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Now this is interesting; I see where a focus group of Republican women has declared Mike Huckabee the winner of last night's debate. These undecided, right-leaning women thought Mitt Romney came off as phony, arrogant and "a snake''—and one woman who described herself as a strong Republican wondered if a guy that rich would really look out for the little guy. (Do you want to break it to her, or should I?) Others expressed discomfort with his Mormon faith and bridled at his lack of support for Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he suggested he would never have appointed to the Supreme Court.
John McCain also got a big thumbs-down from the group, which included 11 California women of various ages, races, and wings of the GOP: He's so snide, they said, as if that were a bad thing. But Huckabee they found caring, real, and in touch with their concerns. So much so that seven of the 11 declared him the winner, and four who'd been leaning toward other candidates decided to support him as a result. Maybe they liked how he patted Nancy Reagan's hand?
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On the legal front this week, we have Michael Mukasey's can't-pin-me-down testimony of yesterday, as Dahlia reported. And also this dismaying report, via his lawyer and the LA Weekly's blog, that a Guantanamo prisoner has contracted AIDS in the camp. If this is true, it's an awful example of the individual harms the Bush administration has caused with its grim insistence that the rule of law and the war on terror shall not mix.
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C'mon, John, there was one great moment in last night's GOP debate: When Mitt Romney sneered that John McCain couldn't be too darn conservative or else the New York Times wouldn't have endorsed him, hehhehheh, and McCain flipped him his riposte—something about then how come both of Romney's own hometown papers, including the superconservative Boston Herald, had endorsed McCain, too, huh? The killing part was not what McCain said, but how he returned Romney's phony laugh, hehhehheh, soooo sarcastically, and right up in Romney's face. So that for a couple of seconds, as they were nose-to-nose doing this and wagging their heads back and forth, I was actually hopeful that the whole thing might end in a head-butt. Alas, that was not to be. But Romney still looks shocked anew every time McCain answers him, so maybe that's why he failed to move in for the kill. And wouldn't you have loved to have seen the thought bubble over Nancy Reagan's head when Mike Huckabee took her arm—thank goodness someone did, because I was afraid she was going to fall—and then spent ages patting her hand?
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Thanks, Dahlia, for your response to my post the other day, and for raising the good question about whether women, especially young women, are more "politically checked out" than their male counterparts. Such questions are one reason I get so amped about overly simplistic feminist rants—they just get tempers flaring and obscure the problems that we can actually work on.
Looking back at the two columns you referenced—a piece wondering if feminism was out of style and the ombudsman's (ombudswoman's?) column in the Washington Post—I have to say that, once I get past the hand-wringing in von Hahn's column, I can relate to her concern more. She seems to be worried that women are paying more attention to low-brow pop culture than concerning themselves with big issues, while Deborah Howell of the Post thinks that we gals would read the paper more if only it had nice stories about parenting and relationships. (Apparently, she missed our discussion of that Page One piece about yuppie parents a while back.)
If men are generally staying better abreast of the political news, I'd bet they're also more politically active, and as such, more likely to have their voices heard. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease, yadda yadda. So therein lies a concern for women. As for what to do about it, it's hard to say. We can't go all Clockwork Orange and strap women into chairs with their eyes peeled open to make them read the A-section. Could we make the hard news more anecdotal, with more personal stories about how the war or congressional legislation or Supreme Court decisions affect everyday people? There's already plenty of that out there, and politicians have bogarted that technique (let us not forget the S-CHIP brouhaha) to such a degree that it's now a tired cliché. I can't offer any solutions myself, but I'd love to hear ideas.
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Did Elizabeth Edwards damage her husband's chances in the election he's dropping out of today? She did not hurt her husband, no; she'd literally rather die than do so, I swear, and still did him more good than harm.
But while people love Elizabeth, they do not love her ?&%! cancer, and the disease did limit her ability to help him. Not because either her illness or its treatment kept her from campaigning—she was out there anyway, forcefully questioning Hillary Clinton's effectiveness as an advocate for women and warning that conservative hatred of the Clintons would energize the Republican base if Hillary were the Democratic nominee. But uncertainty about her health and her future did neutralize her positives to some degree.
A friend of mine, Lynn Hunter, who lives in Ames, Iowa—and has had breast cancer, too, as I have, said, "Even I was stunned when the word that he was staying in the race anyway first came out,'' after the couple announced that Elizabeth's cancer had returned last spring. "At first, it seemed to indicate a level of ambition I wasn't comfortable with. It took a few days for me to figure out that it's like a bad country song or that bucket movie''—if your time is limited, then all the more reason to spend it well.
But men in particular seemed unable to come to grips with Edwards' decision, she thought: "My brother and I were talking about the candidates and the first thing he said about Edwards was he didn't understand how anybody whose wife was sick with cancer would make that decision. I'm in a faith-sharing group and it came up more than once in the group, too. And the men, interestingly, were always the ones saying they didn't get it.'' Lynn, who is a therapist, sees the fact that it was breast cancer as adding another layer of discomfort: "Psychologically, that's part of it. It's like my husband went to Borders and got two books on the husband's role in my recovery from breast cancer. Would he have done that if I'd had leukemia? No, there's a sexual overlay to this; he wanted to be the best breast cancer husband he could be.''
Yet the real deal-killer, of course, was not Elizabeth or John or even his $400 haircuts, but the newer, more inspiring alternative to Clinton, Barack Obama. Because Obama so completely embodies the change that this election is about, no amount of spousal support or sunny uplift would have been sufficient. As Elizabeth herself said of her husband months ago, "We can't make him black, we can't make him a woman.'' Just this once, it wasn't the white guy who best matched the message, or the moment.
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No gender gap, no respect. That's the story for Republican women voters in the primaries so far. Tonight, according to exit polls, they broke for John McCain 32 percent over 30 percent for Mitt Romney. Which means they voted along the same lines as GOP men more or less (35 percent McCain, 32 percent Romney). Ho-hum. As in Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire—if the lack of coverage in my last hour of searching is any measure—no one is much keeping track. Gender has mattered a great deal in the Democratic race, with women tilting between Hillary (New Hampshire and Nevada) and Obama (Iowa and South Carolina), and voting in larger numbers and by different margins than men. But they haven't been the key to any Republican victories. In Florida, tonight, they accounted for 44 percent of the vote in their party, compared to 60 percent among Democrats.
So the main interest in GOP women has been speculation about how many might vote for Hillary in a general election. (Mark Penn: as many as 24 percent. Republican response: no way. October poll: Eighty percent said definitely not, more than ruled out Obama or Edwards.) Given their political views, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they're up for Hillary to grab. On the other hand, if McCain or Romney or someone doesn't start tailoring his pitch to them and only them, they could get miffed. The virtue of a party without a gender gap is that it's not dodging the potholes of identity politics. The downside is that it's muddling along without thinking much about what its women want. Listening to Romney's and McCain's speeches tonight, I don't hear anyone wooing the ladies. Not even in a throwaway sentence or two.
Why is there no female angle to the Republican race? Are the security moms completely gone? Has the Hillary candidacy simply erased gender as an issue for Republicans because they don't have a first woman to support and history to make? What do Republican women want, anyway? They support the Iraq war in far greater numbers than their Democratic counterparts. But they're just as worried about the economy. Beyond that, and the obligatory pro-life nod, no one seems to ask them. Maybe the Republican candidate who went a-courting would find himself with his dance card more than full. When you've spent months as a wallflower, you're ready to dance with the guy who asks you.
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Rachael I don’t think you’re going to find anyone on this blog racing to second Karen Von Hahn’s simplistic take on feminism, any more than we swallowed the NOW tantrum last night or the Steinem logic earlier this month. The split you’re sketching isn’t really between feminists and traditionalists but between feminists and what Von Hanh seems to want to characterize as overgrown tweens. I think that she's mixed up her criticism of apathetic women with a critique of a new generation of (for lack of a better word) post-feminists. Like you, I am infuriated by representatives of the women’s movement who demand I vote for whichever candidate wears the Spanx. And like you—and Rich Ford, whose wonderful book we just excerpted—I agree that if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail (in this case pervasive sexism). And that this is a lazy way to view the world. Right or wrong, this generation of feminists can’t be made to see everything through a gender prism, and that’s not because we’re all spoiled, stupid, or too wrapped up with the Spice Girls to see what’s really happening under our noses—or just above the glass ceilings.
Let’s agree that life is too complicated to hammer away at problems—or at Kennedys—for imagined acts of sexism. But can we also agree that Von Hahn, for all that her evidence is dopey, points to the same trend Deborah Howell poked at in this week’s Washington Post (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Post). It was a strange effort at explaining the massive disparity between young fathers and young mothers who read the paper, but it touched on some of the same themes as Von Hahn (including the observation that “women read magazines avidly, and as one young woman told me, magazine ink doesn't rub off on her hands.”) I don’t know who depressed me more, Howell or Von Hahn, but I do wonder if their claims are true and a generation of young women are more politically checked out than their male counterparts.
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So, some folks are worried that "feminism is out of style." Gee, could it have anything to do with stuff like this? Apologies if I seem too flippant. But I do sense a common thread between Karen von Hahn's column in the Globe and Mail (go read it if you haven't) and that noxious letter from the New York chapter of NOW: It's as if feminism is an either/or proposition. If you like pink ... if you are anti-abortion ... if you don't quiver with joy at the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton, then you are NOT a feminist.
Is there no room for nuance? A woman should be able to think that it's rotten that there aren't more female CEOs and that we still wipe more bottoms and mop more floors than our husbands without also feeling compelled to believe that The Man is still keeping us down because the abortion clinic gives Juno "the creeps."
Von Hahn bemoans the fact that "girls of this generation ... consider it ‘lame' to align themselves with a woman candidate on the sole ground of sisterhood." I think that represents a rousing success of the feminist movement. It tells me that women believe that it's so possible for a woman to become president that they're willing to wait for the female candidate who best represents their views.
If "sisterhood" means that I have to choose Ms. over InStyle, Hillary over John McCain, and If These Walls Could Talk over Knocked Up, then count me out.
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I see that the blogosphere is aflame - oh, it must be Tuesday - with a debate about whether Obama snubbed Hillary at last night's State of the Union. I didn't catch this moment, or lack of one, myself. Which is a shame, because after Kennedy endorsed Obama yesterday, I truthfully was a lot more curious about what the Kennedy-Clinton-Obama body language would be than about whether Bush would make it all the way through his last SOTU without ever once correctly pronouncing the word nuclear. (Si, se puede!)
But here is the play-by-lay from Frank James, on the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp: "As Clinton approached, Kennedy made sure to make eye contact and indicated he wanted to shake her hand. Clinton leaned towards Kennedy over a row of seats and Kennedy leaned in towards her. They shook hands. Obama stood icily staring at Clinton during this, then turned his back and stepped a few feet away. Kennedy may've wanted to make peace with Clinton but Obama clearly wanted no part of that. "
On MSNBC this morning, Obama adviser David Axelrod denied said snub: "First of all, they acknowledged each other as they entered the chamber. But I think he knew that Senator Kennedy and Senator Clinton were friends. This was obviously an awkward day from that standpoint, and I don't think he wanted to stand there while Senator Kennedy was greeting Senator Clinton. And I think that was an appropriate sentiment. Unfortunately, the camera caught it in a different way, and so it got interpreted that way. And that's the kind of environment we're in right now. It's a very competitive race, so every little thing is going to be interpreted in that way. But it was really a matter of letting Senator Kennedy have his own conversation, his own greeting with Senator Clinton without him hovering over them...I think it's understandable that he would not want to stand there with Senator Kennedy as if he were lording it over her."
Today, some Obama backers are arguing that he might not have even seen her, though this seems unlikely, given that one thing we can definitely conclude about last night is that she should wear red more often. Others in the Obama camp say good for him, refusing to shake the hand of someone so willing to whip out the race card. And of course, Hillary backers are outraged that Mr. Nice Guy, who is supposed to bring us all together, refused to reach out to her on his campaign's best day.
Whether Obama was being ungracious, authentic or tactful in a way that did not serve his political interests, I don't know. But I can't help thinking of how big a deal it was when Claytie Williams, who was running for Texas governor against Ann Richards in 1990, refused to shake her hand at a debate; it really was a turning point. Of course, last night's missing handclasp was nothing like that blatant. And Barack Obama is certainly no Claytie Williams, who handed what was left of his support from women to Richards when he observed that bad weather is like rape - "as long as it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.'' Still, for future reference: When in doubt, shake it.
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I saw HBO's therapy series In Treatment last night, and felt it could be helped by adding a long-married couple to the lineup of patients:
Therapist: Why don't we start by--
Hillary: Have you seen his finger? It's out of control. He's wagging it at everyone. Every time his finger comes out I lose 5 percent of voters.
Bill: I should be in the presidential suite at Davos getting a massage from those Swedish gals they have there. But because I agreed to help my wife, I have to listen to lectures on behavior from Ted Kennedy!
Therapist: How do you feel when --
Hillary: Could you tell him to try to remember to mention my name occasionally when he gives one of his "I'm the greatest" speeches?
Bill: You wanted me to rough up Obama for you!
Hillary: I didn't say you should sound like the ghost of Lester Maddox!
Therapist: Could we --
[cut to: lamp being thrown at Bill's head]
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Oh my dear Emily, I just read that NOW letter about how Ted Kennedy has supposedly betrayed all women everywhere by endorsing Barack Obama—and I have not seen that many exclamation marks since I read Donna Hanover's book about how great it is being the ex-Mrs. Rudy Guiliani. (In brief, it is great!) Even though Politico's Ben Smith double-checked with NOW to make sure this missile was for real, it's still hard to believe it isn't a prank, of the sort pulled by those guys who yelled, "Iron my shirts!'' at Hillary a couple of weeks ago. (Seems like longer, though, doesn't it?)
