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On Monday, I wrote about the legal policy advisers for the major presidential campaigns. The Edwards campaign sent me six names, one of which was Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. After the piece posted, I got this e-mail from Warren:
I noted that your recent post listed me as a supporter of Sen.
Edwards. I long have admired the Senator and have had a continuing
dialogue with him and his staff on issues important to all of
us. I've had the same kind of dialogue with a number of the other
presidential candidates and their issue staffs. Contrary to the
suggestion in your piece, however, I have not endorsed any candidate
in the Democratic primary.
The Edwards campaign says they checked with all the advisers they named before giving me the list, and that the problem is that I characterized Warren as "standing with" John Edwards rather than advising him. I guess this is the political equivalent of nonexclusive dating: Warren is free to see other candidates.
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Does anyone remember that ubiquitous ad from the ‘70s: "If they would just stay little till their Carters wore out"? I'm humming that refrain today as my oldest gets ever closer to kindergarten and my fears about the state of public education increase. As if all that talk a while back about birth control for middle-schoolers wasn't enough, via Michelle Malkin I've discovered that in some places, elementary-school children aren't learning math in a recognizable form anymore.
"Everyday Math" was developed starting in the mid-1980s, and its authors "believe that it is crucial to begin laying the groundwork for mathematical literacy at an earlier age than offered in traditional programs. ... The authors also firmly believe that children are capable of learning a great deal more than previously expected."
Especially if they use a calculator. Or take a simple multiplication problem and turn it into a "cluster" of five other, simpler problems. Or make a pretty "lattice" box and input numbers. Apparently, like Barbie once said, "Math is hard!" and we have to dumb it down for everyone rather than figure out ways to let the smartest kids excel and provide help to those who need it. This video that Malkin posts is long but well worth watching. The woman in the video--who went back to school to facilitate a midlife career switch and was startled to see the youngsters in her class struggling--shows how bizarre and convoluted this "new new" math is.
As critics are pointing out, kids are not learning better with these techniques. Children aren't learning multiplication in third grade, since they are repeating the addition and subtraction they should have learned in first grade. And check out this sample question from a fifth-grade text:
A. If math were a color, it would be --, because --.
Seriously, that's a math question? It sounds like an Internet-dating questionnaire. (Math also likes walks on the beach and romantic dinners.)
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Courtesy of Feminist Law Professors, a grain-of-salt study that suggests something pretty interesting: Little girls may want to play with boy toys more than Bratz or Barbies. Yeah, yeah the focus group was funded by Bob the Builder and his bosses. But I’m not all that surprised to see little girls wanting to play with things that do stuff. I saw the same thing in action last week over Thanksgiving: My sons and nieces happily kicking it with the boy toys, while the Hello Kitty paraphernalia slid between the sofa cushions.
Unlike Ann Bartow, I myself was an inveterate hair-brusher. And if they ever build a Sandra Day O’Barbie, I will style her ‘til the cows come home. But this is something that bears watching, I think.
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The study Ann mentioned, which suggests that power erodes empathy, explains all those celebrity interviews that make you cringe for the person and think, "Doesn't he know how that sounds?'' No, he doesn't. Which might be an argument against political dynasties—and for term limits, as well as for the capital gains tax. Yet empathy is a complicated thing; it's innate, surely, to some degree, but also learned and in some cases unlearned, and variable over time. My sister, who lives in Los Angeles, is not a scientist but has done field work all the same, as the owner of a clothing shop she thinks of as "very relaxed''—meaning that you needn't be a size 2 to shop there. Anyway, she reports that while pretty much everyone seems to lose perspective right after becoming famous, many do regain their equilibrium. J's rule of thumb: Three years of crazy is about par, after which normal people go back to behaving normally.
Which is kind of a wonder, given that we as a culture—and certainly as voters—tend to value empathy most in those who show plenty of toughness as well. Sure, we liked Bill Clinton's natural ability to feel for others, but wasn't that only because we also knew him to be capable of a certain ruthlessness? He gained support, after all, after sending a brain-damaged man, Rickey Ray Rector, to his death in Arkansas in 1992. Clinton's decision against a stay of execution, even for a man so severely disabled he saved the cherry pie from his last meal "for later,'' showed he was not soft on crime. Our reaction suggests we found that reassuring.
So, while we like Oprah's "favorite guy" Obama and his whole multiculti capacity to feel where all of us are coming from, we worry, too—essentially, whether he is jerk enough for the job. And maybe that's the quality those underappreciated women elected to run villages in India lacked; today's "Dismal Science" piece reports that female leaders there were routinely judged more harshly than their male counterparts, even by other women, and even when by all objective measures, the female leaders did a better job.
I bridle at the notion that "we're hardest on our own," but that doesn't mean we haven't been trained to respond differently to men; just yesterday, I needed to see my doctor urgently, couldn't get an appointment, and so in desperation showed up in his office without one, but with my husband in tow—not so much for moral support as because I thought the sight of a man who had taken the day off work might get action. It did, and he was amazed at the way the whole attitude in the "matriarchy" of the all-woman office shifted to accommodate him. (And yes, I do know how this sounds: pushy, and not what you'd call good-girl behavior, even under the circumstances.)
So as voters, we do need to remind ourselves how a culture that loathes everything about us has shaped us, too. And as leaders, we need the chance to mature into politicians who can both feel your pain and inflict it, when necessary. Those women in India had no trouble doing the actual job. They were just voted out of office too soon, before they could learn to exercise power with both empathy and an edge.
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Via Think Progress, we learn that at a speech last night at the University of Colorado, former Attorney General John Ashcroft answered a question about his willingness to undergo waterboarding. He told his audience, “the things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do.”
That answer is deranged in at least 20 ways, and I’ll think of 20 more as soon as I post this. But can someone please sit down and explain to the bright lights of the Bush administration, patiently, and like they are 7, that there is a difference between being willing to die for one’s country (and apparently Ashcroft is only willing only to all-but die for his) and the ways in which civilized humans treat their enemies? His effort to turn a serious question into a chance for sloppy braggadocio is astounding.
For one thing, Ashcroft didn’t do anything necessary to protect America. He sat out Vietnam (six student deferments and one occupational deferment). Moreover his DoJ colleague who apparently did allow himself to be waterboarded, acting head of the OLC, Daniel Levin, underwent the procedure in 2004. According to an ABC News report, Levin “found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning,” then concluded that waterboarding was illegal torture “unless performed in a highly limited way.” He lost his job at Justice for that.
The most telling thing about Ashcroft’s non-answer is that it lays bare the central fallacy in Bush administration thinking about how to conduct their torture: The relevant question for these guys is never "what are the rules," but "how tough can I pretend to be while breaking them?"
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Thanks, Ann, for pointing out that great study on the inverse correlation between empathy and power. I agree the methodology sounds kooky, but it does seem to illuminate some fundamental human need to disassociate oneself from the powerless as one clambers up the ladder. I can’t help but wonder, on that score, whether Barack Obama’s decision to take uber-listener Oprah Winfrey out on the campaign trail with him in Iowa is a small piece of rental empathy--some strange way for him to say, “Look, I don’t know what it’s like to stay at home with two kids and a basket of ironing, but Oprah sure does.” Her ability to marry bottomless suffering to boundless influence is without parallel in America.
Now Oprah isn’t actually a stay-at-home mom, but at least she spends her day with them. And all this is certainly unearthing some hilarious claims about the stay-at-home set, whether it’s former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Clinton backer, insisting that Iowa women don’t even get to watch daytime television because they're all out working, or HuffPo’s Joanne Bamberger writing that Winfrey’s “recommendations should stay in the bra and jean intervention categories,” there’s just nothing to beat Hollywood forays into reality.
