CLINTON

I know I may get some nasty comments for this post, but, whatever, bring it on....

I'm not voting for Hillary Clinton.

I'm actually undecided, but the one thing I know for certain is that I will not be supporting the Clintons. This has nothing to do with Hillary's policy choices (I agree with most of them) but with her diplomacy. I don't think the field is especially diverse this year outside of race and gender. No, if you are a democrat this is a bumper crop. Our party listened to complaints and has started leaning left again, not all the way left, not as left as it needs to in order for things to turn completely around, but left enough that the Green Party doesn't make as much since as it has 'lo these many years.

The reason I'm not supporting Hillary is because of the divisive strategies she and her husband and all of the Clintonites are using to divide the party along the lines of race and gender. Back in the day it was called the "Southern Strategy" and had as its primary tool white fear of black men. The invocation of "states rights" as code for segregation has now been replaced by Hillary's infamous LBJ comment, but the underlying sentiment is still there -- it takes White patronage to enact Black aspirations.

I've heard the arguments that she didn't "mean" it that way, that Black people are "overly sensitive" to implications of racial insensitivity, all of that just reinforces my desire to NOT vote for her. She's made much of having attended King's I HAVE A DREAM speech, but she doesn't talk about being a Goldwater Girl the following year and supporting a candidate who voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act. She talks about her husband being called "the first black president" and how she is in an "interracial marriage" -- that moniker was given him by a prominent author who was pointing out NOT that Clinton represented Black people politically, or was our advocate, but rather that many racial stereotypes of black people are more appropriately descriptive of poor people all across the US ("Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas" is the actual quote, you can check it out on Wikipedia, I'm trying to find the original source now).  This nickname was picked up on by the Clintons and found itself co-signed by the black community partially because of Bill Clinton's philandering ways.

As for Mr. Clinton, he has repeatedly engaged in "code" talking, employing terms and drawing analogies calculated to remind rural white voters that Mr. Obama is a black candidate, and implying that he isn't experienced enough to put together a government.  I don't buy that the Clintons are politically, socially or culturally too naive to understand the negative impact his statements (and her implicit complicity).  And I certainly hope that if those comments were in fact made in a space of racial ignorance, then I don't want her representing my country in this volatile foreign policy environment.

I don't believe in rewarding entitlement.  I don't believe in identity politics.  As a woman, I'm ashamed that Hillary is letting her husband play the big bad hubby defending her honor.  I'm ashamed that she is allowing her campaign to characterize her opponent as a young up-start rather than acknowledging and respecting the fact that Obama's struggle upwards has been as harrowing in its way as hers has been.  I don't believe in winning at all costs.  As she lays waste to her opponents in her pursuit of the nomination, she's losing the war at home.

I think Bill Clinton did a great job economically while he was in office, however, his stance on social issues was ridiculous (Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Welfare Reform that saw thousands of elderly African American women forced back to work in order to care for grandchildren) and helped to solidify the intrusion of socially conservative religious issues in Presidential politics.  I have no interest in seeing him, or his influence, back in the White House.  

I'm tired of this politics of fear.  Making a decision to base a campaign on race, gender or age smacks of fear.  

And I wish that John Edwards could find a bigger voice in this struggle.