Opinion: Pumas, you’re worse than cougars
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It took a while, but Hillary Clinton finally came around to campaign for Barack Obama. And now, they’ve taken their show on the road, as The Times reports. The wife of the Man from Hope went to Unity, N.H., today and said, with Obama at her side, ‘Unity is not only a beautiful place... As we can see, it’s a wonderful feeling -- isn’t it?’ Clinton apparently bore no grudge about Obama’s hiring of her former (and unfavored) campaign aide. And Obama, meanwhile, pledged to help Clinton pay off her debts.
Unfortunately some of her female fans haven’t quite made it to Unity. In fact, some of them are deriding the whole concept by calling themselves Pumas, to stand for ‘Party Unity My Ass,’ and perhaps unintentionally invoking another not-so-complimentary feline term for women. Some insist they’ll vote for John McCain, while others plan to abstain, or write in Clinton’s name. Rebecca Traister of Salon had the best explanation of their reasoning. (Traister also had a solid explainer of why liberal women were so peeved by the attitude of male Obamaniacs, many of whom, she noted, insisted they would vote McCain if Clinton was the Democratic nominee. In other words, this isn’t chicks-holding-grudges, Chris Matthews fans.) On why they’re mad at Obama himself:
...for some, there is lingering sting -- about the paucity of women in Obama’s top advisory team during the campaign, about the way they feel the Obama campaign stained Clinton’s supporters -- and Clinton and her husband too -- as racists, about the patronizing ‘You’re likable enough’ comment during a January debate. Perhaps the worst slight, in their eyes, came after Obama had secured the nomination. When he should have been smoothing ruffled feathers, he instead decided to hire Patti Solis Doyle, longtime Hillaryland denizen from whom the senator is now reportedly estranged....
But as Traister notes in conclusion (and in fairer terms than her colleague Walter Shapiro, who calls the Democratic defectors ‘errant voters’ making an ‘empty threat’):
These angry people have nowhere else to go. So the safe expectation is that they will fall in line without much kicking and screaming. And that, ultimately, is why many of them are kicking and screaming. Yes, they’re going to vote for Obama. Of course they’ll vote for him. The truth is, they’ll probably love voting for him. But after what they feel has been done to them -- the way in which they were written off, marginalized and resented, their hopes mocked and their history-making ambitions dismissed as retrograde identity politicking -- damned if they’re going to be nice girls about it.
In other words, if Pumas actually do vote for McCain, they’re presumably voting against what attracted them to Clinton in the first place. McCain’s dismal record on reproductive rights and other women’s issues is well-documented, and I can’t resist referencing the not-very-nice epithet he once hurled at his wife. And, of course, with that name, they’re expanding the annoying ‘cougar’ meme -- that women doing what they want makes them somehow predatory.
So Puma anger might be well-justified, but sometimes, you just have to vote for the lesser of two evils -- because you can’t throw your vote away on a third party.
*Photo courtesy Associated Press.