In any event, your empathy thesis certainly explains why the Hillary campaign is sending into Iowa the only closer alive who might manage to out-compassion Oprah. Bill Clinton versus Oprah Winfrey. An Olympics of hearing-your-pain.
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I'm a fan of Shankar Vedantam's "Department of Human Behavior" column in the Washington Post, which reported yesterday on some recent social psychology research that perhaps sheds new light on tough Hillary, and the spectacle of the candidates in general. The experience of being powerful erodes empathy, a study published in Psychological Science (which I haven't actually seen) seems to suggest. Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. The experiment (which involves drawing the letter E on foreheads) sounds rather ridiculous, but has a certain explanatory, well, power. Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. (So much for femaleness as a vaunted incubator of empathy; here's grist for the notion that the experience of subordinate status, not two X chromosomes, may be a key influence.) The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.
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Three cheers for Stephanie Coontz's piece in the New York Times today in defense of taking marriage private. She asks:
Why do people—gay or straight—need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.
She offers a persuasive case that in today's climate—with divorce rates still high—we need to rethink the state's involvement in marriage. And she points out the logical peculiarity of the fact that unmarried couples who've cohabited for 19 years might have no hospital visitation rights—while two kids who get married on a whim automatically do.
These are all questions I've had on my mind, because I got married this summer after a six-year relationship. I’m happy to be married—in fact, this week, I’m particularly glad, because I’m scheduled to have surgery, and if I weren't married, my partner might have met with far more resistance from Oxford Health Plans when he called on my behalf to investigate the fine points of the claims process. Being able to say the words my husband to doctors and nurses has made bureaucratic matters far easier to manage than the words my boyfriend ever did. One reason is obviously that in an era of constantly shifting relationships, the government and hospitals need some way of figuring out how to distinguish the loose bonds of a one-night stand from the deeper ties of a long-term relationship. But at this point in time marriage doesn't seem to perform that function as well as it might. For one thing, it's the policization of marriage that gives some young couples pause about wedlock. Not to get all Brad-and-Angelina about it, but for years I didn’t want to get married because I didn’t want to participate in an institution that was closed (or largely closed) to my gay friends and family members. Clearly my resolve weakened since then, but it still bothers me that I'm part of something that is not aavailable to all my peers.
So, I'm glad pieces like Coontz’s—which get fresh conversations started—are part of the debate about how modern matrimony might provide the greatest good to the most people, children and adults alike.
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I am feeling all Republican today, after receiving a surprise holiday note from the IRS. Now, theoretically, I am all for paying taxes; I like what that Martin O'Malley is up to here in Maryland, pushing through a tax hike that according to the Washington Post will "not only close the deficit, it will also help to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, extend health-care coverage to 100,000 lower-income Marylanders, build public schools, and add facilities for state colleges and universities.'' Which is more than Jake with me; until every kid in America has health insurance, how could I object to s-chipping in? Then again, to quote Junie B. Jones, this letter from the tax man has killed the glee. Paraphrasing here, what it says is, "Dear Sucker, You know that $1,021.02 refund check we sent you some months ago? Oopsie, our bad! On the off chance that you have cashed said check, pay us back immediately or we will start charging you interest on our mistake. Hahahahaha, Your IRS.'' Is this how fiscal conservatives are born?
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In Meghan's wonderful piece on Susan Faludi's new book, she argues that while all bias against women in our country has not been eradicated, "Faludi tells us that the sky is falling when the debris coming down, in some cases, is just another glass ceiling being cracked open.'' Exactly! You've perfectly summed up my knee-jerk skepticism about how much Hillary hatred goes back to Eve, when maybe some of it is only personal. And just as a thought experiment—one that might or might not show how far women have come—how do you think it would have played if Barack Obama had given a race-based version of Clinton's gender card answer in last week's debate? What if, in other words, Obama had given a speech somewhere about dealing with the all-white club, had been asked to explain himself and had answered with playful derision that, duh, black people do have just the tiniest bit of extra *!%# to put up with from time to time. My bet is that the room would not have exploded in laughter.
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But, Rachael, that's exactly how my blond hair evolved! OK, I was 37 at the time, but still ... Given the appalling lack of basic scientific knowledge in this country, I guess it's hardly surprising to see even science writers and researchers wandering off into the woods in search of ovulating lap dancers and speculation about whether the guys in the Geico commercials would prefer Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russell. Only 14 percent of Americans even believe the theory of evolution is "definitely true''—which could easily explain some pretty desperate adaptive measures to sex up the science, literally. I doubt if these stories are the hoped-for antidote to Mike Huckabee's apparently widely shared feeling that one can either believe in evolution or God; on the contrary, they could well have just the opposite effect, and make scientific inquiry in general seem frivolous, over-packaged and completely expendable.
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Our evolutionary psychology discussion has had me on the lookout for stories that seem particularly ridiculous. And on Fox News today, the morning hosts mentioned a study that purports to show that gentlemen preferred blondes as far back as the Ice Age. I started Googling, and the stories I found demonstrate a huge problem for this particular field of research: The media does a poor job reporting on the science.
For example, the Times of London writes that "north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." One thing I've learned from my casual reading on evolution is that adaptation doesn't work this way. Yes, if a trait is evolutionarily beneficial, it will get passed on and become more prevalent, while traits that are harmful or undesirable will be lost because the people who carry them don't breed successfully. But a brunette woman is not going to give birth to flaxen-haired tots just because her genes looked around, noticed how all the men were going for the blond hotties, and decided to mutate. (This piece from the Toronto Star explains it better.) Yet so many of the stories I see use this cause-and-effect structure to explain findings on evolution, and the ignorance is incredibly frustrating.
Some of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are shaky enough without such bad reporting, which leaves me with a lot of questions. Do evolutionary psychologists even care that the reporting is bad, or do they enjoy the attention that misleading stories bring to them? And is too much to expect journalists to have a little bit of knowledge about the subjects they cover?
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Melinda, I think your instinct about the deterrent effect of the death penalty is about the same as mine. The Liptak article is incredibly interesting but makes the same point I learned in law school: Deterrence works if there is a reasonable chance the punishment in question will actually happen. Even my kids know that if they only get in trouble one time out of every 10,000 times they crayon the walls, it's totally worthwhile to take a chance and crayon the walls. We currently execute only a few dozen people a year.
But even if it were proved that the death penalty served as a terrific deterrent, it wouldn’t solve for the other fundamental problem: We don’t kill the worst offenders—we mainly kill only the most unlucky ones (the guys lumped with sleepy counsel, mixed-up DNA, tough-on-crime judges). Here’s a great new piece by Stuart Taylor on the recent decline of the death penalty that ties some of that together. For something to be a true deterrent, it needs to be understood to work. Even a rationally acting drunk killer on a spree can hardly game the odds of a capital punishment system that seems to punish indiscriminately.
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I really don't know what to make of the study Morgan posted about on Friday. More maternal stress, fewer male babies—it's one of those findings that seems too funny to be true, and enormously entertaining.
Meanwhile, EMILY's List is off to Iowa, to stump for Hillary by luring more women to the caucuses. The group is posting online ads at day-care centers and yoga and health sites, Politico tells us. Good for them—creative-sounding tactics, and the more women who vote the better. But is that as in, the more PEOPLE who vote, or the more women who vote, specifically?
