Monday, February 04, 2008

The White Woman Problem



Yes, I know that this William Kristol clip is a joke:

From the February 3 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:

BILL KRISTOL: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment -- it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that's led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that.

[laughter]

JUAN WILLIAMS (National Public Radio correspondent and Fox News contributor): Not me!

HUME: Bill, for the record, I like white women.

KRISTOL: I know, I shouldn't have said that.

It's also a very clever divisive jab from Kristol, aimed at the Democrats and intended to do more damage to the faltering coalitions on that side. But I'm not going to talk about that business, except to note that Kristol might have looked at the voter figures to find out that all gender-and-race based groups have some people voting for Clinton and some people voting for Obama.

What I want to decode here is the group's reaction to Kristol's initial statement. First, note that the group Kristol mentions here: white women, is probably the largest of all the groups of people divided by their gender and their race. So it's not a small number of people that these three men discuss here.

Second, how does Kristol expand on his original comment? By noting that "we all live with the problem that is the white women." This is a reference to the lamentable fact that most white heterosexual men have a white woman somewhere among their belongings, to have intercourse with, a woman who must be treated nicely, whatever the men might think about white women or women in general or in the voting booth in particular. Ho ho ho.

Juan Williams, quite rightly, points out that he doesn't have to cope with that particular problem. Britt Hume points out that he actually likes white women. Really. Then they all guffaw in a manly way and Kristol admits that he shouldn't have said what he just did say, but it's ok because everybody knows that this was just a funny little joke between the guys.

There. I hope that I have done my bit for the humorless feminazi contingent today.