poor dickie

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen tells us he's sick of people telling him how lucky he's been to have covered this race. He says he has come to loathe it. His final paragraph sums up:

Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then.

Bob might accept the apology, but what a sorry excuse for a column. Cohen is really saying that he hates the fact that racism and sexism are still serious problems in America. Perhaps up until this year he'd managed to avoid such unpleasantness by staying home and mingling with nice people at civilized Georgetown dinner parties. Good for him. But to protest that by exposing these issues to the light the campaign has done the country - or at least him - a disservice, is absurd. I suppose we might have avoided all that messiness if the key contenders in the contest had been white males. The implication of Cohen's column is that he would have preferred it that way.

Comments

[Lyle]

I think Cohen meant that the campaign has been a drag to cover, not that such a campaign should not have happened.

[marbury]

Well, yes, I'm being a little unfair, perhaps - but it's such a prissy, silly column I don't feel too bad about it...

[Dan]

Very well stated. He views the entire Democratic primary in terms of how it makes him feel. What a narcissist.

[Nathan Yaffe]

And the most offensive of all is that the Bob Dylan quote is, in fact, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/backpages.html

[Jason F]

Nathan beat me to it. Cohen obviously missed the entire point of "My Back Pages." Not too surprising -- missing the point seems to be par for the course with Cohen.

[Dirk]

You can't blame Georgetown for Cohen's silliness, your average African American congressional staffer can't even catch a cab there.

[Gus]

I learned years ago that Cohen's not worth reading. Save yourself a few minutes every Tuesday and ignore him.

[William Burns]

Richard Cohens entire career has been devoted to debunking the theory that Jews are smart.

[Hans Suter]

A rarity. An intelligent and well written blog with intelligent and well writing commenters. Except this one.

[mistah charley, ph.d.]

Worse facts could have been mentioned, even if Mr. Cohen doesn't realize it yet. No person running for the presidency - neither the person of color, nor the person of gender, and certainly not the former specialist in aerial delivery of weapons of mass destruction - has found it useful to point out that causing the death of perhaps a million Iraqis by a "war of choice" is the largest crime against humanity of the 21st century - so far. Fair trials for the war criminals may seem an impossible dream - but

"if you no have a dream,
if you no have a dream,
how you gonna have a dream come true?"

(quote from song "Happy Talk" from the musical 'South Pacific', lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II)

[aleks]

He didn't mention Farrakhan did he? At least give him points for improvement shown.