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I am totally riveted by today's Washington Post story about the Baltimore cop convicted of killing his young mistress a dozen years ago—based on a discredited method of bullet-matching and the testimony of an "expert'' who faked his credentials, misrepresented his findings, and after he was busted, committed suicide. Now a judge may overturn the conviction, which is getting a second look mostly because the cop's wife has never given up on him. (Her position is that he cheated on her, but didn't kill anybody. Dude, what did you do to deserve this woman?)
Though this is not a capital case—the cop, James Kulbicki, got life without parole—it seems yet another example of the most undeniable problem with the death penalty: We get stuff wrong. Often enough that we ought to be humbled. And I'm eager to hear what you legal experts think of the New York Times story about the new studies that purport to find that capital punishment might "save lives'' by preventing murders in the states that impose it most freely.
I find this hard to believe, for one thing because I doubt that violent criminals, most of whom are drunk or high at the time of an attack, are at all apt to stop and think, "Uh-oh, do I really want to wind up like old Joe, who ate his last meal and then rode the needle? No! And so, my intended victim, never mind!'' I also cannot see how capital punishment, even as administered in Texas or Virginia, could have a statistically significant deterrent effect. How is it possible to isolate that effect from the larger law-and-order picture in those states?
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If a woman's stressed during pregnancy will she not have a son? A piece in the new issue of the Economist suggests a connection between maternal stress and a baby's gender. Here's the theory: First World women are 5 percent more likely to have a male child than their counterparts in developing countries, but that gap's been closing lately. That could be because women under stress are more likely to give birth to girls. A few studies have shown that women are more likely to have girls when they conceive in war zones, right after natural disasters, or after the loss of a loved one. One tempting bit of association: Fewer baby boys were born to New York City mothers who got pregnant the week after the Sept. 11 attacks.
I wonder how this fits into our discussion on evo pysch. A Danish scientist who's researched the effects of chronic stress on reduced male birth rates (as opposed to stress brought on by a catastrophic event), suggests that the reasons for stressed mothers having fewer boys "might be adaptive" because
the chances are that a daughter who reaches adulthood will find a mate and thus produce grandchildren. A son is a different matter. Healthy, strapping sons are likely to produce lots of grandchildren, by several women-or would have done in the hunter-gatherer societies in which most human evolution took place. Weak ones would be marginalised and maybe even killed in the cut and thrust of male competition. If a mother's stress adversely affects the development of her fetus (as it is likely to do) then selectively aborting boys, rather than wasting time and resources on bringing them to term, would make evolutionary sense.
The "cut and thrust of male competition?" I hear echoes of Dana's monkey-men.
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Dahlia,
I might not be the best person to answer your question, since I can't picture myself supporting Hillary regardless of what she's calling herself, but I agree that it's hard to imagine how dropping "Rodham" can help her. Jill is right that feminists might overlook the switch as a concession to the greater good of getting a woman into the Oval Office, and that this latest flip flop DOES come across as another example of the calculating and triangulating for which she is so often criticized.
I agree—if I read it right; it was indeed an odd column—with Cary Tennis' assertion that women can choose whatever name they want. (For the record, I happily took my husband's name.) And in this post-feminist era, we shouldn't apologize for reserving the right to stereotypically change our minds, like Sarah Michelle Gellar Prinze. But Hillary's repeated flip-flopping reminds me of what Emily B. wrote about John McCain's "B-word" gaffe. It's a move that tells us a lot about her. Just like in this damning video John Edwards put out after the last debate, when Hillary was caught contradicting herself on Iraq and Social Security and those darn driver's licenses, she changes her very identity depending on which way the political winds are blowing.
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I can't imagine Clinton's name change really made a difference, Dahlia, though older opinion polls guessing whether it would seem to show otherwise. I suppose Clinton's thinking could be as follows: Feminists who find it backward for a woman to take her husband's name, with no retention of their maiden name, could likely still be Hillary supporters regardless, simply because they're in favor of a woman president. More traditional women who believe the woman should take her husband's name could be swayed by this statement of family unity. But it seems silly to me to think that anyone could be swayed by it as a statement of family unity, given how often Clinton has flip-flopped on her own name. Whether or not to take a husband's name is a question fraught with issues for women--I know very few who haven't spent some time grappling with how to handle this identity change. Speaking as a double-name non-hyphenated adopter like the former Hillary Rodham Clinton, that, to me, seemed like the best compromise for retaining my identity as Jill Hunter, but also allowed me to adopt a family name that my future children would share with my husband and me. Obviously it hasn't proven to be enough of a middle ground for Clinton. Does anyone know what her legal name is? Is it Hillary Rodham Clinton? She hasn't legally changed it each time she's publicly "changed" it, I'm assuming. That might more aptly reflect her true feelings on the subject.
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I think my husband would rather have a CD, Dahlia, though he would certainly appreciate the cost of a symbolic gift. (Think of the savings!) Rodham or Clinton, Hillary's been called worse, right? And that was just this week. Heckuvan answer she gave on the gender card question at last night's debate, I have to say. Though if it were my first trip to town, I'd wonder why Joe Biden knew the most and said the least; candidates with nothing to lose are always so appealing. And I had to laugh when John Edwards said it was no good replacing a bunch of corporate Republicans with a bunch of corporate Democrats - and CNN's Wolf Blitzer cut in to say, "Senator Clinton, I'm going to let you respond to that.''
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God, what did we do before there was Feministing?
Today they point the way to funny little item about Sarah Michelle Gellar taking the last name of her husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., as a five-year wedding gift. Yikes. Within minutes, I stumbled onto this odd column by Cary Tennis at Salon on the same subject—the feminist message behind taking your spouse's name. (And no, I was not cheating on you Emily ... ). All of which re-raised a question I haven’t heard answered to my satisfaction: When the Rodham fell out of Hillary Clinton’s name, did it help? Was it an anniversary gift to Bill? I doubt it.
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In answer to your question, Torie, I don't think the Democrats need to worry about the Jewish vote, because as far as I'm concerned there's no such thing as the Jewish vote. Saying "Jewish" these days is about as descriptive as saying "Christian." Sure, there are some rough similarities between Reform Jews, Orthodox Jews, and even Atheist Jews, just like there's a twice-removed family resemblance between Protestant Evangelicals and Roman Catholics. But as far as voting goes, it's crazy to think that Lubavitchers and say, Woody Allen, would root for the same team.
The fact that more Jewish Floridians are voting for Republicans than they used to is, I think, a simple reflection of Florida's swing state status. Poll Jews in New York and I think you'll find that they have blue blood, just as they always did.
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It seems like much longer than three years ago that Howard Dean was hailed as the great hope for Web political organizing. Now, Ron Paul has replaced him as the no-chance-in-hell candidate to best harness the misdirected money and idealism of the Internet masses.
But apparently Dean’s feeling nostalgic for the Internet, because he recently talked about one thing sure to stir up bloggers: who gets to go to heaven. During a speech Sunday to Jewish leaders, according to the Politico, Dean said that “there are no bars to heaven for anybody.” (The article headline—“Dean says Jews can go to heaven”—is a little odd: It seems to suggest that Dean granted Jews access to heaven.)
That assertion surely won’t sit well with conservative evangelical Christians who think that there actually is a bar to heaven, and a rather high one at that. But though the Democrats have apparently been trying to woo evangelical voters suspicious of potential GOP nominees Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, it’s not likely to happen. Could Dean instead be trying to stop the trend of Jewish Republicans? There have been periodic trend reports this year about Jews in ‘08, including some wondering if Jews might be more inclined to vote for Giuliani than they were to vote for Bush and how they might respond to Obama. Exit polling from the 2006 midterm elections found that young Jews (and Orthodox Jews) were more likely to vote for the GOP than their older counterparts. Is this actually something Dean and the Democrats need to worry about? Or was he just trying to please the audience in the crowd that day?
