Sunday, March 9, 2008

Associated Press still attacking Hillary


In what can only be called an October Surprise in March, the Barack Obama campaign, with the clear and obvious assistance of the Associated Press, has really turned nasty.


The quote was painless, it was candidate-Clinton sort of talking out her feelings about a couple of states' inability to vote statewide for a woman. Here's her actual quote from the Des Moines Register:


"How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism; that's not the openness I see in Iowa."


Now reading that sentence without all of the noise and hullabaloo to cut through, it is obvious that she didn't mean that Iowa should vote for her so as to not be as backward as Mississippi. I mean, she wasn't saying that the Southern state is backward or racist or misogynistic at all. That would be a little too stereotypically insensitive, especially since the accusation is a) not true, and b) just dumb to say about people who will later be voting for you. She's just saying that they need to vote for more women. Here, I'll let her speak for herself, which she did in a Mississippi radio interview:


"What I said is what I learned is that neither Iowa or Mississippi had ever elected a woman statewide and I referenced the fact that I was the first woman elected statewide in New York and I told the Iowans that they had a chance to try to change that and now in Mississippi [I'm] giving Mississippi voters a chance to change that," Clinton said in the radio interview.


Clinton said she was surprised that "neither Iowa nor Mississippi has broken through to being able to elect a woman statewide."


"You know there's a lot of strong women from both those states, and it's time that women had a chance to have full equality in the political process. It didn't happen in Iowa, it hasn't happened in Mississippi. and it's time that it be changed," she said.


Now, to be fair, I should point out that Mississippi has elected several women to statewide office including two lieutenant governors. But of course they haven't elected a female governor or member of Congress, and this is most certainly what the next President meant when she asked "How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?"


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