This is such an old-fashioned hissy fit, I would not be surprised to wake up tomorrow and read that the sender had gotten up off her fainting couch and apologized: "Silly moi, lost my head there for a minute, on account of PMS. Or not.'' Because it only underscores Kennedy's point about how important it is to "close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.'' And Obama's point that the old politics -- interest-group politics -- will not go quietly. Obama's position on abortion rights is identical to Clinton's, so is the fact that Kennedy has endorsed a man really the outrage here? Or is it that somebody thinks their power base in the Democratic Party is being threatened?
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"Whoa," says Ben Smith of Politico about the New York chapter of NOW's blast against Ted Kennedy for endorsing Barack Obama. Whoa is right. Also woe. Also wow. NOW NY calls the endorsement "the ultimate betrayal," lays into Kennedy for his apparent past legislative sins, which the group previously "hushed," and writes, “And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us." Lots more fury follows—enough to prompt John Dickerson to wonder if the name Mary Jo Kopechne was in the original draft of NOW's press release.
So, that's it—an endorsement of any candidate but Hillary is a betrayal of the feminist cause? I suppose the more sophisticated version is that interest groups expect the politicians they support to support them blindly in their time of need. This is their time of need, the NY NOW chapter argues, ergo, Kennedy should be with them. But that assumes that the feminist time of need equates with electing Hillary. Would most women, or even most feminists, agree with that? I just can't. And what does this narrow-cast way of evaluating a candidate really have to recommend it? I can't think of anything on that score, either. Can some other women's group please speak up to say that if Kennedy has good reason to think that Obama would be the best president for the country, and a damn fine president for women, then supporting him is A-OK with them?
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I am also ready for Bill Clinton to sit down. But it's worth pointing out that among white women in South Carolina, Bill disaffection—or whatever turned women away from Hillary—seemed to produced a boost for Edwards rather than for Obama. You're right, Dahlia, that Obama won 53 percent of women over all, which is the first time he has cracked 50 percent. But that was because he won 79 percent of black women (who made up one-third of the total electorate). Hillary won 44 percent of white women—a lower number than her overall support among women in Iowa or New Hampshire—Edwards won 34 percent (higher than Iowa and New Hampshire), and Obama won only 22 percent (lower).
I hate to carp on these divisions, but they're too big to ignore. There's a divide among men, too, and it's almost as wide, just with positions one and two reversed: Edwards got 43 percent of white men, Clinton 29 percent, and Obama 27 percent. Meanwhile, Obama got 82 percent of black men. What, if anything, could alter all the individual calculuses that's causing this heavy identity politics? Or does it all not matter, because all these groups of Democrats will support the eventual nominee in adequate numbers, and it's naive to think that in a primary in which the candidates agree on most of the big issues, people won't be inclined to vote for the one who looks like they do?
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It’s not going to be about gender when the pundits turn Barack Obama’s thrashing of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina into a referendum on her husband. The truth is that long before Bill turned himself into the Tasmanian Devil on the campaign trail, we were wondering how Hillary was going to fit in the space around him.
Long before his extra-credit sessions with his female staffers, Hillary suffered the comparison between his megawatt charisma and effortless authenticity -- even when he was lying, he was genuine. Long before he re-emerged, larger than life, in South Carolina, he was always larger than her.
As women, we always knew Hillary would have a rough time getting beyond being the missus, and we hardly telegraphed clear messages about what we’d have liked to see from her. We blamed her for staying with him, and we loved her for it. We blamed her for skidding along on his coattails, but we understood that sometimes that's the only way to get in the game. A friend once suggested that women who hate Hillary mostly just wanted to get in Bill’s Wranglers. Any way you look at it, the man casts an enormous shadow; and any way you look at it, we knew too much about the balance of power in their relationship to be comfortable.
Perhaps as a result of Bill’s giant shadow, Hillary wants it both ways. She wants to be on his team and to make it on her own. She wants credit for her successes and credit for his. She wanted him on the sidelines in this campaign until she needed a soccer hooligan. And as soon as he began to co-opt her presidential bid in earnest this week, our first serious female contender for president started to look like Bill’s wife again.
One of the qualities in Hillary Clinton that scares me most is her lack of a fixed sense of self. She has invented and re-invented her public persona dozens of times over the years -- often to contrast with Bill's -- and you can’t really blame her for that. She’s had to figure out what this country wants from its women as she goes along, and if this campaign has revealed anything it’s that we no more agree on what we want in our women than we agree on how to get out of Iraq.
But it hasn’t helped that this Clinton campaign has also reinvented itself almost weekly since January: We’ve had Falling to Pieces Week; Finding Our Voice Week; Unloading a Carton of Whupass Week; and then Heh, Heh, That Bill Is a Maniac Week. Is it just me, or is it true that when it comes to issues of character, you don’t necessarily want a candidate who seems to be testing out new ones for each new crisis?
Caroline Kennedy will be endorsing Obama in tomorrow’s New York Times, and you can’t miss the contrast between this daughter of a great president and the wife of one. Feminists may weep that Kennedy speaks from under the shadow of her father to endorse another man, while Hillary can’t seem to wriggle out from the shadow of her husband. But then, it’s not an accident that in South Carolina tonight, Obama beat Clinton among women 53 percent to 30 percent.
It’s not so much that women aren’t ready for a woman president. We are. But there’s something about last week’s spectacle of Bill Clinton crashing through South Carolina like the guy poised to drag her back to his cave by the hair that reminds us that Hillary has some stuff to work out in her marriage before she works it out with the rest of us. Any woman in public life inevitably still struggles to define herself in opposition to men. But Hillary has an even bigger cross to bear: She’s still defining herself in opposition to Bill.
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A guest post from our own Will Saletan about the exit of Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic race:
Why does the man who endured humiliation through the entire 2004 primary season drop out this early in 2008? I blame the wife. He didn't have a wife last time. The wife is the person who tells you, "Honey, it's time to drop out."
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As far as meta-themes go in this presidential campaign, this week’s “Hoppin’ Mad” trope has quickly become tiresome. Yesterday we heard endless reports about an incident in which Barack Obama ostensibly had a “testy” exchange with a reporter that proved testy only in the eyes of someone at ABC trying to bump up their page views. And today’s headlines are all screaming about Bill Clinton who allegedly “lays into” “unloads on” “gets fiery” and otherwise freaks out on a CNN reporter. But if you watch the video–of Clinton responding to a question from Jessica Yellin about reports of vote suppression in Nevada—I just don’t see much laying into or unloading. Wordiness? Yes. Misdirection? Some. But up until the very end when he says “shame on you”—with a big smile on his face, and in much the same way you might if your dog had peed on the bathmat—I just don’t see much rage here.
So, what’s up with the whole media manufactured tantrums thing? Is it just some lame attempt to create a psychodrama where none exists? Is it reporters trying to stand out by putting themselves at the center of the story? Is Clinton right in saying that—like hockey—the press watches campaigns only for the bleeding?
In his great 2007 book A Bee in the Mouth, anthropologist Peter Wood describes an America in love with a “social anger” that is more performance than real. It’s bad enough when we feign anger in public life in to engage voters. But engaging viewers with the suggestion that candidates and their spouses are constantly out-of-control is exponentially more revolting.
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And still on the subject of bias in Supreme Court reporting, longtime Slate contributor and appellate attorney Walter Dellinger writes in the following e-mail:
A former academic colleague of mine once said a very wise thing about "bias": "The worst kind of politics is the politics that doesn't know it's a politics."
It was once suggested that Linda not cover abortion cases because of her "bias" in favor of reproductive rights. She had a "position." The assumption is that she should and could be replaced on those cases by someone without a bias. Without a bias? Who would that be? Oh, right, of course, someone who had shown total indifference to either side of the debate. And that is because not giving a damn either way about whether unborn are being slaughtered or women are being coerced by a totalitarian intervention into their lives is not a "position"—it is something called "objectivity" or "balance" or whatever.
The goal of fair reporting does not depend upon reporters having no "views"—it depends upon a professionalism that gets it right. And here is where the critics utterly fail. In the field that Linda covers, it would be easy to make out a case of unprofessional bias. The materials on which her reporting is based are all public. To take one kind of example: Every predictive statement she has made in assessing oral argument over a long career was either verified or repudiated by the court's subsequent decision. For example, a report by Linda that said "The Court appeared unwilling to accept the government's broad view of executive power" followed a few months later by an opinion of the Court that gave the executive everything it asked for would count as an error. Finding enough errors and finding that the errors are systematically in the direction of the reporter's "bias" should establish a lack of requisite professionalism. Showing bias (on the part of an unprofessionally biased Supreme Court reporter) would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Why has no critic actually undertaken to demonstrate Linda's bias from readily available public sources? Two weeks' work by a summer intern would do the trick. Doesn't the failure to do this strongly suggest that the critics actually know what they would find—that while she must have made mistakes somewhere in thousands of stories, what is remarkable is how extraordinarily rare such mistakes have been and what is dispositive is the total absence of a pattern of errors in one direction that would be consistent with biased reporting. So the critics must actually know better. Which is why Emily and Dahlia are so right that it is very wrong to dignify these attacks as if they were honest complaints that deserved an answer.
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Dunno, Emily ... I, for one, am glad that Ed Whelan at NRO has outed us as raging drunks.
To me, the remarkable aspect of the assault on Greenhouse is—as you point out—that she warrants such extra-special crazy-ass contempt from the right wing. She’s not just “biased,” in Whelan’s latest. She’s also “sloppy.” It speaks to the impossible high-wire act still attempted by the Supreme Court press corps. They strive to be absolutely factual even while some of the best reporters on the beat have about 30 years’ experience and the political opinions that come with that. Long after the rest of the journalistic world chucked the illusion of objectivity to settle for the hope of accuracy, the folks on the SCOTUS beat still struggle mightily to hide their opinions each day. Some succeed better than others. I succeed not at all. And, of course, all of them slip up once in a while because the line between fact and opinion is murky. But Greenhouse is held to a different standard because the political right thinks she has this magical ability to alter the course of constitutional history with a quirk of her eyebrow toward the bench.
What. Ever.
Most interesting to me about Whelan’s latest crusade—er, noble truth-seeking enterprise—is that it does highlight the impossibility of what most SCOTUS reporters are trying to do: Perfect objectivity in Supreme Court reporting is a laudable goal. But unless we just reprint the transcript, we are all of us offering interpretations and impressions. That’s the expertise we get paid for. Interesting, also, is the fact that the convention is eroding on its own. Both Jeff Toobin and Jan Crawford Greenburg produced excellent books about the court last year that sidestepped objectivity for opinion and point of view. Yet nobody is calling for their scalps. In fact, most of us found their candor pretty refreshing. I am not sure whether anyone would contend that Jan’s book is objective while Jeff''s is not, or vice versa. I certainly didn’t hear rants about deliberate bias and dishonesty. Most of us simply recognized in those books the truth that different legal reporters hold different opinions, that it may be impossible to conceal them anymore, and that this may be a good thing.
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Ed Whelan at NRO didn't like the piece Dahlia and I wrote yesterday defending Linda Greenhouse. We're not eager for a tit for tat. But it seems worth repeating that our basic point, which Whelan ignores, is that critics on the right go after Greenhouse with an overwrought vigor not visited upon any other Supreme Court reporter (and few other reporters in general). The point seems to be to discredit her and the paper, and what we were objecting to is the Times feeding the whole thing. (Though we did appreciate that Whelan didn't like what Hoyt had to say about him.)
Whelan can attack whomever he wants. What's odd, though, is that he seems so reluctant to own up to being a hatchet man. He seems surprised that we feel like he has gone after us, too. I dunno, phrases like "strikingly dishonest and incompetent--or both" (about my writing) and "dishonest and baseless" (Dahlia's) seem pretty clear. (Isn't this great--now he's got me doing his research and reprinting his nastygrams.) Whelan used that language during the Alito and Roberts hearings, a perfect time for confusing the conversation about the nominees with overheated zingers about anyone who dared to criticize them.
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I'm not sure Obama can walk away—as he said on NPR this morning, if you don't respond to charges that you think are factually inaccurate, they tend to stick (Swift Boat). Obama also talked about how Bill is playing the campaigning role that the vice presidential nominee often plays—he's the spewer, as you say, D. In a general election race, Obama would have his own VP, but at this stage, he doesn't. And Hillary's response that Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards also support their spouses doesn't ring true here. They're not ex-presidents, they're not Bill Clinton, etc.
That said, is what Bill is doing really so bad? This is a campaign. Campaigns are slugfests. He's out therre slugging. I don't much like watching it myself, but I feel like it's worth asking the question. Is it more objectionable because Hillary is a female candidate and he undermines her authority? Or is this simply evidence of their smart (if unappealing) teamwork?
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Emily, I’m not sure the Clinton campaign can’t control Bill or simply doesn’t want to. As you point out, it’s apparently working. And certainly it’s to Hillary’s advantage that she gets to appear all calm and superego while her husband spews id all over the sidewalk. (How's that for gender-role reversal? He's playing Lovey to her Mr. Howell!)
But Obama seems to forget that the most basic rule of tantrum-management is walk away ...
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Newsweek's Jon Alter has a piece about Bill Clinton's recent hostile and aggressive campaign behavior. Alter quotes former Clinton lawyer, now Obama supporter, Greg Craig wondering "if Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could." I think we probably have all the evidence we need (see the former No. 1 best seller known as "The Starr Report") that no, Hillary Clinton cannot control her husband. Even if she became the most powerful person in the world, if he started embarrassing her, probably the best she could do would be to declare him an enemy combatant and ship him off to Guantanamo.