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We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging to let you know that Emily Bazelon and Melinda Henneberger will be chatting live on washingtonpost.com Thursday at 11 a.m. Check out Emily's writings on Hillary Clinton, breast-feeding, Sandra Day O'Connor and more, and Melinda's take on Hillary, Rudy Giuliani, and abortion and birth control, then submit your questions for the chat.
UPDATE, Nov. 15: Read what Emily and Melinda had to say.
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I'm with Emily. Despite my irrational and - until now, at least -- enduring soft spot for John McCain, laughing one's senatorial socks off when a colleague is called the B word is no less objectionable than if he had indulged a (theoretical) Obama hater in using the N word. This was not so much a gaffe as a window into the candidate's character, just as Hillary Clinton's planted question was. Which is why these off-script (or on-, in her case) moments can be so instructive. Don't we all wish we had paid more attention to Bush's cocky asides in 2000, and less to his moderate stump speeches?
The fact that our current president's cowboy ways have been so thoroughly discredited is still another reason I can't see Clinton's biggest obstacle as her womanly lack of a little more snap in the old towel. Wouldn't the stereotypically female virtue of prudence, and maybe even a little well-placed aversion to risk, be a welcome relief right about now? Even in full riled-up feminist mode, I can't see that when she has her first bad week of the campaign, it's because some would-be supporters just woke up and smelled the Black Orchid. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made plenty of people crazy with hatred, too. And I guess the bottom line for me is the many women I meet who genuinely seem to feel guilty about not liking Hillary better; does sisterhood require that we support the woman in the race? Or put another way, are those who say they'd like a woman - just not this woman -- necessarily bitchy phonies?
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Usually, Meghan, I'd agree with you entirely that gaffes get more attention than they deserve, at the expense of the substance that should matter more. But I hope this McCain embarassment gets it due in this news cycle, because of the link I drew earlier to his Chelsea Clinton joke. John Dickerson (Slate's political correspondent, if he needs an introduction) is always saying that the gaffes that matter are the ones that confirm our preexisting suspicions about a candidate's weakness. We thought George Allen was a boob; then we knew he was a boob. Laughing at someone else calling Hillary a bitch is evidence of McCain's coarseness, which we've already seen, and which in my mind doesn't bode well for the kind of people he'd want to run the EEOC, say. So maybe I shouldn't care much, but I do.
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I agree with Dahlia and Emily that gender is a big part of it for many of the Hillary hatas out there. A while back I mentioned a study that suggests we see "manly women" as "pretenders," which does seem to suggest that lots of us murkily associate not toeing-the-gender script with phoniness. Meanwhile, I don't think the media's new focus on "gender" is working out that well for Hillary; it seems like she polled better when we weren't contantly being reminded that she is a... woman and her competitors are.... men. A new CBS/New York Times poll of "likely Iowa voters" shows Obama and Edwards closing on her, with 25 percent saying they'd vote for Hillary, 23 percent going to Edwards, and 22 percent for Obama. (Statistically insignificant margin, but it's intriguing that Edwards is equal with Obama.) Even so, I'm not sure this poll tells us anything substantial.
As for John McCain, Dahlia: Sure, he should have said, "Let's not use that word" before he went on to answer the woman's question. But I can't get too worked up about his response; what's really at stake in this campaign has nothing to do with whether McCain tolerated the word "bitch." I'm increasingly finding it tedious to watch politicians being taken to task for small gaffes while weighty issues go largely unexamined.
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Thank you, Madam; the potty-mouth McCain supporter (or was she another plant?) who called Hillary the B word just handed Clinton five points minimum -- and the kind of gender-based martyrdom she so benefited from when Rick Lazio looked like he was zooming in to throttle her during their 2000 senatorial race. Brava! Even I don't like it, and I think the Senator can more than take care of herself.
I'm still not convinced, though, Dahlia and Emily, that the complaint that she's a phony has much to do with her gender; have we forgotten the Slick Willy years? Bill Clinton is just a more talented politician than his wife - and every other living practitioner.
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Dahlia, here's why I think you're right that Hillary hatred is tied up with gender: People who froth at the mouth about her are often neutral to postive about Bill. Even when the substantive reasons they give for hating Hillary are easily and equally reason to hate both of them. In my family, Hillary gets bashed for the role she played in the health care debacle. Because she screwed it up, but more because they think it was nepotistic of her to have assumed a leading role in the first place. Who gave her that role? Bill. Similarly, the charge that Hillary is a phony triangulator applies as much or more to Bill. And yet the phony part seems to stick to her, and not to him. For sure, this is a matter of personality, and they certainly have different ones. But it's also about how Hillary's personality, and persona, meshes with being a woman.
So will John McCain's lapse hurt him? It reminds me of that incredibly awful joke he told about Chelsea.
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Courtesy of Talking Points Memo, a clip of John McCain warmly responding to the apparently self-evident campaign question, "How do we beat the bitch?" with laughter, hearty affirmation ("excellent question") and the polling numbers about his lead over Hillary. All rather sick-making but it's worth pointing out—as several bloggers have not—that his questioner here was a woman.
This raises a good point that Melinda flicked at last week: MAN do people hate Hillary Clinton. You mentioned in your post her "high, deep and not-going-anywhere negatives," and I agree. Folks who think this way are not gonna wake up come election day and say "Hey, I was wrong, I have been out-of-my-mind-demented-crazy-ass-insane with loathing for this woman for 15 years but today I changed my mind!" I think I part company with you, though, over the notion that all this loathing has "zero" to do with her gender. You can't separate the claim that she's a "phony" from the contention that she's a "bitch." That's she's somehow an unnatural woman has always been at the core of Hillary Dementia, hasn't it? It was at the core of Eleanor Roosevelt Psychopathy as well.
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I just had to join in with a "hear, hear" for stamping out evolutionary psychology (at least in its pop-science incarnation.). Now that I have a child of my own, I'm constantly eavesdropping on playground conversations about which behaviors are "hard-wired" in boys or girls, mother or fathers. The minute I hear the word "hard-wired," I wince in anticipation of its inevitable accompaniment: an affirmation of the gender status quo. Boys are hard-wired to like trucks. Girls are hard-wired to wear pink. (What role motor vehicles or rose-patterned tights played in caveman culture has yet to be determined by science.)
The truism that newborns tend to resemble their fathers more than their mothers so that the father will know the child is his, and thus protect it, has become a veritable item of dogma among parents in my circle. This claim, based on a 12-year-old study that has been amply refuted since, is a classic example of an ev-psych argument: While the first part of the theory (that babies look more like their dads than their moms) may or may not be true depending on whose research you trust, the second part (that this resemblance serves as a proof of paternity for the doubting father) is pure and unprovable speculation. But it certainly is handy that the imagined mating behavior of monkey-men happens to reinforce contemporary Western values about male breadwinning and the specter of female infidelity.
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Meghan, Anne,
Here's another recent study to add to the pile of questionable evolutionary psychology findings about women's sexual signaling—the evo psychs are obsessed with proving that women on their fertile days actually do experience estrus like other mammals. Sure, you may be sitting around a conference table discussing the last sale's quarter, but really you're just repressing the urge to lift your buttocks like a baboon in heat. Researchers at the University of New Mexico decided to actually look into fertile women's buttocks' movements, so they tracked the tips 18 lap dancers earned at various points during their menstrual cycle (and wouldn't you be pleased if your UNM tuition was helping pay for this study). Surprise! The lap dancers' tips dropped considerably during menstruation, even though, the male researchers point out, "menstruating dancers can wear tampons (with strings clipped short or tucked up) and change them often during heavy flow days, without revealing any visual signs of menstruation." The findings, say the researchers, are "the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females. ...These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics." Or, another way to look at it is that the results have no meaning beyond the fact that contemporary human female lap dancers know g-strings and tampons are not a good combination.
