That's Fred Siegel's term to describe the increasingly nasty fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Here's Siegel:
The Hillary/Obama race vs. gender dustup has just given the country a taste of why the Democratic Party spent so many years in the wilderness. The game of competitive victimization reminds swing voters in general and white men in particular why the Democrats can be problematic. ...
In the short run, this is good news for the Obama campaign which has done its best to keep its fingerprints off the matches being lit by the press but stands to benefit greatly in the upcoming South Carolina primary if the accusation shift African-American voters away from Hillary Clinton.
On one level none of this hair-trigger 'sensitivity' should be taken too seriously. All the parties involved are marvels at playing double games. A practical effect of the race versus gender game may be increased pressure on Hillary Clinton to choose Obama as her running mate should she win the nomination. But it raises the issue of whether Americans who are neither black nor female will be allowed to ask serious question[s] about the two leading Democratic candidates without potential accusation of bias of one sort or another.
In a word: no, they won't.
Regardless, one possible outcome of competitive victimization is that some Democrats may lose their enthusiasm for whoever wins the nomination. As Siegel suggests, there are ways the Democratic nominee could attempt to bridge the party's demographic divisions. But there's no guarantee any such gambit would work. The Democratic party faces just as many challenges as the Republican party. You may not hear it said often, but the crisis in American institutions and authorities - among them American political parties - includes both the Democrats and the GOP.
