To fellow Democrats.
When Shannon de Rubens, a stay-at-home mom, wears her Hillary Rodham Clinton button, she expects to be harassed. A woman in Bellevue [Washington] even pretended to spit on her once. That's all part of the game, when you're a Clinton backer in a land of Obama bumper stickers.
"I hate to say it, but that sort of acrimony between strangers has been standard in this campaign, especially locally," said de Rubens, who lives in Issaquah and co-founded two grass-roots campaign groups, the Hillraisers, in the region with more than 100 members total.
"We feel undervalued, mistreated and bullied. It's been an emotional journey," she said.
This nastiness is almost inevitable in identity politics, where the struggle is over who the candidates are, rather than what they have done, or what they stand for. De Rubens gives us an example:
De Rubens, 35, who worked at Microsoft for a decade, said she's found that many members of her Hillraisers groups have "related to [Clinton] on a deeply personal level, as mothers, and as women who have worked in a male-dominated fields."
And once it's personal, it isn't just politics anymore.
If you read the entire article, you will notice something significant: None of the Democrats quoted in the article say that their candidate would be a better president than the other candidate. Instead, all talk about how electing a candidate of the right sex, or color, would make them feel better. This might not do much harm if we were electing a homecoming queen or king, but we are choosing a president who will not be just a symbol, but who will make actual decisions.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(I can't help wondering whether Ms. de Rubens has complained about similar nastiness — when it was directed at Republicans. But whether she has or not, Obama supporters should still treat her with civility. And I say that despite knowing that this nastiness may help elect candidates who will try to do the best for all Americans, regardless of their race or sex. Most of the candidates who want to escape from identity politics, and to treat everyone equally, are Republicans, of course.
For those not familiar with this area, I should add that people are generally more civil here than in some other parts of the country, especially in prosperous suburbs of Seattle such as Bellevue and Issaquah.)
Posted by Jim Miller at May 20, 2008 03:47 PM | Email ThisLower primates at HA misrepresented tax comparisons (Clinton years to Bush years) that I grafted, with attribution, from another site. DJ asserts that, rather than dropping marginal-15% Clinton-era payers to the new marginal-10% bracket, Bush snatched Clinton-era non-payers out of the gutter and forced then to pay 10% at the margin. Heritage (below) disagrees.
Rabbit seems to concede the point that Bush tax cuts for the rich allow the poor to pay less than their fair share by pulling 15% payers down to 10%, and by taking millions of the poor off the rolls of payers and by expanding eligibility for the Republican EIC, but he whines that regressive payroll taxes continue to disproportionately afflict the poor.
FICA/Medicare payroll taxes are monuments to the evils of liberal statism. The Social Security quagmire is a good program gone awry; like EIC it represents a welfare transfer from rich to poor (who don't pay their fair share into their "private" "insurance" "accounts.")
Medicare, Ted Kennedy's false-advertising monster, and GWB's false-advertising drug benefit monster, is the gravest economic crisis we face. There's no way to fix it with sustainable tax policy, and it shows how innately regressive progressive liberalism is.
Here's Heritage re Bush tax cuts:
(L)awmakers lowÂered the initial tax brackets from 15 percent to 10 percent and then expanded the refundable child tax credit, which, along with the refundable earned income tax credit (EITC), reduced the typical low-income tax burden to well below zero. As a result, the U.S. Treasury now mails tax "refunds" to a large proportion of these Americans that exceed the amounts of tax that they actually paid. All in all, the number of tax filers with zero or negative income tax liability rose from 30 million to 40 million, or about 30 percent of all tax filers.[17] The remaining 70 percent of tax filers received lower income tax rates, lower investment taxes, and lower estate taxes from the 2001 legislation.Consequently, from 2000 to 2004, the share of all individual income taxes paid by the bottom 40 perÂcent dropped from zero percent to -4 percent, meanÂing that the average family in those quintiles received a subsidy from the IRS. (See Chart 6.) By contrast, the share paid by the top quintile of households (by income) increased from 81 percent to 85 percent.