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It's taken a long time, but at last—thank you for contributing, Meghan!—evolutionary psychology is being revealed as the psuedoscience it usually is, at least by the time it reaches the newspaper columns and the conversations around the water cooler. My main objection has always been the way its lay adherents solemnly discuss research that confirms the existence of some utterly banal aspect of human behavior, usually sexual, and then go on to explain why our ape ancestors found it so useful. Usually, this involves self-satisfied explanations of the primal male "need" for multiple sexual partners—men "need" to spread their DNA around, you see—as opposed to the primal female "need" for a man to protect her children. But why, then, did the human race evolve the concept of monogamy? And who are these women with whom the naturally adulterous men are supposed to sleep? I know that evolutionary psychology has come up with various explanations for these phenomena, but really, one could argue the whole thing the other way around, too. It's like Marxism or Freudianism: a set of all-encompassing principles that can explain anything. And it, too, will pass.
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The trouble with evolutionary psychology is that there are no (or few) ways of testing its theorems. With enough ingenuity on the part of the researcher, nearly any finding about gender can be twisted to suit the evolutionary lens. Prime example, from Crooked Timber last week: the Times in London reported on a study in which men rated the "sexiness" of women's walks. The study found that men rated the women in the less fertile part of their cycle as sexier than the women in a more fertile part of their cycle, because the fertile women walked with "smaller hip movements." You might think that this finding would give evolutionary psychologists pause—might lead them to consider, for a moment, whether some other factor might be at work, such as culture (or tampons!). But no; instead, the Times goes on to say:
That makes evolutionary sense, because it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility only to those men she believes would make a suitable mate. In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman’s walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males whom she might not want to choose.
Dr Provost said: “If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile.”
But you can bet if the study had found that fertile women were seen to have the "sexiest" walks Dr. Provost would have thought that made evolutionary sense, too. There's just no control group here.
via Crooked Timber.
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More frivolously occupied than Dahlia or Emily have been, I spent a bit of my weekend flipping through The Daring Book for Girls. I picked it up after my daughter had written about it for her high-school newspaper—and after The New York Times had mocked it as yet more helicopter parenting for our technology-dependent indoor kids, not a manifesto in favor of daredeviltry at all. My daughter's take was different. She pointed out that the book, billed as "the no-boys-allowed guide to adventure," is actually boy-based and imitative at its core (tips for building scooters, etc), with girl frills around the edges. And it's not very new, she noted: Tomboyishness has always been derivative, taking cues from the guys.
I buy both views of the book, which looks old-fashioned but taps right into the current micromanagement of youth culture. Once upon a time—or so I recall—the tomboy impulse was also defiant, a girl's way of flouting peer and parental expectations. But when adults get into the act, packaging boy stuff specially for girls, the result all too often gets cloyingly tame, to nobody's obvious benefit-except the manufacturer's (or publisher's). An article in today's Times reports on another example. Trading cards, a boy craze for decades, are suddenly being marketed to heretofore generally uninterested girls. The new girl-targeted card game, called Bella Sara, sounds tedious as well as sexist. Featuring pastel-colored ponies, unicorns, and "caring" messages ("use your love to bring peace to the world"), Bella Sara evidently skirts the competition and trading that define boy card games like Magic; it's about cleaning and feeding horses (on a special website, using secret codes on the cards). And it's about buying ever more cards (because the codes can only be used once). Here's where The Daring Book perhaps has advice the whole family could find liberating: "Forget asking your parents for a horse; ask for a ping-pong table instead."
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Rachael, here's a partial answer to your good question: Breast-feeding rates vary in this country by income and race and maternal education. According to this from the Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog, which cites CDC stats, in 2005 "women living below the federal poverty line breastfed at the rate of 63%, and women living at 350% of the poverty level breastfed at the rate of 82%." Also: "Rates of breastfeeding were 81% for Asian Americans, 79% for Hispanics/Latinas, 75% for Whites, 67% for Native Americans, and 59% for African Americans." And 85 percent of college-educated women breast-fed, compared with 63 percent of women with less than a high school diploma.
What's going on here? The answer must involve culture--whether you know about the health benefits, whether a nurse at the hospital where you had your baby has the time to help get you started, whether your mother and sisters and other women you know breast-fed, themselves, and can help you over the rough patches, whether it's regarded as expected or weird in the community you live in. This article from the CDC blames low rates on "lack of social support" and lazy hospitals and lack of follow up. This article in Pediatrics found that immigrant women are more likely to breast-feed than native-born women in their ethnic groups, which suggets that the cultural push against breast-feeding happens here. Amanda's point about the relative ease with which white-collar, as opposed to other, jobs accommodate nursing is well taken.
But I suspect there's more than job-related obstacles at play. And in fact, the rate of breast-feeding has risen dramatically among some of these groups--26 percent among African-American women in the last 10 years.
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Anyone else following the lawsuit filed by two women at Yale law school against AutoAdmit -- the law school discussion board that makes the men's room wall at your local bus station read like the collected works of John Donne? Via the Wall Street Journal's law blog here's a link to the amended complaint, filed late last week in federal court in Connecticut. These women are alleging that anonymous posts to the Web site created emotional distress and may have precluded employers from offering them jobs.
It's going to be rough sledding for these women to actually track down the offenders, named, for instance, "Horse walks into a bar" and "Spanky" in the complaint. And who knows whether they'll be able to prove that they were harmed. Still, just reading the complaint is cause for emotional distress: The plaintiffs are threatened with rape and sodomy and violence; links to the site were sent to employers; private information about them was posted on the site. Part of this is just the unbelievable sewage that gets chummed up wherever anonymous posts about women roam free. I've written a bit on this, but have no real solution to offer. Read the complaint. Is this the kind of thing we should simply ignore? Are lawsuits the answer?
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Rachael, isn’t part of the issue that white-collar jobs tend to accommodate pumping and breastfeeding more than blue-collar or service industry jobs do? This piece, for instance, paints a stark contrast between female Starbucks execs who get to use a lovely “Lactation Room,” and women working behind café counters who have to pump in bathrooms during quickie breaks. Anything that makes it easier for women to pump at work (or during their medical boards!) seems like a good idea to me – and not paternalistic.
Meanwhile, speaking of Emily’s great piece, I wanted to mention another mind-bending example of how environment can influence gene expression. This one comes from a UC Davis psychologist named Brian Trainor, who’s done fascinating work on the relationship between estrogen and aggressive behavior in mice. Last year, Trainor found that estrogen can have completely opposite effects on aggression depending on the length of daylight. Specifically, the hormone made mice less aggressive when daylight hours were kept long, simulating summer. But it made them more aggressive when daylight hours were short, simulating winter. (The pathways involved were probably different, too.) No one knows whether similar effects will be found in humans. But isn’t it wild to imagine estrogen making us docile in summer and assertive in winter, too?
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Emily, I noticed while reading your piece on breast-feeding and IQ that you touched on a point that has always been mind-boggling for me:
Previous studies have also linked breast-feeding to higher IQ, but they generally haven't ruled out the fact that breast-fed kids are also more likely to come from wealthier and better-educated families than formula-fed babies. [italics mine]
You've written on this topic frequently, so I wonder if in your research you've seen anything that explains why mothers who are less well-off are more likely to use formula. It seems like a contradiction to me. I nursed both my sons for all the reasons you cite--it's nurturing, it's practical, it's portable!--but also for the fact that it's just plain cheaper.
