Just. Wow.
I support Obama, but this is a low blow, ladies. As much as as Obama's speech made me realize how much I wanted someone to publicly contextualize and complicate our current dumb-fuck of a "dialogue" on race and gender, I realize that my wish for Clinton to give a similar speech/seminar on gender is going beyond her particular rhetorical abilities.
She has other strengths. She shows them on the campaign trail. Women identify with her, they say, not because she's a victim but because she's tough. Please give them, and her, credit for this, because it's true.
Obama was able to give that speech because he and his staff have a significant amount of faith in his ability to bring out such a harsh and complicated message while softening the blow. HRC needed to find other ways of communicating. And it also could be, alas, that Obama has a truly bizarre amount of faith in American people to appreciate this level of complexity. I sure as heck don't, and so I don't blame anyone else for shying away from doing the same esp. during elections, when "regular" people are assumed to just want the pablum.
Obama won the narrative, I believe, because he's correctly diagnosed the zeitgeist -- a desire to end the perceived deadlock in D.C. He won because he and his campaign have worked hard to embody that desire for change -- it's in the way he emphasizes his life story, works his idiosyncratic bottom-up campaign structure, and consciously turns many of the narratives of the last eight years upside down. He's got a master thesis in the works and he's been providing supporting evidence every step of the way
Clinton's team, alas, read the tea leaves much less well. You can't be both an agent of change and an established political player. Her thesis, as it were, went through too many drafts too late in the game.
