by Molly Ivors
(at right: Maureen Does Morgantown)
Of all Maureen's poses, the ones where she attempts to capture The Spirit of the Heartland© are perhaps the most annoying. Face it, Maureen: you're a Feng Shui-living Manhattanite with 100 pairs of shoes and the best dye job your inexplicably large paycheck can buy, which is to say: still a dye job. You have no secret window into the souls of West Virginians to determine why they vote as they do, and should not pretend to. Your interest in Appalachia is anthropological at best, and shoehorning it into the predetermined narrative you've constructed about the Democratic primary is unfair, belittling, and snide.
Now that we've got that out of the way: today's outrage. You will recall that when I last checked in on MoDo, she was working her "Hillary is a sympathetic truck stop waitress who, like Peter Quincy Taggart, will 'never give up, never surrender'; Barack is a girly man who can't drink beer properly and disdains all this running for office shit as beneath him" angle. The skeevy "if he can't beat a girl, he can't beat a war hero" gong was being banged theatrically, and she was slipping in comments about Bill Clinton's libido at every opportunity. (If only, if only, Bill had turned his attentions to MoDo, perhaps we would have been spared all this.) All caught up? Okay.
In today's outing, we learn that Barack Obama lost West Virginia because it's a state filled with racist, stupid rednecks who must be lied to before their votes are purchased, and Obama doesn't play that way.
Charlie Peters, the legendary former editor of the liberal Washington Monthly who ran Jack Kennedy’s campaign in Kanawha County, W. Va., said Obama should study how J.F.K. managed to win there despite raging anti-Catholicism.
(My father, in West Virginia once on business, found his car had been flipped over by some locals furious about a sign on it supporting the first Catholic Democratic nominee, Al Smith.)
..........
J.F.K. bought affection in West Virginia. “The boss of Logan County said 35,” Peters recalled. “He meant $3,500, but Kennedy thought it was $35,000, so he gave him $35,000. They put out all this money and they carried the precincts.” (Hillary has been using street money more than Obama, though it is unclear how much it has helped.)
West Virginia loved F.D.R. “because the Depression had been very tough for them and F.D.R. was kind to them,” Peters said. (On my father’s trip, he was threatened by a man who asked him about “rumors” that President Roosevelt was in a wheelchair and threatened to thrash any man who said so. My dad, a detective who served on protective details for F.D.R., assured the ruffian that Roosevelt was “a fine, athletic man.”)
Much can be explained about MoDo's worldview, I think, when she mentions her Kennedy Democrat/Reagan Republican father, who I'm sure was a fine public servant and all that, but who clearly inspired Freudian issues in his little girl at which Agamemnon would cringe. See, you have to lie to the rednecks, because they're dumb and deserve it. Or something.
The framing here allows her to hit the trifecta: slamming Obama (he didn't try in WV!), Clinton (she lied and bought the rednecks off!) and West Virginians, in one fell swoop. From a purely technical angle, it's compelling stuff, but of course to admire it, one must close one's eyes to the pernicious effects of all this bashing.
Possibly, just possibly, West Virginians voted for Hillary because she is slightly to the left of Obama on domestic issues. Or because they like her health care plan. Or because West Virginia is a state which fought hard to establish its unions, and unions are one part of the Dem coalition generally (though of course not exclusively) behind her. Or maybe it's none of our goddamned business why people vote as they do.
I happen to think that Clinton should step out at this point, not because she's so far behind (she isn't), but because the money spent now will be needed in the fall. It's strictly economic. I'm not pleased with the way her campaign has been run, and I'd cheerfully lock Mark Penn and James Carville in a 55 gallon drum together for a good decade as punishment. She's a better candidate, and would have been a better president, than these yahoos communicated. And for that I'm sad and frustrated.
But none of this really has any impact on the sheer coastal snobbery of Maureen Dowd. Her "Obama is a girly man" schtick is of noble and ancient vintage, but it may just have turned to vinegar at this point. Use it on a salad, Maureen, not on us. We know this election is too important to be subject to your bullshit analysis.