I realize that WIC lessens the financial burden of formula to some extent. But WIC also tries to promote breast-feeding and rewards moms who make that choice. And, while breast-feeding might not offer an IQ boost for everyone, it still seems that in almost all cases the pros outweigh the cons. Should we be doing more to encourage low-income moms to breast-feed, or is that paternalistic?
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Today's Washington Post review of the new Robert Redford movie Lions for Lambs calls it "strangely inert'' and says its take of the war on terror "plays too often like a college colloquium, with one extended scene of a classroom debate suffering from all the sleep-inducing effects of the real thing.'' Not only that, it accuses the film of "ambiguity.'' Ouch. But is it really such a bad thing to walk out of a political movie without a headache from repeated blows to the brain? I saw a screening last night with my movie-crazy 11-year-old son—who, needless to say, does not go for "inert''—and his only criticism was that they should have shot it on film. "A great movie,'' he thought. And for better or worse, not exactly My Dinner With Andre.
My only quibble was with the particulars of the spanking the movie gives the Judy Miller stand-in, played by Meryl Streep, for the media's role in selling the war in Iraq. OK, whuppin' deserved, but not in the way it's set up. Streep's veteran reporter is torn over whether to make what she sees as the clear moral choice—refusing to broadcast an exclusive about a new American military initiative in Afghanistan altogether, or maybe breaking the story with the crawl line, "In another breathtakingly bad idea from our government today ... '' Or, she could do the wrong thing by just reporting the story. No ambiguity there, but also no relation to the many ethical choices reporters actually face. Still, this is no polemic; it's a love note to our troops, a movie with lots of heart but no pat answers, and one that might even jump-start some of those uncomfortable political discussions we tend to shy away from.
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A nice point, Emily, about the dangers of looking at Sandra Day O’Connor through pink-colored glasses. You’re right to say that there are heaps of women judges who don’t employ O’Connor’s Miz Fixit hospital-corners jurisprudential style. Ruth Bader Ginsburg included. But I don’t think that makes the corollary—that O’Connor’s approach had some uniquely female qualities—false. There’s been some interesting legal scholarship on the point, starting with an article by Suzanna Sherry in 1986, trying to link up O’Connor’s legal opinions to Carol Gilligan’s Different Voice paradigm of women as accommodating and problem-solving and “relational.”
Sherry’s premise has taken a beating in subsequent years, often from feminists pointing out that this kind of thinking is marginalizing to women and celebrates passivity and niceness in all the ways I probably did in my first post today. Needless to say, Ginsburg’s addition to the court also undermined the Sherry thesis. But I stand by my conviction that some of the qualities I most admire in O’Connor are qualities I largely associate with women. Doesn’t mean Ginsburg is manly by the way. Doesn’t mean O’Connor’s ability to foster agreement and forge deals wasn’t also informed by her time in the Arizona state legislature. But I do think—and O’Connor would hate me for writing this—you can’t separate her gender from her jurisprudence as neatly as you may like.
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Dahlia, Emily—Do you really believe there is a female style of judging—pragmatic and non-ideological—and that O'Connor embodies it? Doesn't Ginsburg operate from a clear set of principals—do you constantly wonder where she'll come down before an opinion is released? Hasn't the Bush administration put forward female judicial nominees who have clear ideologies and records that reflect them? As with many people, their strength, in O'Connor's case her practicality and ad-hoc approach, is also their weakness. She ended up not standing for a clear set of principals, so has a weak legacy. Isn't that style simply intrinsic to O'Connor and not sex-linked?
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The man is a nut magnet, as we can tell in just a glance at today's front page of The New York Times.
Above the fold: the former mayor with his new best friend Pat Robertson, who is not taken seriously by any evangelicals I'm aware of.
Below: Former Giuliani BFF Bernie Kerik is to be indicted today on charges including tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy. (And as the paper notes, "Charges could complicate the presidential campaign of Mr. Kerik's friend, patron and former business partner Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, whose mentorship was partly responsible for Mr. Kerik's sharp ascent into prominence.''
Not shown in photo: Another of Rudy's peeps, Alan Placa, a man Rudy considers "one of my closest friends'' - and hired after he lost his job as a priest over multiple allegations of sexually abusing kids.
All of which makes me suspect that inviting his wife Judi to sit in on cabinet meetings might not be Giulini's worst idea.
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Another thought: If O'Connor's pragmatic, this-case-only approach to judging is particularly female, then maybe that helps explain why male commentators tended to excoriate her for it. I don't think this explains all the frustration with her jurisprudence—as you say, Dahlia, she drove you (and me and plenty of other women) crazy sometimes, too. But it did feel to me that she elicited a sort of scorn from some male academics that seemed awfully pointed in a world in which politesse is usually de rigeur. (Must be that cafe au lait I just drank.)
On a grumpier note: I don't miss O'Connor because I keep encountering her in recent books about the court. In Jan Crawford Greenberg's book, O'Connor is there to tell us that she stepped down when she did because Justice Rehnquist asked her to—an account that hardly squares with her record of forthright independence, and which Rehnquist can never confirm or deny. And then in Jeffrey Toobin's book, O'Connor is full of regrets and distress about the bad end she thinks President Bush ended up coming to. Maybe I should find this refreshing, but it mostly strikes me as depressing—far too little, too late from one of the justices who gave us Bush v. Gore.
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I miss Sandra Day O’Connor.
I always forget how much I miss her until I see her talk, as I did yesterday, at a conference at the Law Library of Congress on the need for competent counsel. The conference was co-sponsored by the Constitution Project. The justice was in a wheelchair as a result of a hip injury—“a temporary deficiency” is all she would say.
O’Connor gets more and more O’Connorish each time I see her. And there is something so honest about her approach to her years at the court—as a great big work-in-progress with no certain answers and no definite solutions—after all the bombast and nastiness of last term. “It’s hard when the Supreme Court gets into a new area and tries to articulate a new principle,” she said, describing Strickland, the 1984 opinion she authored that set the standards to determine whether a lawyer had provided competent representation. Describing “so many questions today” that have caused the courts to re-examine the Strickland test, she said, again, that the issue is “very hard.”
She even went so far as to say she wished for a magic wand that would permit a few jurisdictions in the United States to experiment with the British system, in which both prosecution and defense lawyers are paid for from the same public purse. “One day a lawyer is a prosecutor for the state, and the next day he does defense work," she explained. The benefit? A new level of courtesy and understanding for having handled both sides and some much-needed parity in the quality of representation. “I’d sure like to see us take a look at that,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s a thought.”
A magic wand? The need for courtesy? “It’s hard.” And that dismissive “it’s a thought.” The inevitable sense you get is that she was kind of winging it at the court, throwing solutions against that constitutional wall and hoping to solve some problems. I know it drove her critics (and me) crazy sometimes. But with the court sounding more and more like it’s comprised of the nine smartest-kids-on-the-debate-squad each year, it’s refreshing to hear someone confess that they were just trying to be fair. A particularly female approach to judging? I don’t know. It’s a thought.
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Geez, Juliet, I hope you don't believe that Republicans are all cold-hearted greedmeisters while Democrats are all selfless philanthropists! I bet I can think of a few greedy Democrats and, if I try hard enough, a generous Republican or two.
