Now that the Democratic primary is finally over and we don’t have to fret about Obama losing anymore, we have the time to figure out what actually happened. For starters, did the right oppressed identity win? Should we be celebrating the historic triumph of the African American nominee or mourning Hillary’s historic defeat, given that she would have been the first woman to run for president on behalf of a major party?

Hillary and her supporters have argued that women have been waiting their turn for most of human history and that after 43 male presidents, it was time for Democrats to let a woman have a shot at the top job. The problem with this argument was that all 43 presidents were white men. So Obama’s camp could reasonably argue that given America’s original sin of racism, making a black man the Democratic candidate was rather more significant than nominating a white woman.

Since I’ve been an Obama enthusiast from the time I first read about him in 2003, I’m not neutral on this issue. Like many supporters of Obama, I’ve been puzzled by Hillary Clinton’s determination to stay in a race, which, for the past month at least, she knew she had no chance of winning. So I began visiting pro-Hillary websites to get some sense of what her base felt about the contest and Hillary’s likely defeat. Surfing through Donna Darko and Tennessee Guerilla Women and Hillary’s Voice among many other sites, the reasons behind Hillary’s persistence slowly became clearer to me.

On Hillary’s Voice, a supporter called Violet Socks had written a post headed, “Why I will not vote for Obama even if he’s the nominee — and why you shouldn’t either”. The burden of the post was that Hillary’s candidacy had been swamped by relentless miso- gyny both in the mainstream media and amongst political bloggers, that Obama’s campaign had done nothing to control this torrent of anti-woman hatred, that Obama himself had been subtly complicit in this prejudice and that voting for Obama would amount to rewarding miso- gyny, something no self-respecting feminist could do. Similarly, at Tennessee Guerilla Women, a poster wrote: “She represents us. She is opening doors for us. In the short span of her historic presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken a lifetime of venomous misogyny and she has taken it for all of us. If she has not reawakened the long dormant feminist movement, no one can. If she wins, we win. If she loses, we lose.”

The wrong way to read these websites would be to assume that the visceral hostility to Obama that’s obvious on their posts and in their comments sections, is a cover for white racism. It certainly accounts for the tone of a substantial minority of the commenters, but Clinton won as many votes as Obama did in the course of these 54 caucuses and primaries, and if racism powered those 18 million people who supported her, Obama could save himself a lot of trouble by conceding the presidency to McCain now.

Donna Darko, an Asian American feminist and blogger and an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton argues that relatively low percentages of Clinton voters are willing to commit themselves to voting for Obama in the presidential election (larger percentages of Obama voters profess a willingness to vote for Clinton in the event of her becoming the Democratic nominee) not because of race or class, but because they resent the miso- gyny of the campaign. Darko concedes that race and class are factors in the Democratic race, but argues that they are less salient than gender if the Democratic establishment is interested in understanding Obama’s failure to make headway with women, specially white women.

In a rhetorically brilliant inversion of the Obama-Clinton race, Violet Socks asks us to consider a scenario where Clinton is ahead in the delegate count, but only marginally, and nearly every blogger and editorialist and television anchor is being snide about Obama’s campaign to become the Democratic nominee. Where journalists make fun of a black man’s hair, his dress sense, and, worst of all, his dumb refusal to give up his seat to the white woman candidate in the interest of ‘party unity’. A Democratic party that rewarded such behaviour wouldn’t be entitled to the support of self-respecting African Americans come the presidential elections, so why should the party imagine that it can permit brazen miso- gyny and expect women to forgive and forget in November?

It is certainly true that Hillary Clinton has endured derisive comment, which, if directed at Obama, would be construed as racism. For example, an influential blogger, Andrew Sullivan, has spent months skewering Clinton’s aspirations, her personality, her narcissism and her family generally. The trouble is that it is hard to know how much of this invective is directed at Hillary Clinton, the woman candidate, and how much at Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill. A large section of the American commentariat loathes Bill Clinton and a good part of its opposition to Hillary is based upon her relentless exploitation of her husband’s credentials. Her claim to be the more experienced and tested leader is largely based on the eight years she spent as First Lady through the two terms of her husband’s presidency. As an outsider to American politics, it’s very hard to see how Clinton can be cast as a feminist role model. I detested Margaret Thatcher’s politics but she got to the prime ministership on her own steam. Hillary seems more in the mould of Indira Gandhi or Benazir Bhutto than Thatcher or Golda Meir: a woman riding the coat tails of a male relative.

A more substantial criticism of Obama made by pro-Hillary commentators is that he seems too willing to give ground on core Democratic issues like abortion and universal healthcare. While Obama’s voting record is liberal, economists like Paul Krugman have pointed out that on healthcare he is some degrees to the right of Hillary and seems eager, too eager, to give the benefit of the doubt to health insurance companies. Also, while Obama is pro-choice in the matter of abortion, he has publicly acknowledged that the other side has reasonable arguments to make.

Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of Obama’s position, for many women like Violet Socks, this is rather like Hillary, a white woman, going “... out of her way to say how much she admires and respects those Republicans who don’t think African-Americans should have the right to vote.” This might seem over the top as an analogy, but in the charged world of American politics, Roe vs Wade is a holy war, and no Democratic feminist wants any concessions made on their behalf by a candidate with no first-hand experience of owning a womb.

Finally, a strong undercurrent in the comments sections of these websites suggests that Obama is seen not necessarily as a black man, but as a young male usurper, who doesn’t want to wait his turn, and who, in his ambition and his male sense of entitlement, has elbowed out a woman who had paid her dues.

Am I the wiser for trawling these sites? Yes, I am. Which is not to say that I’ve changed my mind. As a foreign spectator, I am moved by Obama’s rhetorical gifts and left cold by Clinton’s television persona. She looks like a grinning mask to me and in her interviews and speeches and debate interventions, she radiates a bizarre sense of entitlement which to my Indian eyes seems dynastic. She has been unfairly pilloried for remarks that were clumsy without being racist, but she has also knowingly sharpened her rhetoric on the whetstone of race, such as the time when she declared that she and not Obama represented hardworking white Americans. So, yes, I can see some of the points her supporters make, and I understand her keenness to stay in the race, to demonstrate that she represents large constituencies that Obama doesn’t. But I still think the best candidate won. I’m sceptical of Obama’s ‘change’ rhetoric but there’s nothing to suggest that he would be a less capable president than Hillary or McCain. And all other things being equal, an African American presidency offers Americans a shot at redemption that they’d be fools to refuse.

Postscript:

The key to understanding the extent of Obama’s achievement is to understand that he’s a smoker. You look at Barack Obama’s lips and you know that this man’s been channelling nicotined air for a very long time. The two years I lived in New York as a private citizen I stopped smoking. Not because I wanted to, but because there was a free choice between not smoking and having friends and smoking and being a social leper. Republicans might cut you some slack if you smoke (because smoking harks back to the time when real men were completed by Marlboros) but the liberal Democrats who were my neighbours in Park Slope, Brooklyn, were more likely to cut you in half. Hillary (so far as I know) neither smokes nor inhales. The real improbability of this primary is that a smoker persuaded an American electorate to vote him in over a non-smoker. The colour bar Obama had to clear for the nomination wasn’t the fact that his skin was black. It was the fact that his lips were blue.