I guess Bill's attacks have been working -- Hillary won the last two contests. But in the long run, won't his self-righteous rants hurt her? Every time he gets riled he seems like someone who, for the past seven years, has only had to deal with questions from lesser mortals such as, "Would you like one pillow or two in your sedan chair, my liege?" In last night's debate Obama criticized Bill's attacks on him, and Hillary responded that she was the one running for president. Obama replied that sometimes it was hard to tell. Isn't that truth terribly undermining of her claim to the presidency?
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So, Chris Matthews apologized—at length—for his Hillary comments (which XX Factor discussed here and here). Here’s the video. I’m sure that now a chorus of laments will ring out in the world at large about how PC nags forced him into this. But let’s remember that his statements took place in a larger context of ongoing negativity toward Hillary (check out this Media Matters article). And listen to what he says about halfway through: that he wasn’t speaking “blunt truth,” in this case, because the real truth is a lot larger than he made it sound. That sounds about right to me. If he had said sympathy was a factor in getting Hillary where she is today, fine, big whoop. But he implied it was the only factor. That’s not a “tough truth” sensitive women don’t want to hear; it’s just a predictable, small-minded jab.
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Good question, Juliet, about whether the decline in abortions can be attributed to the decline in the number of clinics. You're right about the latter. In her recent book This Common Secret, Susan Wicklund says that ”between 1982 and 2000, the number of abortion providers in the United States declined from 2900 to 1819, a drop of 37 percent, and thetrend has continued since." Wicklund also notes that "in 2004, almost 60 percent of abortion providers were more than fifty years old.”
The Guttmacher Institute, which puts out the abortion stats, discusses barriers to acess in certain parts of the country as a possible explanation for the fall. But the Gutt folks don't think there's a direct cause-and-effect link. They point out that the abortion rate declined much faster (by 9 percent) than the number of providers (2 percent). Also, as Will Saletan notes, the rate is down in some pro-choice states and some states in which there was an increase in providers—California, Georgia, and New York. And there were also three states in which the abortion rate increased despite a decrease in providers—Alaska, Colorado, and Connecticut. So this doesn't look like the most plausible explanation.
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That's funny Ann, the one thing that never occurred to me was that Megan Meier's parents had struck an impossible bargain with her over MySpace. Perhaps because my kids still believe that Dora the Explorer actually lives inside my laptop I haven't yet thought through what a parent should be doing about monitoring social-networking sites. One of the ironies of the Meier story, beyond those we've already mentioned is that all these parents are simultaneously described as over-involved "helicopter" people and tragically checked-out.
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Dahlia, I'd say one of the most poignant lines in the New Yorker article-and there were plenty of them-comes from Mrs. Meier, Megan's mother, maturely drawing stark age distinctions. She feels for the teenagers who posted messages posing as "Josh Evans," the fake boyfriend. "If you don't think that child wishes she could go back and change that . . . It could easily have been Megan doing that." It's the adult involvement that she cannot forgive, not just her neighbor's but, I suspect, her own as well: she gave into her daughter's pleas for an account, imposing a rule she knew she couldn't enforce-that Megan never be on MySpace without a parent present. Part of what is so disturbing about this story, I think, is the image of a world ensnared by social networking technology, making middle schoolers of us all: needy, insecure, anxiously voyeuristic, socially hypervulnerable creatures for whom being alone, ever, is insupportable-is death.
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Emily, I agree with your Clintonian sentiment re abortion (fewer = better), but perhaps only in theory. The new report on the falling abortion rate didn't provide a reason for the decline. Maybe I'm being cynical, but could this have something to do with the dwindling number of clinics?
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Just read Lauren Collins piece on the Megan Meier MySpace/Suicide story. We haven’t really covered this story at Slate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to wrap your head around it all. Collins doesn’t try to make sense of it all either, just sort of lays it out there in a read-it-and-weep piece that paints the kids involved as somehow old beyond their years and the parents as young beyond theirs.
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Per our discussion about Juno and abortion earlier this week, the Guttmacher Institute announced today that the U.S. abortion rate has declined to its lowest level since 1974—the year after Roe v. Wade was decided. In 2005, the rate was 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The absolute number has gone down as well, to 1.2 millon abortions in 2005, which is 25 percent fewer than the high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990. This, I think we can agree, is unvarnished good news. I hope that it speaks to the spreading of the birth control, birth control mantra that Melinda was wisely intoning. The Guttmacher Institute notes, however, that more than one in five pregnancies still ended in abortion in 2005, so we've got a ways to go.
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The National Women's Studies Association just completed a survey on women's studies programs. Here are some stats, via Feministing: There are 652 women's and gender studies programs in the United States; undergrad women's studies courses enrolled nearly 89,000 students in 2005-06; and 30.4 percent of women's studies faculty are faculty of color, versus 19 percent of faculty nationally.
The ladies over at Feministing seem pretty happy about this academic boom, but I'm not sure what to make of it. In college, I steered clear of the fringe, identity-focused courses. I figured I could learn about feminism or African-American history through conscientious professors in mainstream departments. Plus, it bothered me that gender and/or women's studies classes were populated entirely by women and gay men, and Af Am classes almost entirely by black students. The demographics seemed like an admission of defeat - the world at large doesn't care, but at least we can preach to our own!
The last stat I mentioned - on faculty of color - also worries me, because it brings home the fact that fringe departments help universities massage their numbers. Department by department there are far more men, and far more whites, but Af Am and women's studies make the total breakdown seem a little less egregious.
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Dahlia’s right that last night’s debate was conciliatory and eggshell-tiptoeing to an almost comic degree: After you, my dear Alphonse. But it was a relief to have a break from last week’s victim-of-oppression sweepstakes (which was approaching its nadir in the press as well: did you all see Lorrie Moore’s bizarre op-ed scoffing that feminism has had its day in the sun?)
As someone with a really sad-looking desk of my own, I was also charmed by Obama’s admission of an inability to keep track of paperwork without the aid of a staff. But I’m not sure I agree with Melinda that this moment was an unalloyed mark in his favor. Those harboring doubts about Obama’s youth and relative inexperience, or wondering how he’ll flesh out his rhetoric with action, may not be soothed by the news that he’s not a detail guy, no matter how low the stakes. And after eight years with a leader whose “vision thing” has tended to take precedence over the reading-the-newspaper thing, voters may believe that a single piece of paper (like the August 6, 2001 PDB) can be very important indeed.
Clinton leapt at the chance to exploit this moment of candor by pointing to Katrina as an example of a top-down management debacle: “You have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy.” But I don’t think her own response to the biggest-flaw question was completely disingenuous. Wasn’t her confession that she can be impatient about change, and “sometimes come across that way,” a not-so-veiled admission that her personality can be her own worst political enemy? Wasn’t she saying, in essence, “Fine, I’m pushy”?
Edwards, on the other hand (who I thought performed wonderfully in the January 5 debate) seemed strained and defensive, going out of his way to mention the word “mill” every 30 seconds: “My father was a mill worker.” “I grew up in a mill town.” “I really wish my opponents could be ground up in some type of mill.” His response to Russert’s question about strengths and failings was pure hogwash, the stump-speech equivalent of “I poop rainbows”: “I sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to the pain I see around me,” he said, before segueing into a story about, surprise, a laid-off mill worker. Still, all three candidates were Hamlet-like models of introspection compared to our current president, who, asked at a 2004 press conference to name a single mistake he’d made in office, inadvertently revealed more about himself in his answer than any of the three candidates did last night: “I’m sure something will pop into my head here … you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.” Four years later, he still hasn’t thought of anything.
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All three of the Democratic presidential contenders insist that the next occupant of the Oval Office has got to be more open and honest with the American people. After seven years of gut-instinct infallibility, who could disagree? Yet when asked at last night's debate to be honest and open about their own greatest shortcomings, John Edwards did a searching moral inventory and concluded that he might have too much empathy: "I sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to pain.'' Hillary Clinton allowed that she wants change so badly that she does not, in fact, possess infinite patience: "I get, you know, really frustrated when people don't seem to understand that we can do so much more to help each other.'' Not only is she impatient, but "sometimes I come across that way.''
Only Barack Obama named a true human failing -- that he can be disorganized, to the point that his staff knows never to hand him a piece of paper more than two seconds before he needs it "because I will lose it ... and my desk and my office doesn't look good. I've got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff.'' Which shouldn't be a big deal, but because politicians so rarely cop to anything real, it is. Sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose, candidates actually provide us with important information about themselves. And for voters who really do want more honesty -- and self-awareness -- from their next president, this was one of those times.
The answers Obama and Clinton gave line up with what we already know about them. Instead of obfuscating, Obama has written about how he messed around with drugs as a teenager and went through a period when he and his wife, Michelle, were barely speaking. Whereas Clinton, who is asking to be judged on the basis of her experience as First Lady, was certainly not a known champion of transparency when she lived in the White House the first time. From the beginning of her husband's presidency, her attitude toward the press was combative, even when it didn't need to be. Her secretiveness about health-care reform undermined her efforts on the biggest job she ever took on. To this day, no one knows how the missing Rose Law Firm billing records mysteriously reappeared in the White House residence two years after they were subpoenaed. Part of her pitch is that she's learned from her past mistakes, yet in her autobiography, Living History, history has been airbrushed beyond recognition. Which makes Obama's admission of the absolutely obvious -- nobody's perfect -- a bigger mark in his favor than it really ought to be. Now it will be interesting to see if voters are being honest when they say they want honesty.
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The real truth? Peel away all the ugly, snarling identity politics of the past few weeks and what you find underneath it is a trio of Democratic presidential hopefuls who are colossal wonks. And in much the same way they might do after someone had landed a truly tasteless joke at a dinner party, everyone at the Democratic debate in Las Vegas tonight is on their superbest behavior. Everyone is for unity, equality, and pulling together. Nobody is for hair-pulling, kicking, or snorting coke.
The most discordant notes of the night are consistently logged by the moderators, Brian Williams and Tim Russert of NBC, who devote at least 38 minutes up front and 12 minutes toward the end to trying to reawaken the race vs. gender tensions that have made for such great television these past few weeks. The candidates steadfastly decline to indulge. The nadir of all this is a question to John Edwards about whether he doesn’t, in effect, feel like shit as a white man running against two historic candidates. His answer, I believe, is “kinda” while Hillary murmurs “poor John” on mic.
The gender nadir is the debate setup, in which Williams and Russet ask real questions while poor Natalie Morales parachutes in from some faraway land of lip gloss to pose intermittent e-mail questions from viewers. This would be horrifying enough, were it not for the fact that the very last e-mail question—ostensibly the only “truly thoughtful” one of the evening—is too important to beam up to Morales and thus must be posed by Williams. As of midnight on Jan. 16, then, the candidates have officially gotten past identity politics. The networks have not.
For the most part, when the candidates are being wonks, they agree. They agree on the subprime crisis and on the energy crisis and Yucca Mountain, and they even agree that while guns are bad, they are obligated to say guns are awesome to be elected. Asked to enumerate their respective great strengths and weaknesses, Obama confesses that he tends to lose whatever he is holding after two seconds, such that he needs to surround himself with good people, whereas Hillary Clinton admits she tends to get impatient and compulsive. Oddly enough, that strikes a chord. Obama is brilliant and funny and self-deprecating. Clinton still looks like she has been programmed to smile warmly at nine-minute intervals. But there’s something about the prospect of having yet another President who needs someone to pick up after him that’s incredibly jarring, and Clinton subtly capitalizes on that tonight.
Amid all the conciliatory agreement here, what you really notice is how the candidates tend to look in repose. As they nod and affirm one another, John Edwards looks like a man on a bus, listening to Woody Guthrie on his iPod. Obama appears to be listening to Democracy and Distrust by John Hart Ely. And Hillary looks to be listening to daily affirmations by Stuart Smalley. But it ultimately takes an unspoken agreement to get past haircuts and skin color and highlights to be able to hear what’s going on in those candidates’ heads in the first place. Which is why, for my money, everybody won tonight.
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Clearly, any article that describes the dilemmas of "young" parents, age 28 (using the same language of regret-for-lost-childhood once reserved for teenage mothers), has a hidden agenda: To make all of those fortysomething readers feel better about themselves. For if 28 is the new 18, then 38 must be the new 28 ... and 48 the new 38!
Subtle message to readers: You're not as old as you thought you were!
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Wow, Dahlia, thanks for sharing that story on "young" parents in the WaPo. I'm not quite sure I get the point of the article, but it leaves me with a million random thoughts. First off, it puts to rest the notion that only women write puff pieces. Are these just-about-thirtysomethings looking for sympathy (for forgoing all those wild nights out and exotic trips to the Galapagos) and plaudits for braving the uncharted waters of having a child ... in their late 20s? Give me a break. For how many years after college do you really need to be hitting the party scene every weekend, or hopping last-minute flights to Vegas, or taking that girls weekend at the spa? (Lest I sound too callous, I should add that I fit the profile of the couples mentioned. After five years of living together, my husband and I married in our late 20s and had our first child when I was 30. We were even among the first of our friends to have kids. Big whoop.)
I have no doubt it can be difficult to decide whether to have children before your career truly takes off or to wait until you're established. Alas, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to that dilemma. But the fact remains that, whether one is 28 or 33 or 38, if you are a college-educated, married professional, raising a child is a heck of a lot easier than it would be if you were 22 and single and struggling to make ends meet. I'm sure there are plenty of such TRULY young parents out there who are doing an admirable job—even if they are too busy to reflect that "parenthood is giving them a new level of ambition that is sophisticated and rejuvenating"—and I think their stories would be vastly more interesting than what was deemed worthy of front-page treatment in the Washington Post.
