Hillary, it's time.

For some reason I've withheld from posting anything overtly political, as in commenting on the current election cycle. It's time for the gloves to come off.

Hillary, girl, step aside. It's important. It's necessary. It's time. You're doing more harm for our cause now than good. And by our cause I mean all the other hegemommies out there. We champion your ball-busting demeanor. We LOVE that you don't bake cookies. We adore that you are the brains behind Bill's bravado. Most of all, we just love that men hate you simply because they fear you. They cannot demean you by sexualizing you and they cannot outsmart you. So instead they hate you and, by all appearances, you don't give a rat's ass. For that we love you because we see ourselves in you.

But speaking for myself now, I cannot support race-baiting any more than I can support gender-baiting, and your campaign, and your supporters, are race-baiters. The voters you woo in typically New-Democrat fashion are not Democrats. Many call themselves Reagan Democrats, or conservative Democrats. I call them Republicans. These are the same voters who for the past eight years actually believed that the Republican party gave a shit about them. They honestly thought the corporate robber-barons financing the Bush & Co., campaign would protect their jobs, provide them affordable health care, and, most importantly, save the institution of marriage from all those nefarious twinks. Oh, and the jihadists. We need protection from them also so your supporters vote for the party that will protect their jobs from the Mexicans, their cultural institutions from the gays, and their freedom from the Muslims. Those are your voters.

Do you really think if given the choice between a woman and McCain these voters will vote for you any more than they would vote for Obama? C'mon. You're a smart woman and you know better. These voters all go Republican in November, because they always go Republican.

I know you know better because I've watched you position yourself for this run since your first Senate victory. You vote Republican party-line at almost every opportunity. You want to bomb Iran as soon as you can. Your health care plan leaves all real power in the hands of the insurance industry. Your husband's administration (and the basis of your "experience" claim) shut out the working class with NAFTA and kicked the gays with Don't Ask Don't Tell. You pander to Hispanic-conservative racism, suburban fear-mongering and, at every opportunity, divide the true Democratic base to shore up personal support. You make millions of dollars a year, live the majority of your adult life in stately government mansions yet campaign as a commoner. Jeez, that sounds familiar. You learned a lot from the Bush II campaign, and its showing.

The thing is, I don't hate you, and I don't even hate on your political decisions because I am sure they are creatures of necessity. I understand that for a woman to get to your position of power that you had to make some compromises. I get it. I've made my own. I also get that just because I'm an egg-headed liberal that the nominee doesn't have to represent my "far out there" views. I can handle a candidate that plays to the center. So long as that is the center of the left, and you Hillary, you have been playing to the center of the right.

There's nothing I want as badly as a woman president. Well, maybe a few things, but for the good of the cause, we need a woman in office. Apparently this is a radical concept in the US, although not so much so for our democratic counterparts in the rest of the world as the UK, Germany, and a host of other industrialized nations have done just fine with it. But I also think as white women here in the states we have a larger ghost to exorcise.

History has used our white femininity as a means of whipping up racial frenzy and fear. Those early race-baiters preached that our country's fragile white women needed protection from the exotic sexual appetite of all things black. Miscegenation laws and Jim Crowe owe their very existence to the cultural urge to protect our women (and by default of female biology, our future) from the heart of darkness. Hillary, you are now, perhaps unwittingly, writing a new chapter in this country's abysmal history of race-baiting. It's got to stop.

I know the impetus of this blog is a vent for all the shit I take as a woman in a man's world. But I have not for a second lost sight of the fact that even in my diminished status in the professional world I remain absurdly privileged compared to my black female peers. Hillary, I think you could use some of that perspective.

And seriously, is your campaign, and the reporting of your campaign, not just a perfect illumination of the male gaze, the normative lens through which all cultural assumptions are formed? That gaze that has always pitted minority against minority, playing on women's perceived frailty as a cultural value endangered of being darkened. Do you really want to be such a pawn?

So please, Hillary, it's time. Let's let the Democrats, rather than the Republicans, choose our nominee. Your career has not arced yet, but if you insist on pressing forward in the manner in which you have since Iowa, then your defeat against McCain in November will do nothing but solidify the two dangerous cultural prejudices: that black men are still to be feared, and that women are too weak to ultimately govern. I know that is not the legacy you imagined as you set out on your campaign, yet it is the legacy you are helping to write. You've never settled for being simply another stereotype before, please don't do so now.