Republicans don’t see any reason to wait around until 2016 for the next presidential election to start insulting Hillary Clinton and the women of America.
Republicans have so perfected the art of alienating major voting blocs they’ve moved seamlessly from relentlessly attacking every act by our first African American president to relentlessly attacking every act by the woman they fear will be our first female president.
After Barack Obama’s overwhelming re-election crushed the Republicans’ absurd attempt to paint a moderate Democratic African American president as a dangerous, foreign-born Socialist, the party immediately began its ugly campaign to caricature Clinton as the Wicked Witch of the East.
You’d think Republicans would have figured out by now that driving so many different people away from their party—just about every voter who’s not a sour, aging, straight or deeply closeted, white male—is not a workable strategy for success in a highly diverse country.
And, in fact, for just an instant after their 2012 election debacle, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus from Wisconsin suggested the party move away from repellent hate politics.
But Republicans just can’t bring themselves to do it.
When a few Republican senators dared to support badly needed immigration reform, the right-wing tea party picked off a prominent congressional leader for not hating Latinos enough, absolutely terrifying other elected Republicans.
So Republicans continue alienating Latinos at the same time their Hate Hillary Campaign is kicking into high gear.
They’re desperate to try to prevent Obama’s history-making eight years from being followed by another history-making eight years of Clinton as the nation’s first woman president.
Think about it. Sixteen straight years with Democrats in the presidency will finally shatter the Republicans’ last bastion of right-wing control—their shaky 5-4 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
As their power slips away, the extreme Republicans on the high court are frantically trying to sabotage civil rights, voting rights, campaign finance reform and women’s access to health care while they still can.
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Walker Signed Anti-Woman Laws
It doesn’t matter that Clinton can’t be on the ballot for another two and a half years. Republicans have loathed her ever since she was first lady. Republicans intensely hate Democratic first ladies because they’re strong women who support such radical ideas as health care and healthy eating.
Then Clinton was even uppity enough to become U.S. senator and secretary of state, important jobs that are supposed to go to men in our society.
When America under President George W. Bush was attacked by terrorists on 9/11, both parties came together behind a president Democrats didn’t like very much.
When America under President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton was attacked by terrorists in Libya in 2012, Republicans gleefully joined in, attacking them both.
Now all Clinton has to do is go on a book tour to be bombarded with hypocritical Republican attacks.
She’s accused of making a lot of money from books and lectures by the party favoring tax cuts for billionaires. She’s questioned about why it took her so long to support marriage equality by Republicans who don’t.
Republican vitriol toward progressive women in politics can be cut with a knife. Republicans prefer their women to act against their own interests by opposing job and pay equality and, in an absurd contradiction, abstaining from both contraception and abortion.
This open hatred of Clinton and of fair treatment for women in general can only help strong Democratic women candidates this year in states like Kentucky, New Hampshire, Georgia and North Carolina to keep a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.
In Wisconsin, the more that Republicans denigrate women, the more it helps Democrat Mary Burke, a successful businesswoman running against Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who’s presided over one of the most anti-women administrations in state history.
Openly opposed to women making their own health care decisions, Walker signed laws designed to shut down women’s health services and to require any woman who wants to end a pregnancy—a legally protected right for 40 years—to jump through humiliating hoops.
Republicans really do have to drive all those ugly haters out of their party if they want to attract decent voters in the future. The Democrats did it back in the 1960s.
When Democrats embraced civil rights, vicious, white, racist Democrats abandoned the party and became vicious, white, racist Republicans. Richard Nixon called it his “Southern strategy.”
If Republicans also turned their backs on those ugly extremists, the tea party would become an embarrassing fringe group without any real power to stop social progress in this country.
Republicans already have driven most people of color from their party.
Republicans are making another fatal mistake in alienating women who consider themselves intelligent human beings capable of making their own decisions about their lives in which they enjoy the same rights and opportunities as anyone else.
Many of those women are their own wives and daughters.
Comment at expressmilwaukee.com. n
TAGS: women’s issues, Hillary Clinton, Reince Priebus, abortion, Scott Walker, Mary Burke, civil rights, voting rights, campaign finance reform, Obama,