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Here, in a skit posted months ago, is all you need to know about how the Democratic primary is playing out. Oh, except that the Republican enjoying the show has yet to be named ...
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Dahlia, amen. Racism and sexism are issues in the campaign, no doubt, but they're not the central issues, and playing the game of who-has-it-worst could end up in a form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Luckily, the candidates themselves seem to have realized this, Ann, and are trying to get out of the "identity trap" in a manner akin to your proposal: Both Obama and Clinton released statements yesterday crediting the other candidate and urging us all to get past this narrative. So now it's just time for the media to get back to analyzing the candidates' positions on key issues. (Via Marc Ambinder)
Speaking of which, here's an interesting post on the shrinking gender pay gap from a new blog: It appears that the pay gap is shrinking, mostly because men's wages have remained stagnant while women experience gains. (Via Marginal Revolution)
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Did anyone else find the Washington Post’s front page story today about “young” college-educated parents just surreal? (Disclosure: They own us.) First off, all these extremely young parents who are not hanging out in bars or brunching with their buddies are all either 29 or 31. Where are these playgrounds in which all the parents are “old"? And what, precisely, are “older-looking” parents anyhow? Apparently something to do with Rolling Stones T-shirts but, er, wait, wouldn’t those dads be 60, then?
Unexplored and unexamined is the assumption that it’s best for your kids to have your attention while they are toddlers, so you can be free to make partner when they’re potty trained. Except every mom I know says the opposite is true. Thoughts?
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Dahlia, I'd just been typing up a post in the same spirit as yours, inspired by David Brooks' column today about the "identity trap" the candidates have gotten themselves into. Maybe it's a good moment to invite suggestions for how they could escape, since mere hand-wringing about the situation—virtuous though it makes us feel—is going to get old fast. I wonder if humor might offer a way out. Remember Reagan's deft neutralizing of the ageism that stalked him during the 1984 campaign? "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign," he joked in the second debate. "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." Maybe Obama and Clinton could try out a variation. "We want you to know that henceforth, we won't make race or gender an issue in this primary season," they could say in the debate tonight. "We'll save that up for the general election, when we won't hesitate to exploit, for political purposes, our opponent's aura of white male privilege."
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If the first half of last week was Gender Week in the mainstream media, and the past few days were the Days of Race. Today’s theme is fast shaping up to be Gender Vs. Race, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Having gone one round on Hillary’s soft side and the next on the racist attacks her surrogates have unloosed on Obama, now it’s apparently time to debate once again who has it worse.
Not only does this Olympics of Pain play to the worst stereotypes about what’s wrong with liberals; it also forces us into pointless linguistic bickering about which words are code words for other offensive words and why. Politics as freshman year English lit class, circa 1987. Now there’s a smart way to pick your candidates!
The irony is that in 10 days, we’ve collapsed from a semisubstantive debate on the candidates’ merits to an inchoate debate about identity politics; a debate full of the cheap stereotypes and deliberate misunderstandings you often see when minorities and women square off on a reality show. Unless we can figure out a way to put all this who-suffered-hardest stuff back in the box, this presidential campaign will make history not for race and gender barriers broken, but for the race and gender clichés we relied on to hold us back.
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Hey Melinda, no, I wasn't being deliberately provocative. I've written about women who regret their abortions, and about the importance of counseling. And I think it's an issue that deserves more attention and funding; services like the after-abortion hotline Exhale are a good start. But I think it's also important to remember that for some women, abortion brings simply and merely relief.
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Were you just being provocative, Emily? Describing a best-case abortion as nothing more than "a few not ideal hours'' makes it sound like an afternoon at the DMV without a good book. And aren't you being just as categorical as you say Caitlin Flanagan is when you argue that giving a child up for adoption is definitely trickier than having an abortion? (Except when it's not?) Whether you think abortion is morally neutral, intrinsically evil, or the gray area that hijacked our whole political debate, though, here's what I wish we could agree on: There is no other-than-partisan purpose in lobbies on both sides of this issue raising huge sums that only stoke the argument, like some hideous perpetual flame. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, it's the fight itself that keeps us from focusing on the widely agreed-upon need for birth control, birth control, for heaven's sake birth control.
That Erica Jong post on girl-written puff pieces that Dahlia mentioned made me laugh, though; first, why shouldn't we have enough confidence to cop to an interest in not only Iraq and the Darfur and the dollar, but also shoes and Carla Bruni and poor, poor Katie Holmes? (Today's shiniest news bauble: The man Princess Diana considered the love of her life has, as the Daily Mail put it, "run to fat.'' In his first-ever, "world exclusive'' interview Pakistani doctor Hasnat Khan, reveals ... lots less than the photo of him does. "I found her a very normal person. ... I think she did great work for the country. ... I always wanted to follow in the footsteps of my maternal grandfather, who was a doctor.'') If women really were the lead dogs on the newshound puff patrol, however, we'd completely dominate daily journalism at this point, because we are all style reporters now. There's no mystery about why that might be; as news outfits cut staff to boost stock—and are expected to magically do More with Less—it's way cheaper to provide commentary than reporting. And though women are still overrepresented on the boo-hoo brigades sent out to gather quotes from grieving families, I think I mostly differ with Jong on what the meaning of "puff'' is.
She complains that we delve into such "idiotic'' and trivial matters as a political candidate's marriage—but then also charges that we "never discuss psychological depth because hey, who cares if the president's a bomb-happy dry-drunk trying to play out an Oedipal war with his father?'' I write a lot about political marriages, so I guess her puff pastry is my meat and potatoes. But isn't looking at a candidate's closest relationships how we find out about bomb-happy dry drunks trying to play out Oedipal wars? Not a whole lot of that sort of thing comes of just-the-facts coverage of position papers. Doubtless we can do a better job of covering the issues, even in our current pared-down state. As can any readers who feel deprived of substance.
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Back to Hillaryland (because who can stay out for long?): Who is she kidding when she said to Tim Russert yesterday, about herself and Obama, "I don't think either of one of us want to inject race and gender in this campaign"? I'm pretty much in favor of giving Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her recent statement about the comparative roles of MLK and LBJ, as Josh Marshall does in this post. I'd like to think she was being boneheaded rather than deliberately challenging King's legacy (which would constitute temporary political insanity). And I think it's over the top to say that pointing out that the Republicans will use Obama's drug use against him is akin to painting him as a "stereotypical black drug dealer." Obama is about as far removed from that stereotype as you can get. And a realistic assessment of his weak points in the general election is just as important as assessing his strengths. But I worry that Clinton and her people are tiptoeing up to the line of injecting race into the campaign--I hope at their peril. And they have certainly crossed it in injecting gender. They did that a long time ago, when they started preparing "handmade signs that read, 'I can be president' to hand to young girls, as John Dickerson reported.
I know that part of politics is calling the sky green when it's blue. But this disingenuity plays right into the case against Clinton that Christopher Hitchens sketches here, and this fact check today belying the Clintons' claims that Sen. Chuck Hagel drafted the 2002 Iraq war resolution that Hillary voted for, and that Hagel "said it was not a vote for war,” as she said in another problematic Meet the Press moment. Also, as my dad points out to me, Hillary was aggressive and confrontational with Russert, at exactly the moment when she's supposed to be warmer and more likeable. Is that the first female candidate conundrum that she's stuck with, or a playing out of her particular weaknesses? Both, I suppose, but today it feels like more the latter.
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Emily: You nailed the problem with Flanagan's piece—the overarching, equalizing is that so officiously announces to women how "they" experience the world. Everyone's a Platonist when it comes to teenage girls and sex. One thing that was great about Juno was that it tried to take that is and smash it into pieces so that girls might know for a second what it might feel like not to have fretting, anxious adults telling them how painful their sexual experiences really are. Juno tried, instead, to tell the story of a young girl who goes through a complicated, painful experience and finds it to be—upsetting, absolutely, but not life-ending or even life-defining. I don't think that's a fairy tale at all. Juno makes a point that so often gets lost when we in the media put on our gender lens: Women, young women, react to similar experiences in a plurality of ways.
By the way: Wouldn't it be nice if pundits could retire that old saw, "Biology is destiny?" At best, it's a half-truth, applicable at certain moments (even stretches) of a woman's life. But time and again it's hauled at as the only truth.
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Dahlia, agreed entirely. And now on to a subject that lies somewhere between the CIA and nail polish: Caitlin Flanagan's complaints about the movie Juno in the NYT over the weekend. (Did anyone else notice that the Times' Sunday op-ed pages were practially all XX Factor fodder?) Flanagan says that Juno is a "fairy tale" because, "As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure."
It's not the sentiment that bugs me, exactly. Yes, adoption and abortion can be fraught. It's the categorical nature of the statement: Adoption is a lifelong burden; abortion is complicated and scary. Flanagan's argument, here and elsewhere, also boils down to this: Sex is bad for teenage girls. That's sometimes true, sure, but sometimes not—as Juliet has pointed out to us. Sometimes, teenage sex is caring and loving and, well, great. And sometimes an abortion is a few not ideal hours that give you the rest of your life back—nothing more. Check out this new book by abortion doctor Susan Wicklund and the stories she tells about her patients. Adoption is trickier, I grant Flanagan, if for no other reason than it means going through with a pregnancy. But wouldn't the world be a better place if girls could experience it the way Juno did? I'm glad the movie made me imagine a girl who has a baby, hands it over to another woman who desperately wants to raise it, and then goes back to playing guitar with her boyfriend on his front steps. It's a fairy tale with a purpose. I did have one quibble with the movie, though: I wished that Juno's parents brought up birth control in the scene in which they gently chide their daughter for getting pregnant. It was such a no-brainer, and the mother in me rued the missed opportunity.
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Erica Jong posted yesterday on the embarrassing lack of substance in our political coverage. I don’t disagree on the merits. The media (ourselves included) have now devoted exponentially more energy to Hillary’s non-tears in Portsmouth, than they have to the sixth anniversary of Guantanamo, which occurred almost unnoticed last Friday. But she also falls prey to a piece of Steinem-ism that shouldn’t go unobserved. Jong claims that “women writers are only drafted for the most trivial subjects. We comment on style not substance, beards not policy, clothes and shoes and chick lit and cooking. The men get the big topics like war, though women have the most to lose. ... ” The implication must be that women writers are disproportionately responsible for producing the poufiness that is the mainstream media.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. For one thing, women—including many on this blog—write about the “big” topics, now more than ever. For another, as Jong herself admits in this post, women who choose to write about style over substance (as she has done “because that's all the news that's fit to print and I like shooting my mouth off on the Op-Ed page as much as anyone”) cannot then turn around and complain they’re being marginalized.
Some women choose to write about shoes and chick lit and cooking. Good for them. Other women choose to write about CIA black sites and national security. Excellent. But I am sick to my teeth of the complaint that women are only tapped to write fluff. Here, by way of a valentine to Meghan: An interview with Harold Bloom (hat tip Scott Horton) offering the same critique of the media as Jong: “Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter’s capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy.” Bloom’s interviewer, by the way, is a woman.
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Emily,
So glad you brought up the love affair between Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. It's pretty much a de rigeur topic of conversation in European capitals at the moment, but I daren't mention it too much on an American Web site, during the all-too-serious American primaries, lest I be thought lightweight. Here's what I like about it
1) As you say, the protocol issues. How do the Jordanian and Egyptian government treat the president of France and his mistress? I have just come home from a dinner at which Count Z. held forth on this subject, arguing that everybody ought to get out their 18th-century history books and work out how heads of state treated Madame de Pompadour and the various other royal mistresses, back in the day. There's plenty of precedent!
2. The way it makes everyone else look dowdy. Apparently the Blairs were holidaying in Luxor at the same time as Sarkozy and Bruni, and the latter made the former look terrible. Tony breezed down to dinner in some inappropriately casual outfit, and Cheri made him go upstairs and put a jacket on. Allegedly. Then when Cheri got cold - it's chilly during those desert nights - the waiter had to lend her a jacket. Allegedly. Meanwhile, over at the Sarkozy-Bruni table, everyone looked magnifique. Allegedly. Anyway, one would have loved to have been there to watch everyone's facial expressions.
3. The way it puts everyone else's sex scandals to shame. What, Bill Clinton talked dirty with an intern in the Oval Office? So what! The president of France can get on a plane with his notorious mistress, an ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, and go to Egypt! And the French tell pollsters it's his business, not theirs!
4. The possibilities it opens for everyone else. If Hillary would just find it in herself to ditch Bill, she could end up with ... (who is the male equivalent of Carla Bruni.? Warren Beatty?) ... Anyway it would be more amusing to gossip about them than Paris Hilton. Though she should wait until after she's won, as Sarkozy himself did.
Anyway, to be continued. Can't wait to find out if Carla's really pregnant.
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When this blog started in October, Anne Applebaum wrote of how the Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy, France's president and first lady, could be a model for American political couples. She had her own life, did not help him campaign, and no one in France seemed to care. Well, just as our presidential campaign has been full of surprises, so too has the love life of the French president. According to the Daily Mail, Sarkozy's girlfriend of two months, former model Carla Bruni, is pregnant by him! You must read this fabulously juicy story, including the account of Sarko's near breakdown when Cecilia divorced him. But that was all so 2007, and now he's recovered and in love. My favorite story is about how Carla fell for the son of one of her lovers (others have included Mick Jagger and Donald Trump), who left his wife (who wrote a book about it), and had an out-of-wedlock child with the guy. Her nickname is "The Maneater." Sarko's romance has caused some protocol difficulties as he's traveled the world with her, since foreign governments have not known how to treat a president and his girlfriend. All that should be resolved soon, as apparently he is going to marry her. This is Jerry Springer with foreign accents and designer clothes!
