Thursday, March 6, 2008

Proud and Ashamed at the Same Time

First, I've been away on business and away from a computer, so this is my first chance to blog since Sunday.

That means I finally get to brag about how proud and pleased I was to see Ohio put Sen. McCain over the top to "certain nominee" status on Tuesday night.

My pride lasted exactly 12 hours.

On Wednesday morning I found a USA Today outside my hotel room door. As I was reading through it over breakfast, I became ashamed of Ohio. Well, not just Ohio, Texas, too. Actually, pretty much everybody. Why?

Well, on page 5A they showed the data for "Who Voted for Whom, and Why, in Two Key States", specifically Texas and Ohio (unfortunately I couldn't find the numbers on their web site, so I can only link to some graphs, which are not nearly as clear as the raw numbers). The part that made me ashamed was the breakdown of voters, by race and sex, and how they voted for Senators Clinton and Obama. Short version: The whites voted for the white and the blacks voted for the black, while the men voted for the man and the women voted for the woman. (By the way, the same was observed earlier in South Carolina.)

And this was by the voters of the party that prides itself on being the party of inclusion? The party of diversity? The party of tolerance?

Apparently racism and sexism are not yet things of the past, not even for Democrats.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While racism and sexism will always exist and these diversity issues will always transcend politics. Every sample usually contains what the population entails. Therefore, all of the "isms" are alive in every political affiliation.

K T Cat said...

You could also see this as rooting for the home team. Even though Bellichek was a cheater, the locals were all Patriots fans. Sometimes voting is nothing deeper than that. How often does some clearily scurrilous knave win his home state in a presidential election?