Before there were Bernie Bros there were Oboma Boys...

[TerranceL]

http://www.ibtimes.com/bernie-bros-...8-medias-clinton-sanders-pundit-clash-2300707

In case you are not a member of the media class, or a regular consumer of political think pieces, you may be unfamiliar with one of the stranger twists of the 2016 campaign, the emergence of so-called “Bernie Bros” — angry young men whose enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders makes them condescending and even misogynistic toward female supporters of Hillary Clinton. Even moderate political junkies would have to be deep into Twitter and the blogosphere to have come across the term so far, but rest assured, it is tearing the world of online politicos apart.

Today’s Bernie Bro phenomenon, sketched out by critics over the past few months, is simple enough: The 2016 Democratic presidential race, which pits Sen. Sanders of Vermont, a male socialist, against Clinton, a female party establishment grandee, has allegedly spawned a toxic class of male Sanders supporters who badger, mock and harass female Clinton fans, mostly online. The thesis was first written up (by a male author) in the Atlantic last October, and produced sequels from different writers, most of them women.

Over the course of several think pieces, the portrait of the Bernie Bro began to mutate from a largely harmless boor to a very nasty character when it was elaborated on by Mashable (“The bros who love Bernie Sanders have become a sexist mob”), New York magazine, Salon and a whole lot of Twitter feeds. The pieces cite harassment from scores of social media accounts and dismissive mockery from certain progressive sites.

Veteran observers of the 2008 election, of course, remember sexism as a hot-button issue during the showdown between Clinton and Obama. Hillary supporters hit the young senator hard for several slights that many felt were gendered (“you’re likable enough, Hillary”), and her campaign returned to these charges more frequently as the race dragged on.

But that broadside gave life to a more specific narrative in the blogosphere: the scourge of the “Obama Boy,” a term coined in a 2008 Salon headline , though not the body, of a piece by Rebecca Traister, one of same authors who has repeatedly weighed in on the Bernie Bro this season. In the 2008 piece, Traister described women who, while sympathetic to Obama if not outright supportive, felt alienated by latent and sometimes not-so-latent sexism from male supporters .

Gosh that's interesting. I'm sure it's just a coincidence and not a blogger carrying water for Hillary.

“You already see this idealistic longing projected on Obama,” says one woman interviewed by Traister. “People talk about him as a secular messiah who will bring us political salvation. There’s no sense of what is plausible.” Unchecked idealism is also one key aspect of the Bernie Bro, as the Atlantic wrote last year: “The Berniebro doesn’t really have a good answer when you ask why the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based healthcare policies aren’t socialist, would ever find national success nominating an actual democratic socialist.”

The 2008 piece also suggests that sexism clouds Obama Boys’ judgment of the facts, causing them to ignore Hillary’s “more progressive” healthcare plan (probably not the case today) in favor of the young man from Chicago. Back to the Bernie Bro manual: “The Berniebro has spent most days since March 2008 in an environment where bland support for Barack Obama was so presumed as to be unspoken.”

Tom Watson, hunter of Bernie Bros and founder of the organization #HillaryMen along with Peter Daou, a former adviser to Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, has recently been deleting tweets from 2008 in which he slammed Obama in tones he now reserves for the Sanders camp. “The messiah complex in Obama scares the hell out of me — as does his campaign's casual acceptance of sexism so easily in order to win,” he wrote in one of them.

This is astonishing coming from someone who supports the person who called her husbands victims "bimbos".

That same day, Sanders felt strongly enough to weigh in, bluntly. "Look, we don't want that crap,” the senator said. “You know that anybody who supporting me that is doing the sexist things, we don't want them. I don't want that. That is not what this campaign is about.”

Annnnnnd once again the coward Sanders refuses to defend his own supporters when they are being attacked.

For anyone outside of the press and think piece circuit digesting this debate day in and day out, the meaningful question is whether the idea of “Bernie Bros” will begin to cause political problems for Sanders, or even cost him supporters en masse.

So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case: It’s worth mentioning that Sanders attracts more young people, and by some measurements, more young women, than Clinton. In Iowa, young women voted for Sanders over Clinton by a margin of 6 to 1, according to the Associated Press. A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll published last month indicated that voting-age Democratic women under 35 favor Sanders by 20 points over Clinton nationally.

What is it about Clinton that brings out such paranoid vitriol from her followers?

Don't forget that not only was it Clinton supporters who created the "Obama Boys" meme but it was also one of her supporters that popularized the idea that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen.

 

[Gadarene]

Collective resistance to a particular set of liberal views will cause that movement to come under attack, typically pathetic guilt-by-association. Seen this happen so many times before - US scifi writing, movement atheism, men's rights, video game criticism.....pushing this sort of crap into the presidential election process itself is really despicable.

Sure, there are crappy people in Sander's support base. The same is precisely true of Hilary's support base too, yet there's far less of an expectation that she apologise for them. "Berniebros" is incisive criticism, "Hilary harpies" is MUH SEXISM.

All very tedious.

 

[TerranceL]

Sure, there are crappy people in Sander's support base. The same is precisely true of Hilary's support base too, yet there's far less of an expectation that she apologise for them. "Berniebros" is incisive criticism, "Hilary harpies" is MUH SEXISM.

All very tedious.

That is what bugs me about the whole issue, Sanders apologized... for nothing.

It's all very odd and looking at the history of Hillary's campaigns it really looks like she's got a problem with men in general.

 

[Gadarene]

That is what bugs me about the whole issue, Sanders apologized... for nothing.

It's all very odd and looking at the history of Hillary's campaigns it really looks like she's got a problem with men in general.

At the same time, it did give Sanders more of the high ground once Steinem and Albright screwed up in the name of Hilary.

But he can't have known that was going to happen either when the Berniebros nonsense was spreading. Yeah, he folded too easily on that one. If someone of Hilary's ilk is holding you to a particular standard, test to see if that standard applies to themselves also.

 

[rambot]

It bugs me that they would target female supporters; Men supporters of Hillary deserve just as much ribbing and poking...maybe moreso.

Is there anyone on CF whose voting for her?

 

[TerranceL]

It bugs me that they would target female supporters; Men supporters of Hillary deserve just as much ribbing and poking...maybe moreso.

Is there anyone on CF whose voting for her?

Nobody that I know of has actually come out and said it that I know of. I wouldn't doubt there are at least a few.

 

[LivingWordUnity]

Nobody that I know of has actually come out and said it that I know of. I wouldn't doubt there are at least a few.

Despite what seems like a lack of popular support, Hillary seems like she absolutely expects to win the primary.

 

[TerranceL]

Despite what seems like a lack of popular support, Hillary seems like she absolutely expects to win the primary.

She appears to think she deserves it for some odd reason.