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Part of the slam against Hill's supposedly subpar experience seems to be that she spent much of her career in a provincial backwater like Little Rock. But isn't it elitist and credentialist and regionalist, too, to imagine that political talent can come to the fore only via New York or D.C.? American elections do not work that way. (And amazed Democrats stand around going, "Hey, but our guy had the perfect résumé! And a house in Nantucket!'') Apparently, voters are kind of intrigued with pols from Arkansas, which produced not only the Clintons and Mike Huckabee but that slouch William Fulbright.
This is not how it works in much of the world, I know. I went to graduate school in Belgium on a fellowship, and afterward ended up applying for an internship at the European Commission, handed out every year to 200 twentysomethings from all over the planet. To get the thing, you totally had to know somebody; all the French kids had been to l'ENA and had parents who were former ministers of something or other, and even my American roommate had grown up riding horses with the Reagans. (Oh, I had an in, too, of course: The bureaucrat who processed the applications was sweet on a Belgian friend of mine.) Anyway, the experience was highly instructive in that I saw first-hand how "meritocracy'' works. Even now, whenever I see that word I think, sure, right - affirmative action for (the right) white people. And if we're really all for diversity - or feminism, for that matter -- that means that there have got to be any number of acceptable routes to the front of the line.
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Melinda, I think your own tacking back and forth on Hillary reflects not just the tendency of women voters to swarm her only when she’s been attacked, but also our own ambivalence about what the first female president needs to look like and how we should react to her as women. If you look back over the raucous pre-and-post-feminist pajama party in the media this week (and when have you last heard Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, Maureen Dowd, Camille Paglia, Marie Wilson, half of Slate, much of the blogosphere and your dental hygienist all whacking each other with pillows on that single question?), we still have a lot of disagreement about that. And as big media turns its attention onto the next Burning Cultural Question (likely, Obama and Race) we may feel like we have to go back to debating these issues less publicly and heatedly.
Let’s not.
At the risk of flogging a dead metaphor, that’s no different than Clinton being accused of crying when she actually held it back.
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I agree with you, Meghan (what had Bill Bradley done before he got elected to the Senate?). I'd go further: that untidy trajectory of Hillary's and those multiple identities and even her authenticity issues—which have us XX bloggers all tied up in knots—may not suit feminists or purists, but are in fact an essential part of her credentials, like them or not. They're not just the symptoms of someone ensnared in political strategy, but part of her history: She's pioneered in juggling the competing priorities and expectations plenty of women still haven't sorted out either. I'm not sure why we should expect the first female candidate to have the ideal trailblazer CV and perfect timbre plenty of male candidates lack. If she did, we might well be worrying she was too lyrical and had lived in a fairy tale world.
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On Hillary's electability: What had Ronald Reagan, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, done to make them "electable" before they became governors of California? Sure, maybe Hillary hadn't "accomplished" as much as some male candidates out there. But even that seems a vague criterion when it comes to American politics. For better or for worse, voters look to a whole host of things in electing senators, representatives, and presidents: Life experience, poise, intelligence, charisma, and so on. So I don't think Hillary should be overly dissed because she didn't do a lot early on in her life; in fact, you might say, as Dahlia even suggests, that the empty spots on her CV stems from what might actually be termed a rational division of labor in a modern marriage: She supported him till the time came for him to support her. Yeah, I'd probably prefer that the first female candidate for president had blazed her own trail. But I'm not going to insist that Hillary should have made a different set of choices.
This is partly why Chris Matthews' statement seemed so egregious to me: Of all the people who've been elected to the Senate, Hillary is clearly one of smarter and more intellectually rigorous -- and she knows a thing or two about how the White House works, even if she learned that vicariously. Maybe voters warmed to her after the Monica Lewinsky affair cast her in a vulnerable light. But it's not the only reason they elected her.
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It occurs to me that in our discussion here, I am mirroring the reaction Hillary Clinton has gotten from women voters throughout her short but exciting political career: Expressing considerable skepticism, then rushing to her aid at the first sign of incoming. None of the other candidates takes this much energy, that's for sure. So why is that? (And do I want to know?)
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Anne,
Being a rock star in law school, creating a local legal career for yourself, and getting involved in local politics was about the extent of Sandra Day O’Connor’s résumé, too. Yet it’s often said of her that even if she hadn’t been tapped for the high court, she’d have been a national political figure someday. (I agree.) I think Melinda is right on this one: Whether Hillary hitched her star to Bill’s wagon, he hitched his star to hers, or they just recognized and loved in each other a boundless driving personal ambition is too close for me to call. But if we start dissing power women just for having married power men (and then succeeded slightly later in life, which will often happen if you have kids, no?), we're writing off a lot of incredible talent.
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A smart XX Factor reader wrote in to make a great point about where the increase in Clinton's support among women is coming from:
Obama's percentage of female voters was virtually unchanged -- it only dropped from 35% [Iowa] to 34% [New Hampshire]. Therefore, Clinton's increase of 17% had to come from elsewhere. Where? From Edwards and the also-ran candidates -- an intriguing fact that no one seems to be discussing in answering Emily's question about why the difference between Iowa's and NH's women voters. Edwards' percentage of the female vote plummeted from 23% to 15%, a decrease of almost a third. Women also virtually abandoned the minor candidates, as their share of the female vote fell from 12% to 4%.
OK, so having missed this until now, which I definitely did, what do we make of it? I'd been thinking that as Edwards' support diminishes, as I think it will, Obama would benefit. That's the conventional wisdom, right--Edwards' voters are also "change" voters, and so they'll go in greater numbers to Obama. But if the women who were leaning toward Edwards or were up for grabs move to Clinton instead, that changes the calculus. I guess it's good news for Obama that his percentage of women held steady in the first two contests. That implies that he's not actually losing women who have been his solid supporters. But if Hillary is going to pick up an increasing share of all the other women as Edwards fades, then the gender gap will continue to widen in her favor.
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A question from John Dickerson:
I am still waiting for data that proves that women flocked to Hillary in NH because of the debate pile-on or the near tears moment in Portsmouth. (Data suggests late deciders actually went to Obama.) But clearly women everywhere are talking about these moments, which leads me to ask: If women in part recoiled at the way Obama and Edwards treated Clinton at the debate in Manchester, why didn't they do so after the Philadelphia debate, when she was also piled-upon? Is it because Clinton didn't draw attention to it n Manchester the way she did after Philadelphia? Or was it because after the Iowa defeat, she was truly vulnerable in a way she wasn’t in Philly? (My bet for the enduring explanation of all this is that to the extent Clinton benefited from being vulnerable and human it was from the IA loss not the Portsmouth moment.)
I agree with the Iowa loss explanation.
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OK, this is absolutely the last time I post on this subject. ... BUT the idea that Hillary is a very accomplished person because she was a star at Yale Law School, got involved in a few minor Washington issues, and had a decent career at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock before becoming a full-time presidential spouse just doesn't hold water. Lots of people are impressive in their 20s; lots of people are top lawyers in small cities; lots of people have loads of unrealized potential; and none of them would be considered a qualified Senate candidate, let alone a presidential candidate. Hillary may be good at a lot of things, she may be terrifically competent, even brilliant--and for all I know a great president. But that doesn't change the fact that her standing as a national political figure is derived solely from her marriage, and from nothing else. No man with that kind of personal biography would be considered electable.
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Wow, Anne, and now I'm defending Hillary? Weird. But she really did not hitch her wagon to this upwardly mobile guy, and the rest is history. It was Hillary, even more than Bill, who was the superstar at Yale Law. Life magazine had already written glowingly about her ballsy Wellesley commencement address—in which she rebutted the guest speaker—and she was already "on her way to becoming a political meteor'' before she ever said hello to Bill Clinton, according to Carl Bernstein's excellent Hillary bio, A Woman in Charge. In fact, when they fell in love, campus cynics suspected that he was the one working an angle: "Some fellow students thought Clinton's attraction to Hillary was calculated, that he was trading on her renown to advance his own stature on campus and beyond.'' And most of her friends thought she was throwing away her shot at national prominence when she married him.
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Something elese I've been wondering about, relating back to Julia's post yesterday about Hillary's newfound authenticity and all of Meghan's insights about Clinton's voice. Strategic question: How does one operationalize authenticity? In a day-to-day campaign that will last months? I mean, here we have a candidate who has, as Melinda's pointed out, been so many things to so many people (and yet so few to so many as well!) that when she finally strips off the mask, as she did in New Hampshire, we all swooned. I agree with Meghan that her whole voice that changed in that Portsmouth diner. But I have a nagging sense that her voice changed again on that Saturday night debate. And yet again in her victory speech.
So, to repurpose Julia's question: How does a woman who has worn so many masks; who is so dependent on pollsters; and who is backed by a huge political machine going to sustain being the warm, likable person we glimpsed?
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Meghan,
The only trouble with the "how-can-a-woman-make-it-in-politics-given-that-men-won't-sacrifice-their-careers" line of Hillary defense is that, actually, lots of women have managed to make it in politics, using various strategies. Among top world statesmen, we have Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Condi Rice. One married someone older and richer, one married a scientist who stays out of politics, and the other didn't get married, for reasons still undiscovered. At the moment, there are sixteen women in the Senate and a handful of women governors. While some are (as is traditional in the US, a country that loves political dynasties) wives or widows of famous male politicians, some aren't. In other Western countries the same is true: there are at this very moment several prominent, senior women in the British, French and Polish governments, for example, just to name the ones I'm certain of off the top of my head. And I'll bet a lot of them have husbands who are also prominent, in one way or another, even if not in politics. There is no escaping the fact that Hillary chose the most traditional path to power. I certainly wouldn't want her as a model for any of the young women I know. "Get into Yale Law School - and then find an upwardly mobile spouse." What kind of advice is that?
best,
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I can't believe I'm going to get between Chris Matthews and a punch, but I don't think he's a Hillary hater at all; here is a recent clip of him describing her as sweet, sexy, delightful, charming and on and on... Unlike Meghan, he even called her mellifluous! And at the time she was elected to the Senate, saying she got there thanks in part to some post-Monica sympathy votes was no more controversial than complaining about partisan gridlock in Washington. Here, for instance, is an ABC News story quoting a pollster on Hillary's favorables: "In the impeachment scene, Clinton emerged as a much more favorable person during the period in the victim role.'' Here is Harold Evans, opining in the Guardian in the middle of the Senate race that Hillary needed to remind women just how awful they'd felt for her as a wronged woman, and fearing that she might lose unless she played the victim card again: "Hillary has a problem with women, just the kind of women you would think she would attract. She has slipped from a 50% approval rate among women in 1998, during the Monica affair, to 44%...Suburban women could give Rick [Lazio, her lame opponent] the Senate seat. It is puzzling. So many of them look and talk like Hillary and think more like her than Lazio on abortion and guns and education.'' Sound familiar?
Here, too, is a BBC story about how voters were won over anew after mean Tim Russert brought up Monica in Clinton's Senate race debate with Lazio. A debate in which her opponent lost a ton of support by crossing the stage to hand her some nonsense pledge or other - a move that women in particular saw as threatening and way out of line. So where did anyone get the horrible, sexist idea that New York voters - women in particular - liked Hillary Clinton better specifically as a result of her husband's philandering? Sorry, but from New York voters who cited it as a factor at the time.
If we're obsessed with HRC -- and lots of people are -- it's because she is so endlessly complex that there is always another layer. (Although she has also on occasion made me think of that Sondheim lyric about another complicated woman, from the Follies song Ah, But Underneath: "Sometimes when the wrappings fall, there's nothing underneath at all.'') I hesitate to say this, because I see that Slate is running an ad for the paperback release of Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge, and I never want to let it be said that I wrote anything that pleased an advertiser. But of all the Hillary books I've read over the years - and oh, there have been many - this is the one that taught me the most. It convinced me that some of that feeling that we don't ever really know her is not only a function of her obfuscation -- though there's that, too -- but might also come from Hillary herself not knowing which version of her persona is really really real.
We all have our contradictions, of course, but there she was, the president of the Republican Club at Wellesley, attending the Republican convention in 1968 in some official capacity or other, and then, for good measure, sneaking downtown in Chicago with a girlfriend to hang with the anti-war protesters at the Democratic Convention that summer, too! Anyone who thinks she's posing when she espouses some pretty conservative views just doesn't know much about her. Which is understandable, because there is so much biographical ground to cover, and I sometimes think there have been so many Hillary books because she is Zelig meets the Three Faces of Eve; it's hard to believe that everything she's lived through happened to just one woman. It's wildly unfair to call her just another lawyer from a middle-sized city who also did volunteer work: She darn near single-handedly saved Legal Services from Ronald Reagan when she chaired the LSC in the early 80s. Then again, for every "wow, she did that?'' there seems to be an "oh no, she did that, too?'' It's kind of rich, for example, for her to deplore the politics of personal destruction when, according to Bernstein, she pushed hard during the '92 campaign to go after Poppy Bush as a....(supposed) philanderer!
