A troubling politics of hatred...

An excerpt from Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in todays New York Times, "Hate Springs Eternal":

The bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre. Both candidates still standing are smart and appealing. Both have progressive agendas (although I believe that Hillary Clinton is more serious about achieving universal health care, and that Barack Obama has staked out positions that will undermine his own efforts). Both have broad support among the party’s grass roots and are favorably viewed by Democratic voters.

Supporters of each candidate should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod.

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.

The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part, yet the “scandal” became a symbol of the Clinton administration’s alleged corruption.

During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.

And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.

I call it Clinton rules, but it’s a pattern that goes well beyond the Clintons. For example, Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.

For now, Clinton rules are working in Mr. Obama’s favor. But his supporters should not take comfort in that fact.

For one thing, Mrs. Clinton may yet be the nominee — and if Obama supporters care about anything beyond hero worship, they should want to see her win in November.

For another, if history is any guide, if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, he will quickly find himself being subjected to Clinton rules. Democrats always do.

But most of all, progressives should realize that [this] is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.

I should note that just this past week I had so-called "progressive" pro-Obama friends citing Republican/conservative rhetoric (just as the Obama campaign has been doing) and conservative writers (is Peggy Noonan, a speech writer for Reagan and Bush Sr., really a progressive?) in order to question Clinton's healthcare plan and campaign. Who really sold out to corporate special interests here though? The one with the plan closer to universal healthcare (i.e. Clinton) or the one further away (i.e. Obama)?

Perhaps Barack's "high road" isn't so high after all though. Perhaps he's the one doing the real "bamboozling" in these elections. I can only hope that Obama's supporters have the intelligence and humility to admit to his imperfections, otherwise their movement of "change" will continue to look to me to be incredibly hypocritical and superficial just like almost everything else in politics, but perhaps even more so precisely because of their continuous claims not to be so.

UPDATE: I just came across two entertaining and interesting blogposts by Stanley Fish, "All You Need Is Hate" and "A Calumny a Day To Keep Hillary Away". He too is writing about the strange phenomena of Hillary hatred that seems to permeate this country, quipping that "Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity" and "If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative." The second article, a follow-up to the first, is especially funny.