I can see the apparent contradiction you cite, but I don't know, in the case of the first daughters, that either apple has fallen that far from the tree. Hillary Clinton wasn't doing pro-bono work all those years at the Rose law firm. (And thank goodness, since the Arkansas' governor's salary was reportedly $35,000!) As for Jenna, well, it's hard to read a profile of the Bush family without coming across the term noblesse oblige. Sometimes that means serving in government, other times maybe it means heading down to Latin America to work with AIDS patients, as Jenna did. And let us not forget that Laura Bush is a former schoolteacher and librarian-her influence is apparent in Jenna's choices.
It's easy to sympathize with the children-even young-adult children-of presidents. Chelsea had to watch her parents' marital issues morph into a constitutional crisis, and lord knows the Bush twins didn't do anything in college that I didn't get away with quite anonymously. But one of the fringe benefits has got to be how well-connected you are when ready to enter the workforce. So in some ways it's probably easier to branch out and try something that defies expectations.
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The Times' Sewell Chan wrote a good blog post yesterday on Lauren Bush, a fashion model and niece of the president who's promoting the FEED bag: "[A] reusable cloth bag that costs $60 and enables the food program to feed a child for one full school year." News of Lauren Bush's do-gooding got me wondering how the younger female members of our two dynastic families—the Bushes and the Clintons—match up.
I'm a loyal Democrat, but I must admit that the Bushes are racking up all the karma points. Besides promoting the FEED bag, Lauren Bush has served as an honorary spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program. And Jenna Bush just published a book called Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope, which chronicles her experiences working with U.N.-sponsored charities in Latin America. Chelsea Clinton, on the other hand, has joined the corporate ranks. She left McKinsey not too long ago to work at a hedge fund.
I find it interesting that the daughter of two Democrats chases cash while the Bush girls advance liberal causes. Is Chelsea acting out? Are the Bush girls rebelling against their conservative forebear? Or am I being too cynical? Maybe Chelsea figures the private sector is the only way she can get any, um, privacy. Maybe Lauren and Jenna really care about the United Nations.
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Emily, I’m so glad you offered Paula Radcliffe as a model by which to understand Hillary Clinton, because after years of struggling to comprehend why such a lot of people seem to dislike Hillary so, I finally get it. (She strikes me as more likable than most politicians, though that’s a bit like saying she smells more like dog poop than elephant feces.)
Why? Because I cannot stand Paula Radcliffe. My anti-Paula animus is completely irrational. We’ve never met, and I’m sure we never will. She’s made no statements that offend me and taken no positions that infuriate me. I admire her talent and her single-mindedness. And as someone who loves athletics and who still has a British passport somewhere at the back of a drawer, I’m extra-appreciative of her success. But there’s something about her that drives me up the wall. It’s probably not even her fault. I was in Britain during the 2004 Olympics, and judging from the media coverage, the entire Olympiad was mere background to the women’s marathon, which "our Paula" was favored to win. In the event, as the BBC put it, she ended up “slumped on an Athens pavement, crying bitter tears of pain and frustration.” If I’d had to look at one more image of her “agony,” I’d be crying bitter tears myself.
By the way, your mention of Radcliffe resuming her training schedule just 12 days after giving birth reminded me of a story about Margaret Thatcher taking the bar exam the afternoon after she had twins. It’s one of those anecdotes that’s too good to fact-check, but I just looked it up. According to an interview she gave in 1985, four months passed between giving birth and taking the final exam to become a barrister, but it was seeing the new babies that left her determined to really pursue the law: “I wrote off to Lincoln's Inn for my Finals papers for my Bar Exam which was to take place in December, and I knew that once I had done that and entered pride would make me work hard for it to get them.” (Incidentally, the interview is fascinating and reminded me what an outsider Thatcher was—she was famously a “shopkeeper’s daughter,” but she also grew up in a home without an indoor toilet and was the first person in her family to go to university.)
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How inopportune for the Democrats that the face of their fund-raising efforts in the Senate is New York's Chuck Schumer, of Michael Mukasey fame. "Slightly better on water-boarding,'' is not much of a rallying cry, and liberal activists are urging those who hoped that a Democratic-controlled Congress might toe the line on torture to withhold their contributions to the party.
Specifically, contributions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Schumer chairs, as a reprimand for his judiciary committee swing vote today, in favor of Bush's nominee for attorney general. Of course, Mukasey already seemed as much Schumer's guy as the president's, since Mr. DSCC kept bragging that the nomination was all his idea—right up until Mukasey refused to call waterboarding torture.
In their intensity, those who want to see Schumer punished—as a deterrent—remind me of my family of Midwestern conservatives, nocturnal Republicans who'd stay up all night decrying the Trilateral Commission. When my Aunt Ginny stopped by our place one day to report that the Commies were coming, a schoolmate who didn't know this happened all the time in my house burst into tears. And oh, Gin took fund-raising letters from her party personally; Ronald Reagan was counting on her, she'd say.
So I thought of her, not only with fondness but fresh kinship, as I tore into the message in my inbox this morning, from Schumer's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Dear MELINDA,'' it began; see, they know me! Surely, CHUCK was writing to explain himself. Which was great, because I had a hard time following that part in his New York Times op-ed about how we know for sure Mukasey would be better than whatever caretaker AG we would otherwise get. Skip the advice and consent now, in other words, so as to maybe be able to offer it later—when something really important is at stake?
Let's see here, hmm, the letter offers a "little Senate update, a 10-second strategy session,'' but mentions nothing about the matter at hand. It does say that "2008 is the Halley's Comet of elections.'' Oh, and that "we can nail the trifecta next year if we start filling our war chests now.'' But through some oversight, shy Schumer's name is not even on the thing, which is signed by James Carville.
As a result, I'm stuck parsing the op-ed, in which Schumer explains that "Judge Mukasey's refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me.'' But, no worries, he goes on to say, because Congress is considering a law that would explicitly ban the practice. Like I'm considering the conclusion that fund-raising is the only reason we even have two parties.
Last week, Schumer argued that Mukasey is "the best we can get'' from President Bush: "From this administration, we will never get somebody who agrees with us on issues like torture and wiretapping.'' But who is this ‘we' again? Count me out, along with those online warriors who find today's plea for money so resistible.
"For the Senate to make a bold declaration about torture and waterboarding by rejecting him is appealing,'' Schumer says in his op-ed. Only, not appealing enough; it is just so embarrassing getting all worked up over the fate of the Republic, like my out-there Aunt Ginny and the whole of the blogosphere. Yet if not over the notion that the United States does not stoop to torture, then when?
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I've been thinking about Hillary's dilemma, if that's what it is, through the prism of Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe won the New York City Marathon last weekend after running up to the day before she gave birth to her 10-month-old daughter, and then taking exactly 12 days off after the birth to recover. I confess that I kind of hate her. Shouldn't pregnancy and birth be one time when women give themselves a break and, yes, accept the attendant biological limitations?
At the same time, Radcliffe's feat is cause for celebration, I suppose, precisely because she exceeded those limitations. Isn't she the ultimate liberated woman, having figured out how to be a mother and a running rock star? Somewhere in here lies an imperfect Hillary parallel. She is also the woman who is breaking the country's biggest gender barriers, and in that sense, she has won my admiration and the support of a lot of women. And yet to do that, she has to be utterly singleminded, and try to mask her female identity in certain key ways. That's key to proving she can be commander in chief. So then when she says she's being ganged up on by a bunch of men, just that claim is enough for a dust up, even if she didn't explicitly play the gender card. But she doesn't take a hit from women in the polls, because a lot of them do see the dilemma.