So it's typical that while on the one hand she's the right-wing's prototype Feminazi, it's also true that her feminist credentials have been questioned throughout her adult life. Even now, she is hardly universally beloved by right-thinking, left-leaning women; Jane Fonda went so far as to call her "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a vagina and a skirt.'' She is not a sister plagued by self-doubt, though, as far as I can tell, even when she might ought to be. Which is one reason she hasn't found her voice -- as an orator, anyway. A friend of mine who is in Democratic politics herself and supports Clinton says the senator is just not breathing right. She told Hillary's people this, too, ages ago, and offered to give her a free breathing lesson that she claimed could have solved the problem in 40 minutes. But, Hillary's peeps thanked her for the feedback and never got back to her. Until this week, I think Hillary liked her voice fine the way it was.
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Anne,
The larger question about Hillary-as-beneficiary-of-Bill is fair game, and I want to say more about it in a second. First, though: what was creepy about Matthews wasn't that he was saying Hillary benefited from a form of nepotism (maritalism?); it was that he was saying we could elect her only because we felt sorry for her. Which seems creepier and nastier to me.
But on to the larger question about what, exactly, the nature of Hillary's accomplishments is--something that's been troubling me these past weeks. Like you, I'm sometimes bemused by the eager championing of her candidacy by feminists; you'd think feminists would want the first female presidential candidate to have a very different C.V. (And I'm sure many do.) I think you're right, we probably would never have heard of Hillary if Bill Clinton hadn't picked up his saxophone and started campaigning all those years ago. Yet if you stop and think about it, the issue is a little more complicated. Because one important (and unanswerable) question is: Would we have heard of Hillary if she hadn't married Bill Clinton? After all, she presumably shaped her career largely around his ambitions and his talent, and part of the deal they struck seems to have been that when the time came, he'd use his influence to support her. You could take the hard line and say that lots of talented women of her generation chose NOT to get married precisely so they wouldn't find themselves in her shoes. And I can understand that. Or you could say she shouldn't have settled so early into the role of just supporting him. But whatever the case, it would be important, I think, to acknowledge how difficult it is in within a marriage, even now, to insist that a husband's choices should be shaped by a wife's ambitions, rather than vice versa. You could still conclude that she just doesn't have real credentials, and that parlaying Bill's power into her own is creepy. Even so, it's a conundrum the men in this race didn't have to face -- just it proved a benefit they weren't able to take advantage of.
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Totally agree that the Bradley Effect is a bogus explanation. Also that the racism vs. sexism competition and one-upsmanship is ick and should end now.
That's about all I'm sure of today, though, because mostly I'm busy feeling torn. On the one hand, I love this from the inestimable Andrew Sullivan:
[P]art of me is happy to see two candidates forced to battle it out in a long slog. We find out more that way. They grow more. More people get a say. That's a good thing. ... I also feel little compunction in recognizing that Clinton did have something of a personal breakthrough in the last few days. The brittle exterior cracked. What was beneath is more human and less calculated. She was forced to explain from the heart why she really wants to win. People responded. As they would. ... Nothing worth winning comes easily. But Clinton is learning from Obama as he has from her. And both are growing as a result. This is a good thing.
On the other hand, I'm worried about what Clinton is going to do next. If Julia is right, and Hillary's authenticity quickly calcifies, then she'lll need to do something else to win. And that could mean going on a racism vs. sexism tear, or in some other way going after Obama in a way that will make the party as a whole come out looking terribly. This I fear. Especially because of the Hillary-Knows-Best arrogance that you nailed, Rachael. I get that presidential candidates have to convince themselves that they are utterly necessary to the nation, because of their egos and the hell of campaigning. But Hillary's sense that she and only she among the Democrats will make a good president reminds me of the worst of the first Clinton era—the sloppy self-aggrandizement, the embittered bunker mentality, the wasted opportunities and screw ups. Spare us.
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Meghan,
Chris Matthews was more interested in being nasty than being right. But isn't there something to the fact that the reason Hillary's a US Senator, the reason she's a candidate for president...is the fact that her husband was president at all? Reverse the first paragraph of that Gloria Steinem article again and ask yourself this: Imagine a talented man who falls in love while at Yale law school student and decides to follow his wife to a very provincial city - Little Rock, say - where he makes a decent but hardly national reputation for himself. Then he follows his more important wife to Washington, where for eight years he works as a full-time spouse. Is such a man qualified to be a senator, let alone president? I know that this is the old reductive narrative, I know we all know this, and I know it's reverting to the basic facts, but personally I find the fundamental presumption of Hillary's candidacy impossible to get away from.
The thing I don't get about Hillary, and never have, is why she is championed by feminists like Steinem. To me, a woman who owes her fame and reputation to her husband - and we would never of heard of her, a Little Rock lawyer and the governor's wife, if it weren't for his own New Hampshire surprise -doesn't inspire, however smart and talented she may be. I can see that there would be other reasons for New Hampshire women to vote for her, but because she's a role model for women? I don't get it.
For the record, I'd also like to note that everyone I know, even the most apolitical, is suddenly talking about American politics. Personally, I've found it hard to care deeply about the primaries, which always seemed to be months away. But—pathetically, predictably—now I'm gripped, absolutely gripped, by the whole thing, am even scouring YouTube for the latest soundbites. There's an actual race! There are interesting issues! Sexism! Racism! I can't be the only one out there who feels that way - might this be the election that gets the non-voters out to vote?
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We all knew Chris Matthews was no Hillary-lover, but what he said on air this morning takes the cake: "The reason she's a U.S. Senator, the reason she's a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front-runner, is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be Senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win it on the merits. ... " Nice. As Greg Sargent points out, what's egregious about this statement is that Matthews went right back to offering a reductive narrative about what voters do or don't like about Hillary. No wonder the commentators at MSNBC were so surprised when Hillary took the lead yesterday; they assumed all the undecided voters would go heavily for Obama, because they wanted it to happen that way. And now they are suggesting the Bradley effect is responsible. I agree with Juliet: I don't buy it. Like Emily Y, I'm hoping the commentators figure out by the next primary that they need to start offering up some more sophisticated analysis of just what is taking place.
via TPM.
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Now that Hillary's won New Hampshire everyone's falling all over themselves to ascribe racism as the cause —just as if she'd lost it would vindicate the view that Americans (unlike Brits or Germans) are fundamentally sexist. But I agree with Juliet that the New Hampshire result wasn't because in the privacy of the voting booth people won't vote for a black man. In the end, it was a close race between a woman and black man. If sexism and racism were the voters' secret vices, wouldn't we be talking about the stunning John Edwards' comeback? I hope we aren't going to have to listen to the sexist/racist dirge every time Hillary and Obama swap wins. Whoever gets the nomination, New Hampshire voters will have made her or him or her a better candidate. It would have been bad for either Hillary or Obama to feel she or he was the anointed one.
I agree with XXers that Obama's speech was better than Hillary's. I wanted more from her than plodding bromides. (And speaking of style [and sexism], I will dare to say it—was anyone else distracted by her jacket? Did she pull a Scarlett O'Hara and fashion a victory outfit out of the drapes at the hotel?) But I found myself surprised by how moved I was by McCain's speech. I had written him off months ago as a gutsy, erratic, cranky guy whose moment had passed. But he has shown courage in standing by the war and the surge. (The Washington Post had an interesting editorial noting that none of the Democrats at the last debate were willing to recognize the progress the surge has brought.) And of all the candidates last night, McCain was the one who acknowledged something that people may not want to hear: that the new president will face not just recalcitrant insurance companies, but a world full of violent enemies.
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So, I did it. I made myself watch Hillary's post-victory speech. (Alas, Julia beat me to the punch with the post-speech review.) Unfortunately for her, she spoke after Barack Obama. He was his eloquent, soaring self, making references to those who blazed a path for him and sweeping everyone up and carrying them along. Clinton's speech, while not "unbearable"—a description bandied about after her second-place finish in Iowa—sounded like a mundane stump speech in comparison.
Aside from their different oratory styles, there was one important stylistic difference that becomes painfully apparent in the his and hers transcripts: Obama uttered the word I three times—including when he said "I want to congratulate" Hillary. Mrs. Clinton? More than 20 times. Obama is the "we" candidate; Hillary is the "me" candidate. Even when she says something mildly stirring—"This campaign is about people. It's about making a difference in your lives. It's about making sure that everyone in this country has the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential," for example—it all comes back to her: "That has been the work of my life."
Clinton critics like to describe her as power-hungry, but I don't know if that's the source of all the self-referencing. She's long given me the impression that she believes she knows what's best for me, for all of us, and we'll like it whether we like it or not. And no amount of humanizing or not-quite-weeping over coffee with the girls can get me past that.
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Dahlia
argued yesterday that Obama is appealing because it's simpler "to be yourself
than to be a piece of precision machinery." At the outset of Hillary's victory
speech last night, she claimed to have had an epiphany along these lines: "Over
the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice." The
crowd roared, and I was moved, too. I'm undecided still, but leaning toward
Obama (even though he seems a little windy) because I think he has a better
chance in the general election. When I heard Hillary's opener, I was
momentarily convinced that her Iowa loss, the debate dust-ups, and the Diner
Sob--and the seemingly positive voter response to all of it--had delivered us a
new Hillary, one who can win: open, honest, authentic. But then the speech
rolled on, and as the crowd subsided it became possible to hear the clanking of
her political apparatus as it shifted from the Experience setting over to To-Thine-Own-Self-Be-True:
"very full heart", "we all spoke from our hearts", "politics isn't a game", "this
campaign is about people". A calculated pitch to show how authentic and
uncalculated she is!
I'm happy about the New Hampshire results. It's great
Democrats will have more time to make their decision. But I don't think Hillary
the Authentic will be convincing for long.
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With all due respect to Chris Matthews, and a few of Slate's very own pundits, I don't buy the theory that the "Bradley Effect" explains why Obama lost New Hampshire—that voters "lied" to pollsters to seem progressive.
Here's why, via Marc Ambinder: "the pre-election polls did NOT overstate Barack Obama's support. He averaged 36.7%, according to Mark Blumenthal's compilations," which is just under his actual piece of the pie—37 percent (with 95 percent of precincts counted).
So, what happened? The people who said they would vote for Obama probably did so, and undecided voters chose Hillary. Big whoop.
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Some analysts have been arguing that many of the actual differences between Clinton and Obama are a matter of style rather than substance. But, wow, is that stylistic difference.... substantive. Watching the two candidates speak last night you couldn't escape it. Obama is all cute optimism checked by quasi-gravitas. His way of ducking his head and looking down at the end of sentences makes you feel secure and cozy inside; it suggests an untapped inner power. Never mind that his speech doesn't say very much at all, built as it is on repetition and rousing rhetorical flourishes about hope and affirmation. Hillary says more, but she continues to seem so ill at-ease; watching her try to play cool gal, making shout-outs to supporters as the applause died down, simply made me uncomfortable.
I wonder if the biggest difference comes down to their voices. (Not their speaking styles.) Obama's is round and full and open. But Hillary always sounds as though she's not quite inhabiting hers- as if she is stuck using what some scholars call the "false voice," where the throat constricts. At other times, she seems as though she's trying to speak in a lower voice than is comfortable for her. I don't think this is a small point. As Anne Karpf points out in her fascinating book, The Human Voice, a lot of how we judge people's derives from what their voices subconsciously convey to us. She points out that over the past 50 years women's voices have deepened to a pitch closer to men's--a pitch we associate (if I recall correctly) with trustworthiness and power. (Margaret Thatcher's voice, Karpf notes, "lowered by 60Hz, or about half the normal difference between a female and a male voice" while she was Prime Minister.) Watching that clip of Hillary's "emotional moment," I was most struck by how natural her voice sounded. She said she finally had found her true voice. Was it the way her voice sounded, as much as anything she actually said, that might have spoken to voters?
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Back when that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I thought about how everything I needed to know I learned in my 92 years of dating. And as it turns out, those lessons hold up pretty well in political life, too, in that chemistry and timing trump reason and a common goal more often than we'd like to admit.
Political life does not always mirror the real thing, though: If New Hampshire were an employer and Hillary Clinton a job candidate, she would have been out of contention the minute her eyes filled with tears during the interview. As those Sex and the City women (thank you, Trailhead) and every flesh-and-blood XX knows, men can throw phones and wastebaskets across the office and that's cool, but a woman who lets a tear fall is toast.
Which really might explain - sorry, but the instant Conventional Wisdom does occasionally get it right -- why women who could relate rode to Clinton's rescue last night. In future contests, I'm guessing Obama will refrain from gratuitous, way-beneath-him swipes like "You're likeable enough, Hillary.'' But that still leaves her with the same problem Al Gore had in 2000: What about Bill?
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With her surprise victory
tonight, Hillary Clinton has fared far better than the polls
suggested—and that’s because she “got the women back,” as CNN just put
it. In Iowa, Obama carried women 35 percent to Clinton’s 30 percent. In
New Hampshire, according to exit polls, women broke for Clinton 47
percent to 34 percent for Obama (Edwards got 15 percent of them and
other candidates the remaining 4 percent). In Iowa, Hillary won only
among older women; In New Hampshire, she won the whole kaboodle over 30.
Why the difference between women voters in Iowa and New Hampshire? At Trailhead, Chadwick Matlin has already tweaked
the press for its inevitable leap to the Diner Sob—the moment when
Hillary welled up yesterday in response to a voter who asked how she
gets “out the door every day.” OK, so that’s a tedious
oversimplification I’ll spare myself from making. But it seems entirely
plausible to me that undecided New Hampshire women shifted to Hillary
in the last few days because they were both wincing and empathizing as
they watched her struggle with her sudden second-tier status.
For a lot of us, there are at least two layers to this year’s Democratic choice. As Juliet Lapidos put it in a XX Factor post earlier today (click here to
read the whole thread), there’s the particular Hillary and there’s
Hillary the First Democratic Woman Waging A Serious Run for President.
