is a Democratic

political strategist

The HBO series In Treatment depicts people in therapy examining what's bugging them in their inner lives, and how it is affecting the rest of their lives. These private and volatile examinations are fictional. Similarly, in the Democratic presidential primary, we are watching voters examine personal issues, things that bug them, and affect their voting lives. Like the HBO series, there is a voyeuristic component, and it is great fodder for media angst.

Nuances become headlines. Paradigms of race and gender clash and break into shards of psycho/political glass that splinter and get embedded in the body politic. Subtexts of personal preference are writ large, examined, pronouncements made, and redefinitions are offered of motivation, of intent, and of consequence.

Discussions at kitchen tables in America are becoming therapy sessions. And Hillary Rodham Clinton has become an American Rorschach test: What you see in Clinton has a lot more to do with you than with her. It has to do with your lived experiences, your deepest uncovered fears, your buried resentments, your dashed hopes, your angers and your aspirations.

Democrats who support Clinton are accused, overtly and covertly, of closet racism. Women who support Clinton are accused of gender narcissism. Barack Obama supporters are expected to defend their choice of inspiration over experience, and not use the "R" word. What's this word?

Of the two candidates, Clinton is far and away taking a bigger political and psychological beating. Maybe it's because she has been in the ring longer. But more likely is that Hillary-bashing has become a perverse acceptable national pastime. That she is making history by being the first serious Democratic woman to run for president doesn't get her any slack. Instead, there is a malevolent overreaction, which usually finds expression as male qualities misapplied: she's too cold; she's too calculating; she's too ambitious; she'll say and do anything to get ahead. Men with similar traits are described as forces to be reckoned with; they compete to win; they are a worthy foe. With Clinton, these qualities inspire fear and loathing.

With Obama, one hesitates, if one is white, to examine too much, at the risk of going too far. This is because examining anything in constructs of race is politically risky business. Our own Gov. Rendell has faced some withering criticism for making what he believed to be an "unbiased" observation about some white Pennsylvania voters and black candidates.

Yes, we Democrats are in treatment. But we are not alone. The other side of the aisle is equating anti-Mormonism with anti-Semitism and engaging in Main Street vs. Wall Street deconstructions of what it means to be a conservative. I will leave the more in-depth psychoanalysis to my Republican friends. But at least we are confronting the social/psychological/political problems that are bugging us.

The clash of paradigms on race and gender are breaking long-held frames of reference and operative assumptions of how, and on what basis, to choose our nominee. And it is forcing a revisitation of so much about who we are as Democrats; what do we believe; what do we care about.

Our time is up for today.