It's so inconvenient when losers keep winning!

I haven't bothered to write much about the current election in a while, but the last few weeks have had me shaking my head. I'm just astonished by the treatment of Hillary Clinton's campaign by many in the party and the press. For so long there has been the constant drumbeat of calls for her to quit. The insults took nearly every form: she's a sore loser, she's wrecking the Democrats' chances, she doesn't have support, she's the candidate of the old (read: racist/losing) Democratic party.

Now I'm not a big Hillary fan. I actually think she's only marginally less bad than Obama. My favorite candidate dropped out long ago because nobody liked him but me. Oh well. But let's stop for a minute and think about what we've done in the process of vilifying Hillary.

The party made a gigantic, colossal, ridiculous, horrifying mistake by nullifying the Michigan and Florida primaries. I don't believe that they should have taken results from the primaries as they were done (that would certainly not be fair to Obama in Michigan), but they absolutely should have called "do over." The cost of new primaries and the precedent of special treatment is far less of a concern to me than the near disenfranchisement of so many primary voters. This isn't Zimbabwe or Kenya - we can redo a primary in a fair manner that would get to the actual preferences of Michigan and Florida voters. Their voices are not being properly heard, and in a primary where even Montana managed to be pivotal, it should have been done.

The attitude of the media and the party has done a great disservice to women. I remember the day I realized as a child that my grandmothers were born into an America where they couldn't vote. I now wonder what we will say to our collective granddaughters when they learn about the first really viable female presidential candidacy. How could a woman have won so many primaries and still be so consistently be called a loser (and she won them right up to the end)? The labels used in this campaign were not the language you hear in any other close race - no nail biting or neck-and-neck. The moment Obama won Iowa the new press meme ran rampant: She's lost! Now she must crawl into a hole and disappear! Wait! Why is she still here? She must be ruining everything!

It's quite disingenuous for people to keep going on and on about Obama's campaign as being a shocking, surprise victory as well. I remember the 2004 convention. Anyone who saw that production was well aware of the collective gush that followed his speech. And the gush kept happening long after that. It would have been surprising if he hadn't managed a very successful run for the candidacy.

And now there has been so much focus on the question of racism, it's nearly tarred every Hillary supporter out there. The claim that Hillary represents the "old" Democratic party, which started long before the talk of door-to-door campaigners hearing racial slurs, is particularly damaging to the party. Treating Hispanics, women, and blue collar workers as if they are all part of Strom Thurmond's Democratic party only pushes people away. And it sorely misrepresents the true base of the party. Are we now to think that women aren't the backbone of the party? That Hispanics aren't a growing electoral force? That working class people, who have been hit incredibly hard by the economic changes of the last decade, shouldn't be a major focus? Get real.

And just how are we going to explain this one to the next generation? "Well, you see honey, she may have won a lot of votes, and she may have kept winning primaries, but not all of her votes could really count, and some might have been from racists. And by continuing to win, she just got in the way of the real winner. So, what you should learn from this is that if you are very close to winning, but it's not 100% sure you will win, you should just give up so that people will still like you."

So here we are; Obama now gets to preside over a party that has spent several months devouring itself. It wasn't the long campaign that did the damage, or even the candidates, really. Candidates are always going to try to spin things in ridiculous ways. You just have to ignore that and move on.

I blame the press and the party regulars. They turned this from a constructive fight about minor policy differences into a destructive battle over who really counts as a Democrat.