The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

The Bitter Truth

Melinda, your observations last night seem to have foreshadowed much of today’s postmorteming: Everyone now agrees it’s all about the bitterness. The only point of contention is whether all this spluttering rage indeed motivates voters—as you suggest—or pisses them off—as this Times op-ed insists. (Tuesday’s result was “even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work.”)

More and more I see this as liberals foreshadowing their own November defeat. Everyone is so damn terrified of the inevitable, invincible, candidate-crushing Republican Attack Machine that the only metric left to us is which candidate can survive it. If that’s all we care about, we should probably just nominate Karl Rove to run against McCain in November. And here’s the kicker: It feeds on itself. Your angry Clinton supporters read this morning’s Times op-ed about bitterness, and it makes them even more bitter. (“She can’t catch a break. Everyone in the media is in the tank for Obama. Even when she wins, she loses. ...”) Whereas the pacifist Obama-cats like myself read that their guy is poised to take the gloves off, and it mostly just makes us want to stay home.