While I am a Hillary Clinton supporter and I have contributed to her campaign, I don't think sexism was rampant in this primary process as as former VP-candidate Geraldine Ferraro has asserted. However, I do think Obama was coddled and Clinton was put on the spot much more often than he was in the debates.
The debates were highly biased and seemingly structured to benefit Obama. I watched 3 of the debates-- so I can only speak about what I saw in those. However, I saw moderators who gave Clinton the questions first. She would outline her plan in a way average people could understand. Then the question would be turned over to Obama and he would simply echo her plan in more general terms. Nothing like spoon-feeding Obama his answers. In the commentary after the debates, the pundits would rave about Obama and claim he had better ideas while failing to note that his entire platform was predicated on the platform Clinton put together nearly a year before he got into the race. Nobody ever called Obama out for pirating his entire platform and nobody ever gave Clinton credit for formulating her platform (and the one Obama pirated) on her own. Obama is running on Clinton's ideas. And the fact that nobody has called him out for it disturbs me greatly.
The Clinton campaign also made some huge blunders. First, they relied on old money for their funding in the primaries, disregarding the fact that there was a cap on how much these wealthy donors can contribute to a primary campaign.
Second, Clinton's main constituency of supporters consist of the working class, the elderly, and the poor-- all of whom don't necessarily have money to give to political causes and many of whom work two jobs or have frail health and can't show up for caucuses. This led directly to the lead Obama built in caucus states.
Third, Clinton's campaign management staff failed to realize that the Democratic Party awards delegates proportionally in the primary process-- if Clinton gets 53% of the vote, then she gets 53% of the delegates, not all of them. This misunderstanding of the rules led the Clinton camp to focus on the big states, employing a strategy that would be sound for the general election (where winning by 1% of the vote would give the candidate all of the electoral votes) but very unsound for the primaries (where winning by 1% of the vote might get you one more delegate than your opponent).
All of these failures in tactics and strategy contributed directly to Clinton's fall from front-runner status and may carry more blame than sexism.
All this being said, however, Clinton won the big states-- the ones a presidential candidate has to win to get into the White House. Secondly, she has broader appeal because the majority of Americans have voted for her (she won California, New York, and the actual voting in Texas and those states have highest populations in the US). Obama has won only in states where there are large numbers of blacks and college-educated democrats. He has little to no appeal among the elderly, the working class, the poor, or the Hispanic population.
In the end, I do not think either Clinton or Obama can win the general election without the other as their running mate. Hillary Clinton needs Barak Obama because he appeals to younger voters and blacks-- two sectors she has not done well with. Barak Obama needs Hillary Clinton to win over the working class, the poor, and the elderly-- the sectors of the population he fails to attract.
The sad part of all of this is that we could be sitting here the day after the November election asking ourselves if racism cost Obama the presidency. Several news networks and political pundits have cited polls that suggest many people among the working class, the elderly, and poor may not vote for Obama simply because he's black. So, apparently, the majority of democratic voters are more comfortable with a white woman than a black man in the White House. While this isn't "right", it's a statistical "fact" that the Democratic National Party is going to have to consider along with who won the Big States before it hands the nomination to anybody.
So, unless Clinton concedes, this isn't over yet. And if she shows well in Kentucky, Oregon, and the states left to vote in early June, she has a good argument to push for the seating of the Michigan and Florida delegates or push for new primaries in those states. So. . .hold on to your seats because this may get messy as messy as the Gore-Bush issue did in Florida.
Funny how Florida keeps rearing it's head as a major sticking point in the democratic process in US politics and a Bush is governor of Florida, huh?
