Hillary bashing has become so normalized that, save in the most extreme and offensive instances (like Shuster accusing her of "pimping out her daughter), it barely registers as more than background noise. On the one hand, this is a real advantage for the Obama campaign. On the other, it's tremendously unfair, and a prime example of the media using pack narratives and group beliefs to influence elections -- a power that progressives should call out and oppose. Whatever their respective merits as politicians, what's happening to Hillary is little different than what happened to Gore.

The nativist motivations for such campaigns move beyond the subliminal at times. Elizabeth Krause, an anthropologist and author of "A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy," tracked that country's population efforts over the past decade and found politicians demanding more babies "to keep away the armadas of immigrants from the southern shores of the Mediterranean" and priests calling for a "Christian dike against the Muslim invasion of Italy." The racial preferences behind Berlusconi's "baby bonus" came into embarrassing relief when immigrant parents were accidentally sent checks for their offspring and then asked to return the money: the Italian government hadn't meant to promote those births.