, showing just how delusional Clinton's supporters were. Yesterday shouldn't have been the wake up call. That should have happened months ago.

Clinton's supporters also must be disheartened because Hillary had been telling them for months that she was going to convince the superdelegates to be on her side, to give her the nomination even if she was behind Obama in the delegate count. In other words, she was saying she would ignore the will of the people and the rules of the Democratic Party regarding the importance of delegates and rely on party insiders to give her the nomination. Yet now that her plan has backfired and the superdelegates, seeing that he was ahead in delegate count, all ran to Obama on the last day of the primary, she and her supporters are left not only stunned, but convinced they have been robbed.

I have wondered for the duration of this campaign why Hillary has such a hard time playing by the rules, why she attempts to change the rules when she is behind, and why the first serious female presidential candidate in history acts so unsportsmanlike, so contrary to the rules and etiquette of politics, so much like girls and women acted prior to the feminist revolution. And the only answer I can come up with is that she and many of her older supporters never really played team sports. If they had, they would have learned you can't get away with the things she has tried to get away with - not in sports, and not in politics, the greatest sport of all.

Hillary doesn't seem to understand that when you are losing the baseball game at the end of nine full innings, you accept defeat. You don't scream that you closed strong, getting five runs in the last three innings and therefore you should win, even if the other team was ahead by ten runs. You don't insist that the winner should be determined by who got the most hits, not who got the most runs. You don't announce to the crowd at the end of the game that your team has been victorious and that you aren't sure you will accept the results as posted on the scoreboard. And you don't turn your back on a member of the opposing team and refuse to shake hands after they beat you.

If you do those things, one or more of the umpires or some of your teammates will take you aside, introduce you to reality and embarass you in front of an audience. That is what members of the House and Senate did today to Hillary Clinton.

The good news is (although I will only believe it when I actually see and hear it) she has listened to the umpires and her teammates. The bad news is she stepped on a historic moment and she can't take that back.

She has embarassed herself.

Hillary and her supporters do not help the cause of feminism

She's had two chances now - last night at her speech to supporters, and today at the AIPAC conference - and she just won't do it. She won't concede and congratulate Obama.

Some of her supporters have apparently decided to organize a Hillary for President campaign outside of the Democratic Party. Others say she "needs time" to come to grips with reality and to reconcile herself to her loss.

There has never, to my knowledge, been a primary election candidate who after losing was given time to come to grips with his or her loss. Every losing candidate, on the night the nomination is secured with the required number of delegates, calls the winner and graciously concedes.

Why is Hillary allowed to do otherwise? Why is everyone so afraid of her?

Do they really think all 17 million of her supporters will vote for John McCain in the Fall? Really?

More than half of her votes are from women, and will these women really be willing to allow conservative pro-life John McCain to nominate four conservative justices to the Supreme Court? Really?

Will these women, many of them mothers, really be willing to allow this war to continue and kill more of their sons and daughters? Really?

For what great cause are they willing to do this?

Or are they simply doing it out of spite?

Are they really that self-destructive, that masochistic?

Barack Obama has done absolutely nothing to deserve this anger, this spitefulness. No, he didn't "wait his turn," but this isn't hopscotch, this is politics, this is our future, this is the future of the world. Barack Obama truly believed he could transform this country. So did Hillary. He won. Now it is time for her to endorse him and act like a grown-up, and a true feminist who competes equally with rivals.

Obama has always been courteous and gracious to her. He has not used a kitchen sink strategy the way she did, throwing every negative thing at him she could find. He's also not the one who tried to change the rules regarding Michigan and Florida.

Obama outcampaigned her, outstrategized her, and won the nomination. It's as simple as that. If she and her followers refuse to accept that, and are willing to work to deny him victory in November, then they are not true Democrats and they might as well leave the Party now.

Furthermore, they have betrayed the woman's movement. Because the woman's movement was never about giving women an unfair advantage, or making men stand down so women could have "their turn." The woman's movement was about equality for all. I think some women have forgotten that.