We can have our doubts about the first one and still root, on some
level, for the second. And even if we’re not certain we ultimately want
her to win, we sure don’t want her embarrassed by a run of heavy early
losses.
And
what’s more, it turns out that Hillary on her heels is more appealing.
Never mind the tears (though don't forget that she didn’t spill them!).
At the debate on Saturday, when she fought to swipe the change mantra
back from Obama, I didn’t buy it. After all, this is the candidate who
is promising us a Clinton sequel in the White House. (And after the
Bush presidency, sequels are looking positively toxic.) And yet I
couldn’t help sympathizing. Since Iowa, Hillary has been for me the
brainy girl who studies hard for every test and writes great papers,
semester after semester. And Obama has been the smooth, crowd-pleasing,
charismatic genius guy who breezes in and charms his way to the
prize—award for best student, admission to the college of choice, a
ticket to the White House, whatever. Gender colors this image. It’s not
the only lens to see the contest through, but at the moment, it seems a
useful and inevitable one.
In the end, Emily Yoffe’s post was right,
this is not a good way to pick a president. Far better to assess
Clinton and Obama and any other candidate based on his or her
individual merits. Maybe the good women of New Hampshire have done just
that. And yet isn’t it a bit of a thrill to write that “his or her”
sentence—and have its meaning be concrete as opposed to hypothetical?
Might not some of those New Hampshire women have thought, when it
actually came time to cast their ballots—damnit, don’t count her out yet?
Meghan O’Rourke pointed out, in responding to Gloria Steinem’s NYT op-ed
today, the way in which Hillary’s candidacy makes us think about
“pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its
head in surprising ways.” Surprising and hard to chart, I find—that’s
the thing about subterranean—and yet increasingly meaningful, and worth
pondering, as I’ve watched Hillary over the last handful of days.
I asked
after the Iowa caucuses whether it was impressive, in some sense, that
women there transcended identity politics by backing Obama rather than
Clinton. But there is also something moving about this wave of women
supporting their woman at this point in the campaign. Women in other
states may not stick with Hillary. Maybe they shouldn’t. But tonight in
New Hampshire, they weren’t ready to let the country write off the
first real woman candidate without a thorough look. They wanted Hillary
in contention. They decided she deserves that much. Fair enough.
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Give me a break, indeed. Like Emily Y., I can scarcely believe what I'm seeing on this video of the former president, who in theory is in New Hampshire trying to help his wife get elected. The mere sight of a defiant Bill Clinton waving his finger around stirs up so many bad memories that if we didn't know better, we might think the next Clinton presidency was supposed to be all about redeeming the last one. Just like George W. was supposed to rewrite the book on Poppy, and we know how that turned out. Did you see the poor kids seated behind him squirming like they'd rather have been stuck in traffic? "Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon!'' Clinton thundered. Yeah, and his wife just spent $100 million to find out he still can't keep ... his mouth shut. Is it too late in the cycle for a legal separation?
(And Meghan, this is sad, but when I saw the USA Today reference to the "seemingly sexist remarks'' of the men who yelled "Iron my shirts!'' at Hillary Clinton, what I assumed was that the editors were hedging their bets in case the guys turned out to be plants from the Clinton campaign, trying to manufacture a little gender-based outrage.)
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Many in this forum have been asking - is Hillary losing out to Obama because she's a woman, or because she's not the woman we've all been waiting for? In other words, are Americans somehow incapable of electing an XX, or just not this particular XX?
So I'm wondering, if Hillary's the wrong candidate, who's right? I can't think of a single female politician who could possibly have come this far, if only because no one else has the name recognition. Pelosi's not stepping up any time soon, and I can't think of any charismatic female governors.
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The Drudge Report is linking to a video of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail attacking Obama. Drudge's headline is Bill's line about Obama's favorable coverage, "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." But if you watch the whole clip I think you will conclude that Bill must be hog-tied and left in the rec room in Chappaqua until the campaign is over. He starts to lose it so badly that he makes an extremely oblique reference to a nasty press release from the Obama campaign in June calling Hillary the senator from Punjab (a joke she made on herself) because of big contributions from the Indian community. A summary is here. I had to look it up because I missed the initial flap, as did surely everyone in the audience Bill is addressing: You can see them look at each other quizzically wondering what in the world he is talking about. But Bill keeps going and brings up ... Ken Starr! Ken Starr!!! Bill, if you want your wife to be president, please do not remind us of those glory days and why the American public might collectively feel, "Actually, let's not have another Clinton administration."
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Dahlia (and others): I don't think your point and mine are mutually exclusive. I certainly agree that sexism/the death of feminism is not why Hillary lost Iowa; she lost Iowa, and Obama won, for the very reasons you point out: Obama represents the possiblitiy of change, a break from baby boomer preoccupations and impasses, a break from, well, the Clinton era. (Andrew Sullivan summed it up powerfully in his Atlantic Monthly piece a while back.) These are the reasons many young women I know are supporting Obama. And sure, Steinem overstates the issue and writes from a prescriptive, first-wave point of view that doesn't float my boat. And yet I really do think, as I said earlier, that Steinem captures something crucial about the challenges facing women in America right now, namely, a pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its head in surprising ways. This unease would dog, it seems to me, even the female candidate "with Obama’s innate confidence and openness" whom you call for, Dahlia. Sure, such a candidate would probably perform better than Hillary is performing. And gender wouldn't be the main factor in her candidacy -- just as it is not the really the main factor for many Democrates, including me, as they try to make up their minds about Hillary vs. Obama. But there would still be the same tiresome debates about what a female presidency meant, and in what ways a woman was or was not tough, and so on.
What I hoped to point out is that in so frequently describing how gender isn't the main factor in this presidential race, we are sometimes quick to assure ourselves that it isn't a powerful factor. I absolutely agree with Melinda that many of Hillary's negatives have little to do with her gender. Yet what so many of the debates about Hillary have reminded me is that as a nation (and as a media) we are strangely anxious about identifying any element of sexism to begin with -- and that's what I find striking. And that's why I liked Steinem's piece, even given its quite obvious limitations. Her point that today gender is harder to overcome than race may be spurious. And yet the notion that gender issues are easier to whitewash than racial ones seems right on. I'm curious: Do you really think that if some men had heckled Obama about race at a campaign stop, a national newspaper would have printed a headline referring to his response to "seemingly racist remarks"? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining it.
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I'm inclined, as you are, Emily, to downplay the role of sexism in Hillary's recent fortunes, but I'd say she's bent over backward to try to dispel a sense of entitlement. The puzzle to me--and to her, to judge by her choked-up moment--is still why that wonkiness of hers isn't serving her better as proof that she's earning her role, that she's no Bush-like heir to the throne. Sure, her style can be robotic, and having the easy, open, eloquent Obama as a rival doesn't help, as Dahlia notes. Still, isn't the clamor for yet more poetic uplift perhaps just a little unnerving? After Bush's eight years of messianically winging it, you'd think more people might be warier of inspirational calls. Not that she could change it if she tried, but Hillary's hard-working, unglamorous competence--and reticence, too--is probably her most refreshing asset. Being a pioneering woman was supposed to be poetry enough. Could it be that there's too little sexism among voters to make that fly?
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I also read Gloria Steinem's NYT op-ed on Hillary and sexism twice because I hoped on the second reading I wouldn't find it such a load of hooey (and I admire and am grateful to Steinem for her pioneering work as a feminist). Her opening thought experiment -- try to imagine a woman with Obama's biography being elected to the U.S. Senate -- is ridiculous. As she mentions, Obama was a lawyer, community organizer and state senator before being elected to the U.S. Senate. This is very similar to the pre-Senate biographies of Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine and others. Gloria, how about this thought experiment: Imagine a lawyer who worked for a middle-sized law firm in a small, Southern state, gave up his career to do important volunteer work while his wife had a prominent political job, then decided he'd like to get into electoral politics himself, by starting as the senator from New York, a state where he never previously resided. Yes, it's hard to imagine. You can take either Obama's and Hillary's biographies and say it's absurd that someone with such a thin record of political accomplishment would consider themselves presidential material. But despite racism and sexism, the public has taken Obama and Hillary as serious presidential candidates, unlike more experienced choices such as Sen. Joe Biden or Gov. Bill Richardson.
Sure, we live in a world that is still full of racism and sexism. But I agree with Dahlia that Iowans went for Obama over Hillary not because Americans won't elect a woman president, but because they liked him better and resented her robotic sense of entitlement. Had they preferred Hillary, everyone would now be concluding that racism is more ineradicable in our society than sexism.
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I didn't find Gloria Steinem's op-ed nearly as gentle a nudge as Meghan did. In fact, she walked in and gave me whiplash: I do not want to be made to feel like a traitor if my vote is not gender-based. She says "I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest'' but—just like my kids, who always preface their most offensive remarks with "no offense, but...''—that's exactly what she is doing. And in the process, I'm not sure she's doing her candidate any favors. I have argued endlessly that Clinton's negatives were never about gender. And as Dahlia suggests, this election may not even tell us much about who has it toughest.
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Emily, Melinda and Meghan. All of you offer compelling observations about how the smoke pouring out of the feminist brain today, and yet I have to disagree.
I read Steinem’s op-ed twice this morning; the first time because I agreed with her so wholeheartedly, and then again because I am paid to cock my head and scowl. And so here is where I must part company with Steinem’s premise: I think in comparing the ways in which gender, as opposed to race, holds a candidate back in America she has factored out the single most important thing Obama brings to the table. It’s not just that he’s inspiring or charismatic or an agent for change or any of the bullet points we’ve affixed to him. It’s that he is unchanging, and forgive me but—authentic—in ways she simply is not. She somehow managed to earn this presidency on the merits, without ever showing anyone who she really was.
The real contrast between Obama and Clinton lies not in this who’s-carrying-a-greater-burden sweepstakes. It’s that he figured out how to transcend labels and she tried to do so by turning herself into an android. In the end, it seems to me, Obama faces easier sledding today not because its easier to be a black man in America than it is to be a woman, but because he’s modeled—and rather beautifully—how much simpler it is to be yourself than to become a piece of precision machinery, comprised of polls and talking points.
Maybe Steinem is right that a woman with even Obama’s sizzle would have been toast from the get-go. But I am not sure that he and Clinton are the best markers of that competition. I’d have liked to see a woman in this race who’d had Obama’s innate confidence and openness. That would have been a fight worth watching ...
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I thought Gloria Steinem's op-ed in the New York Times today performed an important service: It aptly—but gently—reminded us that it’s really hard to talk about sexism in this country. Partly that's because most of us, as Steinem points out, don’t like to hear about it. After all, so much has changed for women since the 1960s—Hillary Clinton was at one point the Democrat’s front-running nominee!— that it can seem monomaniacal to keep track of the myriad ways that women don’t have equal stature. But this reluctance to acknowledge sexism as real can be carried to absurd extremes. And yesterday provided an all-too apt example of Steinem's point: After Hillary was heckled by guys who crudely cried out “Iron my shirt” at one of her campaign stops, USA Today published a piece whose headline read, “Clinton responds to seemingly sexist remarks.” (The body of the piece continued to refer to "seemingly" sexist remarks.) If these comments were only “seemingly” sexist, I wonder what, exactly, indubitably sexist remarks would sound like?
This ginger approach to talking about sexism—this uncertainty about whether sexism is even real—is hardly unique to USA Today (as Steinem reminds us). And I think that’s partly because so much of the sexism we deal with now is latent and almost unconscious, leaving many of us, even women, with a mish-mash mush of confused attitudes, like the ones you describe, Emily. So I think Hillary’s emotional speech at the diner yesterday is going to speak to a lot of women voters, who will find in its clarity a relief from the exhaustion of trying to sort out what they really think or feel about this female presidential candidate.
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Our feminist heart strings are really being pulled, aren't they? Hillary welling up yesterday (which I agree with your take on, Melinda), Gloria Steinem reminding us that women candidates still face big meaningful obstacles that men don't—even black men—and this clip from a Clinton campaign event in which she had to contend with some idiot screaming "Iron my shirt!" I've heard three smart women say in the last few days that they are thinking and thinking again about Hillary's candidacy. That is a good thing. However we all end up voting, and whether or not that choice comes down to our feelings about gender and inequality, all of this bears much more attention and analysis. I feel like I'm only beginning to sort through my own reactions. But at the moment, what's paramount is a feeling of gratitude toward Hillary, for going first, which is never easy and in her case is looking awfully thankless.
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Oh, Emily, I didn't mean to suggest that Hillary really is beyond caring that she's hated; for that, I think you either have to be dead or the Dalai Lama, and then you wouldn't be hated. I was just admiring how convincingly she seemed not to care, and even put over a joke about it, which worked for me. Since then, of course, Clinton has also gotten teary-eyed in public—just like her husband and both Presidents Bush have in the past. And yes, as it turns out, humanity looks good on her. Not, I hope to goodness, because women are so appealing in victim mode, but because the biggest question about Sen. Clinton as a presidential candidate has always been whether, for completely understandable reasons, after all she's been through, there was any unscripted impulse left, any residue of feeling that might offer some reliable clues about who she really is and what she might do as president.
At a diner in New Hampshire yesterday, she broke down when answering this sweet softball of a query from a freelance photographer: "My question is very personal; how do you do it?" the woman asked, and mentioned how well put-together Clinton always looks. "How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?" (Whoa, hardball really is overrated.) "It's not easy,'' Clinton answered her, melting with each word, "and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country; I just don't want to see us fall backwards. You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. Some people think elections are a game; they think it's about who's up or who's down.'' I was glad to hear her say she's not one of them.
