Affinity For Stupidity

by digby

They can’t let it go. Jane Hamsher highlights another bozo implying that there’s something wrong with appealing to female voters:

And here we go again. Tim Dickinson, editor of Rollingstone.com’s National Affairs Daily:

There’s only one thing that makes sense of the Clinton campaign’s clumsy and classless injection of race into her primary battle with Barack Obama. And that is that her victory in New Hampshire — impressive though it was — threatened to transform her into a special-interest candidate. Hillary would not have won that battle without exaggerated support from women. Despite having campaigned vigorously as a candidate who just-so-happened to be a woman, her lifeline came from affinity voters.

Hello, ladies! You may make up 57% of the Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, but you’re “affinity voters.” Congratulations.

Geez, that’s annoying. He goes on to say that nobody’s talking about Hillary’s shocking inability to win over the hearts and minds of male voters. (No word on why both of the male candidates are having such a terrible time winning over the hearts and minds of the women.)

Apparently winning the votes of women equals pandering to some sort of single issue special interest group. I hate to tell him but women are more than 50% of the population and even a bigger majority in the Democratic Party so it’s actually more valid to say that men are the special interest group, not women. If you wanted to be an idiot like this fellow, that is.

As I wrote before, both parties have been playing a “gender card” for decades, going out of their way to appeal to voters by showing off their candidates’ manly credentials. Were men voting their “affinity” when they said they would like to have a beer with Bush? I don’t know. Is the Culinary Union president wrong for saying that his members like Obama because a lot of them are immigrants and his father came from Kenya? I don’t think so. Did Mitt Romney win illegitimately because some Michigan Republicans liked the idea that he was a favorite son? You tell me.

The thing that makes me hot under the collar is that this is a typical unconscious assumption among analysts that anything but white, male votes are somehow illegitimate. They’ve done it for years about the black vote.

Here’s Josh Marshall:

It’s only the African-American vote, the argument goes, that keeps the Democratic party from becoming a permanent minority party.

That’s true of course. But what’s the point exactly? Presumably if you scratch out all the votes of a major constituency of any political party that would put a bit of a dent in their electoral fortunes, right?

If you wanted to be a little nasty you might, with equal merit, note that the Republican party’s goose would be cooked if we disenfranchised everyone who doesn’t believe in evolution.

CNN’s Bill Schneider gave an almost textbook version of this line a couple years ago on CNN …

Judy, how dependent are Democrats on the African-American vote?

Without black voters, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections would have been virtually tied, just like the 2000 election. Oh no, more Florida recounts!

What would have happened if no blacks had voted in 2000? Six states would have shifted from Al Gore to George W. Bush: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon. Bush would have won by 187 electoral votes, instead of five. A Florida recount? Not necessary.

Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? We checked the state exit polls for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. If no blacks had voted, many Southern Democrats would not have made it to the Senate. Both Max Cleland and Zell Miller needed black votes to win in Georgia. So did Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Bill Nelson in Florida, John Edwards in North Carolina, and Ernest Hollings in South Carolina.

Black votes were also crucial for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Jean Carnahan in Missouri. Washington state and Nevada don’t have many black voters, but they were still crucial to the victories of Harry Reid in Nevada and Maria Cantwell in Washington.

Nebraska and Wisconsin don’t have many black voters either, but Ben Nelson would have lost Nebraska without them and Russ Feingold would have lost Wisconsin, too, in both cases by less than half-a- percent. Bottom line? Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.

A hopeless minority. And Jim Jeffords’ defection from the GOP would not have meant a thing — Judy.

I don’t want to overstate the point. But nestled down deep in this argument is some sort of perhaps unconscious notion that the Dems are just hopelessly sucking wind among real voters and thus have to resort to padding their totals with blacks.

*my emphasis.

This idea of “padding” votes is ridiculous (and insulting) enough when they are referring to various sub-sets of the electorate. Implying that Clinton is “padding” her votes (“exaggerated support”) with a group that makes up half the population and a majority of the party is just stupid.

Women vote for a whole lot of reasons, and one of them likely is that some of them like the idea that a woman might be president. And I would bet you a hundred dollars that there are more than a few men who are voting against Clinton because they don’t want to see a woman president. Maybe we should just call it a draw and let this go, kay?

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