Kennedy, Hart and Hillary (or: Hillary as Black Panther)

Driving into work today I heard some Hillary supporter whining (do Hillary and her supporters have tones of address other than "whining" or "shrill"?) that Gary Hart and Teddy Kennedy were allowed to carry on their candidacies until the convention and that that the calls for Hillary to end her campaign were sexist.

Two points:

1. The notion that the needs and interests of women voters can only be served by women politicians is itself terribly sexist and in fact fundamentally undemocratic. My interests are represented in the U.S. Congress by Gwen Moore (with whom, to belabor the point, I share neither gender nor race) and she represents those interests with at least acceptable ability. To suggest that a politician must belong to a group to serve the interests of that group is to subscribe to some sort of bizarre atavistic theory of representation more suited to the separatist movements of the 1970's than to the needs of America today.
   
2. It is telling that this Hillary supporter takes 1980 and 1984 as her models. In both 1980 (Kennedy) and 1984 (Hart), the party lost the general election by huge margins (although to be fair, the full measure of blame for those defeats cannot be laid upon Kennedy and Hart) and emerged internally devastated. I suppose that should Hillary's greed split the party, she can have in 2012 the coronation she hoped for in 2008 with Obama (and through him, young or minority party members) safely relegated to either the backbench or the dustbin (where we clearly belong) and go on to give McCain a second term.
   

The story closes with the Hillary supporter threatening that if Hillary is not awarded the nomination she (and her co-conspirators) will vote McCain in November.

Let me be perfectly clear so that there is no chance of misunderstanding me: A vote for McCain in November is a vote for someone who has consistently been against Roe v. Wade, against the availability of contraception (for both minors and adults), against pay equity, against flex time, against universal health care and on the wrong side of every other issue that affects working families.

But Obama defeated Hillary, so they won't vote for him.