Expanding the data to include all federal taxes, the share paid by the top quintile edged up from 66.6 percent in 2000 to 67.1 percent in 2004, while the bottom 40 percent's share dipped from 5.9 perÂcent to 5.4 percent. Clearly, the tax cuts have led to the rich shouldering more of the income tax burden and the poor shouldering less.
Posted by: Taxed on May 20, 2008 03:59 PM
Nail, meet hammer.
Posted by: pbj on May 20, 2008 03:59 PMThe left has lost lost the ability to disagree agreeably. Voltaire would NOT be a Democrat.
The premise that folks in the Northwest are somewhat immune from the un-civility of politics is outright wrong. A simple look at the Democratic controlled WA Legislature is all you need to prove my point. There is no attempt to work together with anyone else.
Posted by: Seabecker on May 20, 2008 04:17 PMExcellent question. Once, after attending a Tacoma Rainiers game a couple years ago, I returned to my car to find a sheet of yellow, lined paper folded up and tucked under my windshield wiper. Upon opening it, I found a note that read "F*** you! You Republican a**hole!"
I never met the person who left the note, but apparently my Bush-Cheney bumper sticker was enough to merit hatred so profound that the writer took the time to express it to me in absentia.
That's par for the course, unfortunately. Kind of blunts my sympathies for Ms. de Rubens
Posted by: Nathan on May 20, 2008 05:06 PMAt this point, there just aren't that many disenfranchised groups around any more. And there's plenty of avenues to wealth so where are the barriers. To me, everyone at this point should be a Republican and fight against high taxes. Nothing else makes sense logically.
Posted by: John Bailo on May 20, 2008 05:26 PMI believe there was even more property damage that I wasn't aware of as it generated some interest on the AM talk radio scene for a time.
I still pass by that house daily and wonder whether they'll dare to practice their 1st amendment right to express their support for the 2008 candidate of their choice without similar backlash. I'm sure that will depend on if that candidate is the only accepted choice of the" Liberal Seattle groupthinkers" who will no doubt be on the look out for non-conformists to their ideologic bent.
Posted by: Rick D. on May 20, 2008 05:40 PMMy neighbors, a bunch of kids who were renting the house down the street and living two to a room while paying their own way, witnessed it and let him know that unless the tires were paid for he would pay the price. I used to walk down the alley and hang out there on Fridays, listening to music and drinking beer.
Daddy's check paid the bill. Little mister Che wanna-be and the rest of the pathetic miserable failures were not quite so tough when friends of mine let him know what was in store for him unless the damage was compensated for.
Oh, Daddy's check paid the bill when Mr No Automobile Insurance totaled out my buddy's work truck a year or so later while driving drunk off his but.
Posted by: JDH on May 20, 2008 08:46 PMAnd oh, did it make me cry to see the Kentucky exit polls. 50% of Kentucky Dems said they would vote for Obama, 32% said they will vote for McCain and 15% will stay home!
One final thing I find VERY, VERY curious. In an AP poll conducted from April 2 to 14, 50 percent of Democrats said they voted for Hillary and 43 percent said voted for Obama. What would motivate them to lie like this?
Posted by: rawdibob on May 20, 2008 09:39 PMMy car was vandalized and WA Revote stickers forceable removed in 2004. I learned my lesson. If you are not there to protect your property in a liberal area like the Puget Sound, you don't want to put up anything other than HorsesAss approved placards, stickers, etc.
Such is the tolerant Seattle left.
Posted by: Jeff B. on May 21, 2008 09:15 AMNo. Chance. And I have no idea why you would write such a thing.
If you're somehow under the mistaken belief that Puget Sound Ds are more civil than the rest of the country, that's because you're only dealing with the backstabbing passive/aggressive ones.
And yeah. Feeling real sorry for Ms. de Rubens.
/sarc