Since it's apparently fine for boy presidents to get misty—they've been doing it for years—can a woman who is still interviewing for the job get away with it, too? I hope so, because the "likability' we demand of all our candidates requires some vulnerability. And if female candidates weren't allowed to show any, that would explain why it's only theoretical women candidates we find likable.
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Huh, that's interesting, Melinda, because I also found that moment of the Saturday debate memorable—but for different reasons. Hillary's response made me think about how hard and frustrating it is to be told you're unlikable. Especially when the likable guy has just strolled on into a party you've been working for 35 years. Maybe Hillary was simultaneously mocking the whole idea—the double interpretation is all to the good for her—but my main impression was self-deprecation and yes, hurt feelings, which made me empathize with her. It also made Obama screw up, I think. His "Hillary, you're likable enough," retort, or somesuch, was off-pitch and callous. He could have said sweetly "I like you plenty, Hillary" or "they like you plenty," since what was at issue was the voters' feelings, not his. Or he could have said nothing at all.
Another good Hillary debate moment: forgiving John Edwards for dissing her jacket in an earlier debate. She offered the perfect combination of classy acknowledgement and shrug. And when I watched her up on stage with all nine of the male candidates, Republicans and Democrats—well, I was glad she was there.
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Sunday was the Feast of the Epiphany, but the homilist hadn't had one while preparing his sermon—it happens, even to Jesuits—so I drifted back to the epiphanies of the previous evening's presidential debates while he struggled to connect the dots between Fra Angelico's Adoration of the Magi and children growing up now in the Darfur. (Sorry, Father, but isn't calling them "at risk'' sort of like calling Santa a not-altogether-unpleasant figure?) Or calling Mitt Romney a tad unprepared for the full-body thumpin' he got from John McCain on Saturday night? My politically incorrect husband thought Gov. Haircut could not have looked any more stunned if McCain had sneaked up and given him a wedgie in his special underwear.
It was John Edwards' night from where I was sitting—even Barack Obama was no Barack Obama—but the most intriguing moment came when Hillary Clinton convincingly mocked the notion that if some people found her unlikable, then she guessed she'd just go home and cry her poor little eyes out. As someone who would rather hide in her basement than go out and risk getting her tender baby feelings hurt, this got my attention: Clinton really seemed beyond caring, and though I've never been sure she was my brand of vodka, that is an accomplishment worth toasting.
Of all the reasons there aren't more women running for political office, fear of being disliked and rejected has got to be high on the list. Supposedly, the desire to please—and the dread of failing to do so—is drummed into us by the culture, but I have seen it more in my daughter than in her twin brother from the get-go. This year, in their first or second week at their vast new middle school, my son announced that he wanted to run for student government, an idea that his panicked sister tried to talk him out of: "But, you don't know anyone! You'll lose!'' (His response: And?)
On Election Day, I was a nervous wreck, and had chocolate-chip cookies at the ready in case he fell short and came home hurting. But when 3 o'clock rolled around at last, he ran in laughing and proud that he'd ... only narrowly lost? Wahoo, he said: He'd met a lot of kids, gotten a lot of good feedback on his Go Green platform, and figured he was well positioned for the next campaign. His sister and I were agog—as I was last night, watching one strong woman laugh at the news that she had not been named Miss Congeniality. And if that's what Hillary's time in the old boys' club taught her, then sister, I am finally all ears.
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Thought I should jump in on Emily Y., Dahlia, and Emily B.'s discussion on young women voting for Obama over Hillary since, well, I'm a young woman who plans to vote for Obama over Hillary. The truth is, the symbolism of Hillary's gender and Obama's race matters immensely to me. Though I have grown up in an era when women and minorities run Fortune 500 companies, I think we're far from equality, and I'm absolutely giddy at the prospect of having a woman or a black man whose middle name is Hussein running things around here for a while. Ultimately, I'll be delighted if either one becomes president, but I'm rooting for Obama because his presidency wouldn't just be a giant step for the United States, but for the West. There's precedent for Hillary (Thatcher and Merkel), but not for Obama.
Andrew Sullivan expressed my feelings about the Iowa caucus winner better than I ever could in a recent article for the Atlantic, so I'll quote him instead of blathering: "Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man--Barack Hussein Obama--is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm."
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All I can say is, the women in my book are looking smarter by the minute. Though the favored narrative -- that it's women voters who make President Hillary a slam-dunk inevitability -- is still so entrenched that it wasn't so easy to locate the news that Iowa women actually favored Obama in today's Washington Post. Oddly, even their graphic broke out the percentage of women and men who supported each of the Republican candidates, but not the Democrats.
Obama prevailed last night not because we're more ready for an African-American than for a woman in the White House, but because he is striking chords about the hoped-for future that resonate in ways that her theme song --- "Don't Stop (Thinking about the '90s)" -- does not. And even if they agree on nothing, in tone and pitch I see a lot of similarities between Obama and last night's GOP winner, Mike Huckabee. As does a friend of mine who lives in Ames, Iowa, and caucused for Obama. Her report seems on the money:
One aspect of the whole experience that confirmed my choice was the speeches given by the candidates afterwards. Edwards was very fiery and compelling, but he still was saying the same exact things I'd heard him say at town meetings. He just repackaged his script. Still, I give him credit for championing his causes over the status of his candidacy. Hillary, on the other hand, was all about 'I, I, I.' For the first time, I realized that when she is not parsing the specifics of policy issues, she is talking about herself: her accomplishments, her expertise, her experience. It may be good to know these things, but they do nothing to inspire the electorate. In effect, she doesn't convey a vision for the future. She just touts a knowledge base that has evolved over the years. So when, in turn, Obama speaks as a visionary who will unite the country using the politics of inclusion, it really is music to the ears. He has that rare ability to actually inspire people, and that is why he won.
Huckabee showed a similar charisma in his speech. I know that he has an uphill battle ahead of him and he may not succeed, and I disagree with him on just about every topic, but given who he is, I thought he gave an amazing speech. I wanted to hug him and say, "If only you weren't so daffy in so many ways and didn't take such oddball positions on things, I'd like to be your friend!"
The "I wanted to hug him'' factor should never be underestimated. And though Hillary is in no way out of contention now, her plan of attack -- to attack Barack -- is only another confirmation that her playbook is perfect for the last war.
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Dahlia, regarding your response to Emily B's question about why younger women aren't more excited about Hillary. Couldn't the same point be made about black achievement? That is, younger people have grown up in a world where it's no big deal that the mayor is black, or corporate executives are black, or the secretary of state is black. I don't think young women are turning to Obama because they've said, "It will mean more to have the first black president than the first female president." I think they are simply responding to two people and the response is,"He makes me feel excited about what a president could be. She doesn't." Isn't that the way it should be -- that we are deciding about them as individuals and not heavy symbols of race or gender? Sure, their race and gender are there for all to see, but I've been grateful that in this campaign both Obama and Hillary have only rarely made it an explicit issue.
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That’s a great question, Emily. You’d kind of expect it to be the opposite: older women grown weary of the Clinton baggage, and younger women less inclined to see her as back to the future.
I wonder whether young women can’t get that excited about Clinton for the same reason many of them can’t get fired up about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned. This is the world they know. Younger women have no experience of an America without women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies and women in Congress.
The generation that lived through the 1960s knows what America was like before women really seized leadership professions, and they must see what Hillary is poised to do as nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps younger women see it as inevitable. In which case they can afford to wait a while for a woman who really does excite them.
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Women came out in Iowa last night-for Obama. He won with them overall, and among younger women with a wide margin. Hillary Clinton carried only the older-women crowd. That was reflected at the caucus I went to, especially in a mother-daughter pair who split Clinton-Obama, respectively.
If this dynamic continues in a couple of more states, Clinton will be toast, won't she? Is there something impressive about younger women transcending identity politics? Or is this really more about these particular candidates, and the change vs. experience choice they've come to represent?
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So, the big GOP winner in Iowa was Mike Huckabee. Not surprising, considering the polls, but that hasn't stopped the hysteria. Andrew Sullivan last night seemed almost giddy that he'd forseen the surrender of the GOP to the Christianist right, and in the New York Times, David Brooks put Huckabee's victory on par with Obama's for the Democrats as a "political earthquake. "
Forgive me, but I can't get that worked up about Huckabee, though I have no wish for him to win the GOP nomination. For one, the evangelical turnout in Iowa was huge. About 60 percent of Iowa's GOP caucus-goers identified as evangelical and half voted for the former governor; in the general population, 26 percent of Americans are evangelical. New Hampshire is just a few days away, and if Huckabee's victory helped anyone, it was John McCain. If McCain wins New Hampshire, that could give him enough momentum to weather a Huckabee victory in South Carolina and hang on for Super Tuesday.
And what if it came down to a race between Obama and McCain? They'd be two refreshing candidates, largely untainted by scandal, whom their respective parties could rally around positively rather than spending six months tearing down the other guy. I can't help but think that would be an OK thing for this country.
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Have Obama and Richardson entered into an unholy vote-trading alliance? In Eldora, Iowa, where I am reporting on tonight's caucus, precinct chair Ed Bear says that Richardson is his first choice and Obama his second, but not because anyone told him to go that way. There has been "coffee shop talk" about which candidates would make good president and vice president pairs, Bear says. He likes this team, though he doesn't think his first choice Richardson would be at the top of the ticket, because Obama has the charisma-and the height.
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With all this confusing chatter about Iowa polling numbers (seems like every poll says something different, except when you account for the margin of error, in which case they all say the same thing: "Who knows!"), I think it's worth pointing out that many voters don't vote with their heads or their hearts, but on impulse. We've all heard the "I voted for him because I'd have a beer with him argument," and here's some more food for thought: according to a study published in Science magazine "inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcome of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g. 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004)." The subjects had no previous knowledge of the candidates, and based their predictions solely on a 1-second exposure to a photograph. I don't think the study proves that people don't give a damn about the issues, but it certainly suggests that unreflective, knee-jerk reactions influence political races more than we'd like.
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I have been in Iowa for all of two hours, and so far everyone I have talked to (newspaper vendor, rental-car agent, fellow traveler, minimart saleswoman) is planning to vote. Probably a fluke, but it makes me feel like I am in the Land of the Voter. The minimart saleswoman is the one with the most decided-sounding preference. She is caucusing for Hillary at her church tonight to set an example for her daughters, who she says now aspire not to be doctors or lawyers, but president.
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Dearest Mickey,
You have done all you can for the good people of Iowa, but it's up to them now, because anyone interested in the undernews got the point the first 97 times you wrote about it. I have heard "confirmed'' sex rumors - all or none of which may be true - involving most of the presidential candidates (and you're not going to believe this, but in one case, a candidate's spouse!). So if a scandal-free general is the goal, should we go with Kucinich and Romney and be done with it? Or insert a V-chip in all suspected action pants? I know my own capacity to be shocked by power affairs is not all that it should be; after Stephen Hawking left his wife for his nurse in 1995, I concluded no marriage is immune. Except perhaps that of George W. Bush, home every night with his wife and his favorite pillow. But, as they say in French-founded Des Moines, ca ne me regarde pas.
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I am not sure Mukasey had any choice, Emily. The op-ed in today’s New York Times by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, was a clarion call for just such an investigation. Here you have the bipartisan pronouncement that, in no uncertain terms, both the CIA and the White House obstructed the commission’s work and lied about it: “[G]overnment officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the [sic] greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.”
Unlike so many of the other Bush-related scandals that have seemed to just dry up or blow over, the destruction of the torture tapes looks more and more like a serious criminal act. If the White House and the CIA deliberately lied to and concealed evidence from the Sept. 11 commission, as well as various trial courts, John Durham, tasked with heading up this investigation, will be looking at very serious charges.
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A couple of weeks ago, I criticized Attorney General Michael Mukasey for stonewalling Congress over its investigation of the destroyed CIA tapes, and for apparent flaws in the structure of the internal Justice Department probe. I'm feeling better about him today, because the AG has opened a criminal investigation into the tapes (until now, what was going on was a preliminary look into whether there should be such a criminal investigation). Mukasey has appointed a Connecticut federal prosecutor, John Durham, to take the lead in the case, which should mean greater independence from DoJ. These are good moves—both for finding out what actually happened (the NYT has gotten that off to an impressive start) and for restoring the department's Gonzales-battered integrity.
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With all due respect to Slate's cover pieces today, and Jodi Kantor's piece in the NYT, I am not moved by all the violin playing for poor disenfranchised Iowa voters. Yes, the caucus set-up stinks if you can't get out of working the evening shift or are out of state or too sick to get out of bed. But come on, the rest of you people, go caucus! I know it means leaving your house on a cold evening, and that it can take a couple of hours for Democrats. But the campaigns are offering food, babysitting, and snow shoveling for your driveways. They've spent tens of millions of dollars courting you—as much as $150 per caucus-goer on ads for Democrats and $105 for Republicans—and now the whole country is waiting to see which suitor you'll pick. All of this rebounds to your state's benefit. And yet the last time both parties held caucuses, in 2000, all you could manage was a measly 6 percent turnout of eligible voters?!? Come on, folks, if you deserve to go first because of your great civic tradition, then get out there and show us you've got one. Especially if you live in Eldora, the precinct I'm planning to cover Thursday night.
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Via Talking Points Memo, some video of Hillary Clinton arguing this morning that caucusing is particularly hard for women—who see voting as something private and are uneasy standing up and talking about their candidate of choice. It sounds some familiar notes—about women and public speaking and women and politics in general—but I wonder if it’s true. And even if it is true, I wonder if it helps Clinton to say it?