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I guess not. But I had the same question as you did, Meghan, regarding to what extent Hillary Clinton's camp had actually played the gender card. The best I could figure was that the press release ended by calling Sen. Clinton "One strong woman," and one of her strategists told supporters in a conference call that he was "detecting some backlash" toward Obama and Edwards among female voters. It's not much, but that bit about the backlash had subtle hints that the boys were being meanies and the girls didn't like it.
I agree that there were no gender politics at play in the video, but I did find it quite ineffectual. The other candidates are shown, over and over, addressing or referring to "Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton." Without context, it's hard to know if they were critiquing a policy statement or complimenting her pantsuit. But last week's debate spawned another YouTube video that I feel is far more damning to Sen. Clinton, and that's the clip put out by the John Edwards camp of Hillary contradicting herself on Iraq, Social Security, and those infamous driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in New York. If, as a few of us seem to agree, Hillary's biggest problem is not her gender but her phoniness, I think it probably helped her to let the storm over her playing the gender card swirl for as long as it could. It served to distract people from her debate performance.
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Previously, on XX Factor... Hillary Can't Win? I know you mean as in can't catch a break, Dahlia. But until last week, you'd swear from reading the coverage that she'd already been elected. Whenever I mention her high, deep and not-going-anywhere negatives, the unanimous response is, "Hey, but look at the polls; it's a done deal.' So OK, if polls are all, what about this one, a California survey that shows a third of voters there have already decided against her? Gender has zero to do with her biggest weakness, which is the perception that she's a phony - even though women candidates typically enjoy an edge in the "authenticity'' department.
I also wanted to circle back to earlier posts from June and Rachael: See, get a few women who might not be in perfect political sync in a room, even virtually, and before you've collected the coats and the drink orders, they're looking for common ground. Gender stereotype, yes -- but I saw it in action all the time on my book journey in 20 states, and Lord, what a welcome sight.
In Washington, we never stop talking about politics, to the point that if you've run into someone at the dry cleaner's twice, you probably know which way they lean. (And if they don't telegraph it, their poor campaign junkie kids will; last year just before the midterms, my then 10-year-old son answered the phone at dinnertime one night, and called, "Mom, it's another push poll; can I take this one?'') But in a lot of the country, politics is the new sex; nobody says a thing. Mostly because, as June suggests, we'd rather not get into it with people we care about.
All that politeness is hurting our democracy, though, because if those who aren't screaming are silent, there is no national conversation. Because we have no practice, we don't even know how to hash through important issues respectfully, which is to say productively. And if we only speak to people with whom we agree, and give us no pushback, how do we know what we really want from our government? Are we so sure we have nothing to learn, ever, from those with opposing viewpoints?
What I did for the book was get groups of women who were friends but had never talked about politics before together for their maiden voyage, and the result was just the opposite of a shout fest. There were lively disagreements, just as you'd hope, but when people felt heard, even by each other, they put their shoulders down and got serious. Some of the groups are still meeting. And whether Hillary becomes our first woman president or not, that's one way I'd love to see more women leading the way politically -- in their own living rooms.
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I missed out on some of the analysis of the Clinton campaign's "pile on" video last week. Now that I've caught up, there is something I don't understand about all the fuss over Hillary supposedly playing the gender card/"victim card." As far as I can tell, there is nothing explicitly gendered about the "Politics of Pile On" video that was released on You Tube, and there is nothing explicitly gendered about the press release. Nor does either document portray Clinton as a victim. On the contrary, read the press release, and you'll find that the point is not one of victimization or wimpy femaleness. Its point is that the "pile-on"style is contrary to the "politics of hope" message Obama (and to some degree Edwards) both espoused early on. Nor does the imagery of the video make Hillary look like a frail woman embattled by men; at the end, Hillary looks cool, calm, and collected, not shaken and stirred. (I say all this as no particular defender of Hillary, about whom I have reservations.)
I suppose you could make the argument that no man would ever run an ad like "The Politics of Pile On", but that would be purely speculative. I suppose you could say that the video implicitly brings up gender by contrasting Hillary with the men, and maybe it does, but there's nothing in the way it's edited to suggest gauzy, delicate femininity. In the main, the video is not about gender, it's about hypocrisy. I don't happen to think it's a particularly good video about hypocrisy, but no matter. Meanwhile, the gender lens seems to have largely been derived from the media's reading of the whole event (as in this Gail Collins column about "six men" piling on one woman). Hillary herself said (I paraphrase): "They didn't pile on me because I 'm a woman, but because I'm the front runner." This has been construed as some kind of rhetorical turnaround, but it seems to me pretty consistent with the presentation of the YouTube video and the press release. So a fund-raising letter said Hillary needed women's help; that's tacky, but I'm not sure it has all that much to do with Hillary's own self-presentation.
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I'll be very curious to see if this dust-up affects Hillary's poll numbers—and my hunch is that it won't. It's pretty minor, so perhaps not much of a test, but my bet is that she'll maintain her huge edge among women voters. In the personal realm, we're often hard on each other: Studies like the one you mention, Meghan, reflect women's judgment of each other as well as men's judgment of them. But of Hillary, maybe many of us are becoming more forgiving. We know she has a lot of role expectations to straddle.
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Ruth Marcus has a smart piece in today’s Washington Post about Hillary’s decision to play the gender card. I think she is spot-on. Hillary is so far above this sort of gender-grousing, it actually diminishes her to retreat to it. Barack Obama called her on it this morning, saying that “it doesn't make sense for her, after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly she backs off and says, "Don't pick on me."
In one sense it’s not fair. For most Americans, Hillary’s gender will be the main lens through which she is judged. Everyone is “reading her” as you say, Meghan, as a woman. And yet each time she reads herself that way—by referring to herself as a “girl” or unleashing a little cleavage—we all go bananas. I think Marcus is right to suggest that Hillary is at her post-feminist best when she uses her girl power to show strength, but lets down the team when she reaches for it as a victim. Still, it’s a double standard wrapped up in a double standard. A double standard squared?
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In response to your perceptive comments, Emily: I agree that Hillary can seem to lack empathy, and that's what might make her seem a "pretender" to many Americans. But what the paper I cited starts to get at--and what I'm really wondering about--are the ways in which gender powerfully shape the way we "read" somebody, even when we think it doesn't. In other words, you and I might think we have a "pure" take on Hillary--that we'd feel the same way about her if she were a man. But as Lisa Belkin's column in The New York Times today on gender on workplace perceptions indicates, the exact same "tough" or angry behavior is frequently read as abrasive in women, but seen as authoritative in men.
Belkin quotes from a pretty interesting-sounding study by Victoria Brescoll at Yale in which a man and women are given an "angry" script and a "sad script" to use in a job interview: the angry man was seen as most hireable, then the sad woman, then the sad man, and, last, the angry woman. (Caveat: I haven't read the study myself, so don't know how well-executed it is.)
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In the NYT this morning, Gail Collins' column is all about Hillary's toughness. Collins reams Clinton for the substantive answers she gave during Tuesday's debates, but gives her style points for holding her own while "being yelled at by six men." "They began piling on from the first question. She took it all and came out the other end in one piece. She’s one tough woman. Kudos."
Meghan, you pointed out that Hillary gets called a pretender, and wondered if that's because she's striving to be a manly-girl. Collins' column is another phenomenon: Hillary gets points for being tough precisely because she's a woman. Those cross currents will probably be with us through the election; their relative strength could determine whether she wins. I wonder, though, if Hillary's reputation as a pretender has another origin. I believe her toughness. It's empathy that I have trouble feeling from her to the same degree.
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Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.
And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)
It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.
We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.