Published: August 27, 2008 10:13 pm         

Stephanie Salter: Of HONOs, PUMAs and other kaleidescopic Democratic projections

TERRE HAUTE — Many years ago Hillary Rodham Clinton likened herself to a national Rorschach test. She’s the enigmatic inkblot on which millions of disparate individuals project their own thoughts, feelings, values and fears.

Those who love her, those who despise her, it makes little difference. Their impassioned take on one adult American female is almost totally about them, not her. Their gushes or gripes, the halo they affix to her head or the diabolical powers they assign to her soul, speak volumes about themselves, not her.

Clinton’s historic run for the White House has only enlarged the Rorschach audience.

After all, presidential politics, in general, have become as much about our individual projections on the candidates as they are about the reality of the candidates.

The last eight years, for example, were made possible by people who deeply believed that a Yankee blue-blood, Ivy Leaguer and reformed alcohol abuser was really just a clod-kickin’ everyday Joe who’d fit right in over brewskies at the corner pub.

Until this year — until Clinton amassed an unprecedented early war chest, lost ground, made a dazzling, comeback-primary run, and narrowly failed to break the ultimate glass ceiling — the objects of our projections all have been men. (And all white men, to boot, but that’s another subject for another day.)

So, the national xx-chromosome Rorschach now symbolizes much more to many more people. One segment of them, which may include thousands but probably not the “millions and millions” they claim, has confounded and infuriated many — Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to support Barack Obama.

So admiring of Clinton are they — so angry, wounded and betrayed do they feel on her behalf — they deliberately ignore her call for unity.

Professed Democrats, most of them women, the HONO adherents — Hillary-Or-No-One — are willing to see the White House remain in Republican hands and their own social values dissed for another four years, rather than work for Obama. Their aim is to teach their party’s leadership a lesson.

Their stand strikes most Democrats as worse than the HONOs shooting themselves in the foot. It’s more like shooting themselves and their party in the face (at close range) and shooting generations of American women and girls in their collective reproductive systems, given John McCain’s vow to appoint an anti-abortion rights justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The HONOs’ logic is labyrinthine and their loyalty is perverse. One, a self-described “homemaker” from Massachusetts named Darragh Murphy, has borrowed the Vietnam War idea — “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” — and customized it for 2008.

Murphy, 39, is the founder of PUMA PAC, one of the most vocal assemblages of the enraged. Not unlike supporters of independent candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, the PUMAS — it stands for People United Means Action — view their party as broken and “corrupt” for its refusal to defend and back Hillary Clinton. They want Democratic leaders to pay and pay until they die.

Die for everyone’s sins.

On a PUMA PAC blog earlier this summer, Murphy wrote a seething open letter to Democratic National Chair Howard Dean. Her tone conjures up memories of the radical feminist fringe of the 1960s and ’70s.

“Howard Dean, if you or anyone associated with you is reading this, listen well. We WILL not vote for Barack Obama. We will not support or donate to or volunteer for the DNC or the national party. We will do everything we can to make sure you lose — lose the election in November, and lose your influence in this country permanently.

“You and your followers have nothing to offer but the sop of feel-good politics. Your only offering to the civic life of our nation is a sweet, cynical, shallow bribe. And your hands, which force that feel-good sop like a chloroform soaked rag on a complacent nation reach for nothing more noble than personal power, riches, and fame. Our candidate, a woman, was not only the most likely to win in November, she was also the most prepared to lead. She still is. You destroyed her candidacy and dismissed her voters.”

Murphy’s decidedly unfeminist, victim rhetoric is trumped only by her group’s justification for ignoring their candidate’s clear call to get on board the Obama bandwagon.

At a PUMA PAC event earlier this week in Denver, a Wyoming woman, Connie Kafka, told a reporter, “Senator Clinton is under tremendous pressure from the DNC to fall in line. I feel in her heart, she doesn’t believe it.”

Strong enough to lead the nation but helpless to buck the evil forces of her party or speak the truth? The nastiest sexist-pig pundit couldn’t insult Clinton any more deeply.

In her Tuesday night speech at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton posed a significant question to her supporters, when she said, “I want you to ask yourselves, were you in this campaign just for me?”

The next night, when she dramatically — and powerfully — interrupted the roll call and moved for the nomination of Obama by acclamation, she answered that question for herself.

Whatever PUMA PAC and other HONOs may still project upon Clinton, their odd little image belongs only to them. The senator from New York has demonstrated, emphatically and unequivocally, that if she must be a national Rorschach, she chooses the one that looks like a Democrat dedicated to stopping John McCain.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.