Ephron: Which does Pennsylvania hate more, blacks or women?

posted at 7:16 am on April 21, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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If you thought that Barack Obama’s Crackerquiddick remarks in San Francisco were some kind of anomaly, one read of Nora Ephron’s latest column will disabuse bitter xenophobic gun-grabbing Jesus freaks middle Americans of that notion. Ephron gives Pennsylvanians a heavy dose of Hollywood heartburn in her analysis of the primary race tomorrow at the Huffington Post. As she sees it, it boils down to PA voters deciding whom they hate least, and she includes a heaping dollop of her own hate on top:

Here’s another thing I don’t like about this primary: now that there are only two Democratic candidates, it’s suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race. This may have always been true, but weeks ago it wasn’t so obvious — once upon a time there were eight candidates, and although six of them withered away, their presence in the campaign managed to obscure things. Even around the time of Ohio, when there were primarily three candidates, the outlines were murky, because Edwards was still in there, picking up votes from all sectors.

But now there are two and we’re facing Pennsylvania and whom are we kidding? This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)

To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal. …

 

 

I spent the weekend listening to one commentator after another saying that Obama has it locked up, it’s a done deal. I dunno. Hillary is the true whack-a-mole and if she survives on Tuesday, it will be a whole new ballgame. And it will be all because of white men. Plus ca change.

I’ve seen this construct before. People excuse their hatred and prejudice by claiming a privilege through dating members of a group they want to stereotype. Oh, I can talk that way about black men/Asian women/white men because I’ve dated some of them. Unless she’s dated all white men, it’s still prejudice, but it’s a typical expression of hatred for a group for which political correctness allows to express that kind of mindless stereotyping.

And as with Obama, the stereotype is that of everyone outside of Hollywood, Manhattan, San Francisco, and perhaps parts of Seattle as being virulent bigots and misogynists. Ephron sees America as Obama did in his private fundraiser on Billionaires Row in Frisco — as a few oases of enlightened thought surrounded by vast deserts of mouthbreathers. The elitist sneer jumps off the page, and while it doesn’t contain any references to religion or guns — proving that she’s marginally brighter than Obama — it reeks of the elitist, snobby idiocy that afflicts the urban hard Left.

The candidate that wins Pennsylvania tomorrow will do so by generating the most loyalty, not by generating the least amount of hatred. The only hatred seen in this campaign appears to be focused in Hollywood, San Francisco, and other so-called “liberal” salon. Their hatred for middle America and its values will reflect on their candidates this fall.

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